“I think Huntsman would have been a very tough general election candidate. He’s a good guy. We looked at his profile in a general election and thought he would have been difficult.”

— Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, in an interview with Politico, saying Jon Huntsman would have been the toughest Republican challenger in the 2012 presidential race.

New York Times: “Mr. Bush is said by friends to be weighing financial and family considerations — between so many years in office and the recession his wealth took a dip, they said, and he has been working hard to restore it — as well as the complicated place within the Republican Party of the Bush brand.”

“After Mitt Romney’s defeat by a Democratic coalition built around overwhelming support from Hispanics and other fast-growing demographic groups, many Republicans are looking for a candidate who can help make the party more inclusive without ceding conservative principles — and no one is the subject of more speculation at this point than Mr. Bush.”

“To his supporters, Mr. Bush is the man for the moment. His wife, Columba, was born and raised in Mexico. He speaks Spanish and favors overhauling the immigration system in a way that would provide a route to citizenship for people already in the country illegally but otherwise law-abiding.”

New York Times: “Come January, more than two-thirds of the states will be under single-party control, raising the prospect that bold partisan agendas — on both ends of the political spectrum — will flourish over the next couple of years.”

“Twenty-four states will be controlled by Republicans, including Alaska and Wisconsin, where the party took the State Senate, and North Carolina, where the governorship changed hands. At least 13 states will be Democratic, including Colorado, Minnesota and Oregon, where control of the legislatures shifted, and California, where the already dominant Democrats gained a supermajority in both chambers. (The situation in New York, where the potential for single-party control by the Democrats rests on the makeup of the Senate, is still uncertain.)”

Jonathan Chait: “The first few weeks after a losing presidential election are an awkward period for the most devoted ideological polemicist. Months of optimistic spin about your candidate must be cast aside for an entirely different sort of spin — where before the candidate was a budding juggernaut boldly carrying the party banner onward to victory, now we can see in hindsight that he was a hapless loser unable to articulate our side’s clearly winning vision. Transitioning from one line to another can often take months of careful tip-toeing. Commentary editor John Podhoretz offers up a magisterial postelection essay, The Way Forward, that instead simply takes the full plunge all at once.”

Wall Street Journal: “The tea-party movement is trying to regroup after taking some licks in this month’s elections. Several groups already are setting their sights on 2014 congressional races, in which they plan to promote their preferred candidates and hope to weed out Republicans they consider insufficiently conservative.”

“Many tea-party activists say they remain dumbfounded by the Nov. 6 defeat of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and favored GOP candidates for the Senate, and opinions are swirling over how the movement should push forward.”

Staffers for Linda McMahon’s (R) failed U.S. Senate campaign in Connecticut tell WTNH-TV they were not paid after Election Day.

One who complained publicly said he was later handed a check but also got a little something extra in his envelope.

Said the campaign worker: “Basically he handed me a check with a condom in it, told me I was screwed. That’s the rudest gesture you can ever do to a person, it’s like spitting in a person’s face.”

His check also bounced.

Mark Blumenthal takes a deep dive into the Obama campaign polling operation and notes they never conducted a nationwide survey.

Instead, it conducted polls across 11 battleground states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan,
Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and
Wisconsin) at regular intervals throughout the campaign. These were supplemented by state tracking polls and parallel surveys to refine its microtargeting models.

Campaign manager Jim Messina says this gave him a deeper understanding of
“how we were doing, where we were doing it, where we were moving —
which is why I knew that most of the public polls you were seeing were
completely ridiculous.”