First Read: “In yesterday’s Electoral College tally, it turned out there were seven faithless electors — two Republicans voting for someone else other Donald Trump (John Kasich and Ron Paul), and five Democratic electors voting for someone else other than Hillary Clinton (three for Colin Powell, one for Bernie Sanders, and one for Faith Spotted Eagle). That there were more faithless Bernie Sanders-supporting Democratic electors bucking Hillary Clinton than faithless GOP electors spurning Trump sums up the 2016 contest pretty well. In the very end, despite all of the speculation to the contrary, Democrats were more divided than Republicans.”

“Of course, it’s worth wondering if these faithless Dem electors would have been as faithless if Clinton had won (though two of the Washington state electors had said they weren’t behind Clinton BEFORE the election). But as University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers observes, these seven faithless electors — there had been just nine combined since 1948 — are a troubling sign for future contests. ‘It could easily be enough to flip a future election,’ he tweets.'”

Rick Klein: “Three more electors tried to go rogue but were replaced before their votes were counted. Thus concludes one of the stranger trips through the strangest College that American democracy can conjure.”

Stuart Rothenberg: “By any measure, Democrats are on the defensive in the next fight for Senate control. A three-seat Democratic midterm gain, which would give the party a majority, looks virtually impossible given the seats up this cycle.”

“A net change of eight seats would be large by historical standards but not unprecedented. Swings of at least eight Senate seats have occurred in four of the last 17 midterm elections – 1958, 1986, 1994 and 2014 – and in six of the last 34 elections (going back to 1950).”

“The problem for Republicans is that these big Senate swings have always happened against the sitting president’s party. The sole exception, since the direct election of senators, occurred in 1934, when President Franklin Roosevelt’s party gained ten Senate seats. Two years earlier, when Roosevelt won a landslide presidential victory, his party gained a dozen Senate seats.”

Chris Cillizza: “It’s impossible to overstate how big a favorite the former secretary of state was in both her primary fight against Bernie Sanders and the general election matchup against Donald Trump. She was the biggest non-incumbent front-runner for the White House in modern political history.”

“And yet, from the start, it was clear that Clinton’s appeal on paper didn’t match her appeal in the real world of political campaigning. She badly underestimated Sanders’s appeal from the start and then, because of ongoing doubts about her commitment to liberal causes, found it difficult to attack the senator from Vermont. As a result, a primary that was expected to be a coronation turned into a long-lasting problem — exposing the lack of enthusiasm for Clinton, particularly among young voters.”

Seth Masket: “Given the closeness of this election, it’s plausible that any number of things could have made the difference. Had Russia never hacked Democratic National Committee data, had Comey not made his public insinuations about Clinton a few weeks before the election, had the Clinton campaign had better polling data, etc., we’d likely be calling her president-elect today. But it’s hard to know what lesson to draw from that to use in future campaigns. It’s easy to say that you shouldn’t take your lead for granted, but exactly how do we translate that into a specific recommendation for the next campaign?”

“Perhaps the most important lesson is that any major party nominee, no matter how seemingly awful or unpopular, has a shot at winning. This is a lesson not so much for the general election campaigns, but for the parties: Be careful whom you nominate. Pick someone you’d be comfortable seeing in office. You’d be surprised who can lose. And who can win.”

The Associated Press reports that Donald Trump has won more than 270 Electoral College votes to formally become president-elect.

New York Times: “Normally a political footnote, the electoral vote took on unexpected import this winter after Mr. Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, spawned a determined effort to block his path to the presidency by grass-roots advocates who saw him as unfit for the White House and, to some, a threat to the political system.”

See the the latest electoral vote map.

One of Ohio’s 18 electors resigned just before the scheduled noon vote, decrying “extreme political bullying,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

Nate Cohn: “Liberals say Mr. Trump’s victory is proof that the Electoral College is biased against big states and undemocratically marginalizes urban and nonwhite voters. Conservatives say the Electoral College serves as a necessary bulwark against big states, preventing California in particular from imposing ‘something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation,’ as the conservative analyst Michael Barone put it. California sided with Mrs. Clinton by a vote margin of four million, or 30 percentage points.”

“Both sides have a point. But in the end, Mr. Trump won for a simple reason: The Electoral College’s (largely) winner-take-all design gives a lot of weight to battleground states. Mr. Trump had an advantage in the traditional battlegrounds because most are whiter and less educated than the country as a whole.”

Salena Zito: “I’d estimate based on my reporting that this election was baked before the debates, before the Access Hollywood tapes, before the hacked emails and before anyone took the time to actually notice, listen and understand just how upended the American voter is.”

“Pollsters will likely become apoplectic over my conclusion. That’s OK, they deal with numbers and could likely argue with great big gobs of data that I’m wrong; while I am not in the business of predicting, I am in the business of listening to people. It was there in plain sight for everyone to see if they wanted to; it is clear that they did not and that is a bias towards him and prejudice towards the people that needs to be corrected.”

The Cook Polit­ic­al Re­port notes the scope of the GOP’s con­gres­sion­al vic­tor­ies: Only 15 of the 241 House Re­pub­lic­ans won their races by less than a 10-point mar­gin, even though nearly two dozen of them rep­res­en­ted dis­tricts that Hil­lary Clin­ton car­ried.

Overall, House Re­pub­lic­ans won 51% of the na­tion­al vote, and will be rep­res­ent­ing 55% of the seats in the lower cham­ber.