Not sure why, but election nights have maintained a Christmas Eve-like level of wonder and excitement for me. I don't leave milk and cookies out for Wolf Blitzer or anything, but there's something about watching the process unfold over the night that I find fascinating, inasmuch as it verifies that our system, flawed as it is, still works.

I turned on the TV last night at about 8:01, just in time to see Deval Patrick get named the winner of the governor's race here. No big surprise there. Spent the rest of the night (minus an interlude for House forced by our recording two shows at once) flipping between CNN, Fox, and New England Cable News to catch results. This was the first election where I spent almost no time with the on-air networks, focused mostly on the last few minutes of Nightline's coverage on the bedroom TV (no cable). I suppose this comes, at least in part, from the networks not going to election coverage until later in the night, by which time I'd gotten used to flipping between the cable outlets.

Between CNN and Fox, I am surprised to say that I favored Fox's coverage a bit more. CNN had way too many talking heads, from Blitzer and Jeff Greenfield walking back and forth looking at various large monitors (it felt like they were window shopping at the mall), to Anderson Cooper moderating two different groups - one group of four with Carville, Begala, JC Watts, and Bill Bennett, the other of three people I didn't recognize. Fox kept it to a few of the expected people - Hume, Barnes, Kondracke, and one other guy whose name I think I'm misremembering (Juan Williams?) - and had better graphics, I thought (though CNN's "see-saw" depiction of the balance in the House, Senate, and governorships was neat).

Not surprisingly, the Fox coverage was a little more subdued. I had expected funerial music and a black border around the screen, really.

Not much to say about the crop of people we elected up here. No real surprises, and while I'm still wary about Patrick's ability to pay for everything he'd like to do without soaking us further, I'd rather have him giving it a go than continuing on with the current leadership. Besides, this frees Healey up to stump for Mitt.

The ballot question on wine sales in food stores lost pretty handily, which was our one surprise. The folks opposing this question seemed to get more ads on air in the last week or so, not sure if that made the difference or not. That makes it a pretty bad election year all around for the Stop & Shop supermarket chain - Deb Goldberg (whose family founded the chain) lost the Democratic lieutenant governor primary, and it's estimated that they put up about 70 percent of the money in support of the question.