Chris Christie
(Image credit: (Kena Betancur/Getty Images))

Chris Christie and Terry McAuliffe, Bill de Blasio and Marty Walsh, this is your election:

1. Ken Cuccinelli almost won. Maybe it's true that Ken Cuccinelli lost because he was associated with the Tea Party wing of the GOP, which was supposed to have been the story line. But the truth, as votes still trickle in, is that he was 10,000 votes away from winning. That means that had the government not shut down, had Terry McAuliffe made one more mistake, had the timing of the Tea Party revolution in the House come just a month earlier, Cuccinelli might have weathered his party's misdeeds and succeeded.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.