RALEIGH – Having spent much of Wednesday morning crunching election numbers for Carolina Journal and National Review, I’ve ended up with far more material than I could fit into a formal Decision ’08 write-up. So I’m exercising my prerogative as a daily columnist to “empty my notebook,” offering the following stray observations in no particular order.

• Beverly Perdue is the luckiest Democrat in North Carolina. According to the exit polls, she fared far worse than Mike Easley did four and eight years ago among key demographic groups such as independents and downscale whites. But she defeated Pat McCrory by a three-point margin anyway, thanks to the fact that the 2008 electorate looked a lot different than the previous ones. It was more Democratic and less Republican, largely a product of Barack Obama’s early-voter turnout and a rainstorm on election day.

• Jim Harrell is the unluckiest Democrat in North Carolina. An incumbent in his GOP-leaning northwestern district, Harrell had never really felt hot breath on the back of his neck, unlike other Dems in swing seats. He was a surprise loser Tuesday in a Democratic year (the other Democratic incumbent who lost, Walter Church of Burke County, has regularly faced tough opposition, including a close race in 2006 against Hugh Blackwell, who won Tuesday).

• Why didn’t the Obama phenomenon generate a larger wave election for Democrats down the ballot? In part, because Democratic candidates had already snagged most of the low-hanging fruit in their wave election of 2006. In North Carolina, the Dems were content to play defense, mostly successfully. Nationally, a switch of a few thousand votes in Alaska, Minnesota, Oregon, and Georgia would have generated a much-bigger Senate surge – and still might, given that Ted Stevens’ criminal conviction could well lead to a special election, Minnesota and Oregon could end up in recounts, and Saxby Chambliss seems headed for a December runoff to defend his seat, having fallen just short of the 50 percent mark required for a clear win in Georgia.

As for state legislatures around the country, Democrats didn’t have as many good targets for pickup in 2008 because they did so well in 2006. As it is, the pre-Tuesday standings of 57 Democratic chambers, 39 Republican ones, and two tied chambers seems poised to become 58-39-1. Democrats now make up 55 percent of state legislators, up from 54 percent.

Yeah, it could have been a lot worse for Republicans down the ballot, given what happened up top. But Democrats are properly jazzed about the results, and the GOP is bummed.

• Exit polls in battleground states show that a majority of voters opposed the financial-bailout package. Good for them. John McCain’s biggest blunder of the campaign, it seems to me, was that he made a big deal about suspending his campaign to return to Washington, and then proceeded to help pass the bailout. If he’d opposed it – which all lawmakers purporting to believe in free enterprise and government restraint should have done, regardless of the politics – that would have shoved Obama and Bush together on one side and McCain on the other.

• Given Obama’s success, no future presidential candidate will voluntarily submit to the federal government’s absurd public-financing system. He’s either destroyed it, which would be delicious, or he’ll make it mandatory, which would be hypocritical. Meanwhile, John McCain couldn’t make effective use of Republican soft money to combat Obama’s fundraising prowess because of the, uh, McCain-Feingold Law. Instant karma’s gonna get you, too.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.