The crack staff at Maine Web Report has been buried in work and life over the last several months, so the once-frenzied pace of blogging has slowed to something remarkably less rapid than a crawl.

So Senator Collins won re-election in a landslide, 62-38, a wider margin than the media predicted but pretty much exactly where more astute observers (including yours truly, back before I even went to work for the campaign) thought it would end up. The myth of this being a competitive race was outdone only by the other giant misnomer of the 2008 Maine political year- that Democrats in Maine would flock to the polls in order to elect Barack Obama.

Well, certainly Obama won Maine easily, but it turned out that Maine's electorate was significantly less electrified in 2008 than it was in 2004, despite the wild miscalculation of Secretary of State Matt Dunlap. Dunlap stated as late as election day that turnout would break records and exceed 80%, a statement that was repeated as fact in many of Maine's newspapers. Unfortunately, turnout ended up at somewhere near 74%, and, in contrast to the ubiquity of the "Record Turnout" meme carried by the Maine media prior to the election, the post-election media attention to the drop-off in voter interest was minimal.

(The "record turnout" hysteria was pegged easily in the months leading up to the election, if anyone had cared to look: despite the hoopla over Democratic turnout numbers for the primary, Democrat voter registration numbers showed only a 1% increase post-primary.)

It was fascinating to see the role blogs played in Maine this year, and even more interesting to see their effects from inside of a campaign. The Maine blogosphere has come a long way in a short time, and the acceptance of blogs as a potent political tool has increased dramatically since the days when the state government used to sick its PR team and attorneys on bloggers who dared criticize policy..

There are so many lessons to be learned about media, blogs, and politics in Maine from the 2008 Senate race. Hopefully life leaves a few spare moments to explore these in the coming weeks.