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After monitoring results overnight, Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina conceded defeat Wednesday morning after her hard-fought race with Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, stating that she was proud of every moment of her campaign.

Speaking to reporters and a small group of supporters with her husband at her headquarters in Irvine, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive said the experience had been a privilege and that she had been touched by every person she met across California. She said she ran because she was concerned that attaining the American dream had become too hard for too many people and that she was still worried about out-of-control spending in Washington.

“We had an exceptional campaign,” Fiorina said. “In the end we could not overcome the registration that Democrats have, and in particular in L.A. County.”

Demographics played a role (look at the California map) but so did the relentless negative advertising by Barbara Boxer who portrayed Carly Fiorina as a greedy corporate executive who laid employees off by shipping their jobs offshore and enriched herself at the same time. The late in the campaign ads which featured outsourced Hewlett-Packard employees was devastating to Fiorina – particularly in populous Los Angeles County where the ads played ubiquitously in the last two weeks of the campaign.

I was at the Irvine, California Fiorina headquarters yesterday afternoon through the early morning hours. Here are some photos which I snapped:

Radio talk show host of Salem Communications Dennis Prager

California Board of Equalization member Michelle Steel being interviewed

Liz Mair, Flap and Dan Blatt

So, one has to consider whether it was worth the Carly Fiorina effort to challenge Barbara Boxer in “deep blue” California, raise, plus spend, the millions of dollars in campaign cash and come out with a loss that is about what Matt Fong experienced in 1998.

Somehow I think it was, since Boxer herself acknowledged that this race was “the toughest and roughest campaign of my life.” Plus, Boxer had to utilize the full resurces of her incumbency to fight back Fiorina, including multiple President Obama fundraising events. Boxer spent $ millions which could have been redistributed to other states for other Democrat campaigns. And, she spent like a drunken sailor on television ads the last month of the campaign.

But, with this said, California Democrats who have a massive registration advantage, pretty much swept the California election board and shellacked the GOP – from Jerry Brown’s election as Governor to Loretta Sanchez’s re-election to the House. Even GOP favorite California Attorney General candidate Steve Cooley is in a close race which will be decided by absentee ballots (counted over the next few weeks).

I doubt whether the national GOP will place as many resources into California to win a statewide race (such as Senator Diane Feinstein’s re-election in two years) anytime soon – or my lifetime.

California is the new “Solid Blue” Massachusetts, New York or Maryland.

In my Wednesday Washington Examiner column, which had to be filed before the full returns were available, I tried to set the Republicans’ historic gains in the House of Representatives in historic perspective, keeping in mind that the exit polls suggested that Republicans would not get the full advantage of the tsunami of public opinion in their favor in Senate races. As I told an interviewer on Britain’s Sky News, if you had to choose which legislative house you would like to control in America, you would pick the House of Representatives (where the party leadership usually can determined legislative outcomes) to the Senate (which no party even with a 60-seat supermajority really controls), just as in the United Kingdom you would rather have a majority in the House of Commons than in the House of Lords.

As I write, the House results indicate that Republicans have gained a net 61 seats (64 gains minus 3 losses) and are leading in 6 races currently undecided and trailing closely in 6 other races currently undecided. So the Republican net gain will be something like 67 seats—more than any party has won in any single election since 1948 (my Examiner column actually looks at the big seat gains for the Republicans in 1946 and the Democrats in 1948).

The upshot is that Speaker-to-be John Boehner will have a workable House majority, larger than the Republicans had during the 12 years they controlled the House from 1994 to 2006, larger than Republicans have enjoyed since the 80th Congress elected in 1946 which enacted laws which resulted in enduring public policies in 1947 and 1948. The sweet spot in the House, I would argue, is around 250 seats, enough so that you can let a fair number of your member dissent on a particular vote but not so many that dozens of members feel free to ignore party discipline because the party’s majority is so large. A 67-seat Republican gain would mean a House with 246 Republicans and 189 Democrats—a smaller number of Democrats than in any House since the one elected in 1946. The popular vote for the House is not yet available. California takes five weeks to count all its votes, a vivid contrast with Brazil, which voted on Sunday, where all the votes were counted within five hours (what is wrong with this picture?). But the popular vote appears to be a near-reversal from the Democrats’ popular vote 2008 majority in the popular vote for the House which was 54%-43%; the Republicans’ majority is likely to be greater than in 1994 and the largest since 1946 (54%-44%) and perhaps since 1928 (57%-42%). We are, as I wrote in the first sentence of my Examiner column, in uncharted territory.

Of course, I am disappointed with California where the Republican Party continued to take a drubbing at the hands of the Democrats, especially the Carly Fiorina vs. Barbara Boxer U.S. Senate race. But, I will have more on this race later.

America will be stronger and the political direction different for the Congress and President alike.

The American people have spoken.

Stay tuned……

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Americans’ enthusiasm about voting exceeds the recent midterm election high set four years ago, with 50% of Americans and 53% of registered voters saying they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in 2010.

These results are based on the USA Today/Gallup final 2010 pre-election poll, conducted Oct. 28-31.

The record level of overall enthusiasm is primarily the result of Republicans’ heightened excitement — 63% of Republicans (including Republican-leaning independents) say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting. That not only greatly exceeds Democrats’ expressed enthusiasm this year, but also is substantially higher than what Gallup has measured for either party’s supporters on the eve of a midterm election.

The GOP is looking for substantial gains when voting ends today.

The high level of Republican enthusiasm has led to the largest gap in enthusiasm by party of any recent midterm elections, 19 percentage points. The prior highs were nine points in favor of the Democrats in 2006, and nine points in favor of the Republicans in 1994.

The party with the advantage in enthusiasm has won the greater share of the national congressional vote, and gained seats in the House, each election year since Gallup began tracking voter enthusiasm in 1994.