To quote Bill Clinton: “It’s the economy, stupid.” And if Barack Obama had pushed for the original stimulus plan using reconciliation, instead of stupidly seeking bipartisanship with Republicans determined to wreck America for political gain or blowing all of his and the Congressional Democrats’ political capital on an industry-written “health care reform bill” in exchange for a soon-to-be-broken promise not to aid Republicans, the recent loss of the House wouldn’t have happened. But we have the teabaggers to thank for softening the blow. Case in point: Minnesota.

The GOP electoral wave that was predicted for the entire country landed in the North Star State, just as it had everywhere else — and had been predicted for nearly a year, thanks to Washington Democrats’ refusal to push for a stimulus big enough to truly do the job and their insistence on putting more effort into passing a health care bill written by the the health care industry and which only the industry likes. As did over a dozen other states, we lost control of our legislature to the GOP (after only having had both houses for four years), and one of our best US congressmembers, Jim Oberstar.

But we didn’t lose our state constitutional officers, our key judges, and — most importantly — the governor’s race. Yes, there will be a recount, but with a far bigger margin of victory (nearly 9,000) than there are rejected absentee ballots (around 3,000), Dayton starts out far stronger than did Norm Coleman, whose 700-vote margin soon was overtaken when the recount commenced. Furthermore, laws passed since the Franken-Coleman affair will make for a somewhat quicker process — though of course the Republicans are already trying to throw up roadblocks at every turn. Yet even Fritz Knaak, one of Norm Coleman’s original lawyers in the Franken-Coleman recount, states that “[a] nine thousand [vote deficit] is a mighty steep hill to climb, and I think the Emmer folks know it.”

The upshot: Minnesota will have its first progressive Democratic governor in two decades.

Now, if the Republicans had gone with Marty Seifert as their candidate, they may have won. Seifert’s a young man, an up-and-comer, following in Tim Pawlenty’s footsteps as the leader of the Minnesota House Republicans. He was the odds-on favorite to win the endorsement, and thus the nomination to be the gubernatorial candidate for the Republican Party of Minnesota.

Then the Tea Partiers came along, and the Allen Quist TheoCons, and they wanted Tom Emmer. And they got him. The problem: Getting him meant that the moderate Republicans — or even the sane conservative Republicans — no longer had a place in the RPM, at least where the Governor’s Mansion was concerned. So they went in droves to back former Republican Tom Horner, and ensured a Dayton victory.

The same scenario has played itself out across the country. Races that were locks for the Republicans before the primaries suddenly became ones in which Democrats had at least fighting chances once teabaggers won those primaries. Nevada’s Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, was expected to lose by double-digit margins to any of his establishment Republican foes, but instead he faced Sharron Angle of the Tea Party wing, and managed to use his excellent ground game to put together a solid win. Conversely, Delaware Republican Senator Mike Castle, who was a lock to win in the general election, lost his primary to the notoriously batty Christine O’Donnell, allowing Democratic candidate Chris Coons to cruise to an easy victory.

The teabagger failure at the ballot box is so profound that I had to laugh when Michele Bachmann tried to brandish them at John Boehner in an effort to shake him down for a leadership role in the new Republican-controlled House. It’s why the word of the Tea Party wing’s election losses has been spread far and wide by establishment Republican types as a way of undercutting teabagger leverage, real or imagined.