On a big day nationally, Republicans enjoyed a particularly resounding election in Missouri - renewing suggestions that the state may have finally shed its bellwether status for a red shade.
The list of Republican victories Tuesday was long and historic. Consider the following:
In Missouri's U.S. Senate race, Republican Rep. Roy Blunt defeated Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan by nearly 14 percentage points, the largest margin since John Ashcroft's Senate victory in the Republican wave of 1994.
In west-central Missouri's 4th Congressional District, Republican challenger Vicky Hartzler ousted Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton from the seat he had held for 34 years.
Republican challenger Tom Schweich defeated Democratic Auditor Susan Montee, making her the first incumbent auditor to lose in three dozen years.
Republicans appeared to pick up 17 seats previously held by Democrats in the Missouri House and three in the state Senate, giving them their largest number of seats in records dating to 1901.
Those were just the most obvious indicators of Republican strength. There were more beneath the surface.
Republican Ed Martin, who appealed to tea party activists, came within about 4,400 votes - out of more than 200,000 cast - of defeating Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan in a St. Louis congressional district that was redrawn a decade ago to be more secure for Democrats.
And voters overwhelmingly passed a pair of anti-tax ballot initiatives - one barring real estate transfer taxes, which do not exist in Missouri anyway; the other barring new local earnings taxes and requiring a referendum on existing ones in St. Louis and Kansas City.
"Missouri has always been a conservative state, whether we're Democratic or Republican, but this really puts the red stamp on Missouri," George Connor, head of the political science department at Missouri State University, said Wednesday.
There has been disagreement for the past decade about whether Missouri - like many states to its south - was transforming into a Republican-leaning state.
Republicans seized control of the state Senate in 2001 and the state House in 2002, giving the GOP its first legislative majorities in about a half-century. Then in 2004, voters elected a Republican governor, several other statewide Republican officials and an even larger Republican majority in the Legislature.
But Missouri Democrats rebounded in 2006 by taking a U.S. Senate seat away from Republicans, winning the auditor's race and cutting into the Republican legislative majorities.
Political science professor Dave Robertson, of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said at the time that the shift from 2004 to 2006 demonstrated that Missouri still was a bellwether - leaning toward Republicans or Democrats as a pretty reliable indicator of national trends.
But Robertson has since changed his analysis.
In 2008, Missouri broke its most significant bellwether tradition by picking the losing presidential candidate for just the second time in the past century. Voters narrowly chose Republican John McCain over Democratic winner Barack Obama. Although Democrats also won the Missouri governorship, Republicans bucked the national Democratic trend in 2008 by adding to their majority in the state Senate.
When considering both the 2008 and 2010 elections, "Missouri is trending a little bit more Republican," Robertson said Wednesday.
"I would not use the word "bellwether' anymore," he added. "I would use the word "swing state' - a state that can go to either party under the right circumstances."
In this case, the circumstances included an unpopular Democratic president, lingering economic concerns and frustration about the growth of federal spending and deficits. Republicans capitalized.
Missouri Democratic Party spokesman Ryan Hobart attributed the Democratic losses to a national trend and the midterm election bump enjoyed by the party opposite of the president.
"This year, those losses were exaggerated due to voters' feelings about the national economic climate," Hobart said.
If the economy hasn't improved by 2012, Republicans may then be in a position to bear more of the voters' frustrations. That's one reason why some political experts want to observe yet another election before describing Missouri as a Republican state.
"If the Republicans are as dominant in 2012 as they were this time around, then Missouri will have tipped clearly into the Republican category," said Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri.