The Ticker Quick Views on Politics, Economics and Finance

It's a sign of how differently Europe sees this U.S. election from the Barack-o-mania of four years ago that at a session of the European Parliament in Brussels today, Obama's victory got just one mention.

It came from Gabriele Zimmer, a German legislator with Germany's ex-communist Die Linke party, who without irony ranked Barack Obama's election right alongside the Nov. 7, 1917 Russian Bolshevik revolution.

Do Americans suddenly like tax increases and bigger government? Or did they simply forget what happens when you raise taxes and make government larger?

These are questions to ask as we analyze the yesterday’s election results to discern the fiscal consequences. Advocates of higher taxes prevailed in the presidential and legislative races, and resoundingly. Yet the outcomes for the many propositions and initiatives on ballots across the country also require review. These votes suggest Americans are indeed looking at government and taxation differently.

Efforts to rein in the power of California’s public-employee unions, and to reform out-of- control compensation costs that are eroding services and busting public budgets, came to a crashing halt on Tuesday in California.

The idealistic hope that California voters would keep a firm grasp on their wallets, thus forcing the state to rein in pay and other costs, was a pipedream. Californians, who typically vote “no” when it comes to initiatives that directly increase taxes, gave Governor Jerry Brown’s income- and sales- tax boost (Proposition 30) a surprisingly decisive win, with nearly 54 percent of the vote.

(Corrects title of Mario Draghi in third paragraph.)

The U.S. stock market is tanking the day after Barack Obama retook the presidency. What could it mean? Our best guess: With the election decided, investors have reawakened to the reality of an impending fiscal disaster in the U.S. and a festering crisis in Europe.

Coal power was a widespread loser in yesterday’s election. Despite singing its praises as loudly as possible, Mitt Romney was unable to use his support for coal to defeat Barack Obama in Virginia and Ohio.

And heavy spending by the coal industry failed to unseat Democratic Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana.

Predictions of the death of the Northeast Republicans proved premature in 2010, when the party picked up a total of 10 House seats in New England and New York, not to mention a surprise Senate seat in Massachusetts in a special election earlier that year. 

In 2012, the party is back in critical care. Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate lost in three New England states. The liberal Democrat Elizabeth Warren routed Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. In Maine, Angus King, a former governor and an independent who is expected to caucus with the Democrats, sailed past his Republican challenger to replace Olympia Snowe, the Republican moderate who is retiring. And wrestling magnate Linda McMahon, a Republican, was beaten in her $42 million-plus battle against Democratic Representative Chris Murphy to replace Joe Lieberman in the Senate.

(Corrects headline, third, fourth and fifth paragraph of a story published Nov. 7 to reflect that the vote would reform California’s sentencing law.)

California’s tax-increase and union- reform initiatives received most of the national attention in the run-up to Election Day. But two significant criminal-justice initiatives also came before voters.

Ross Douthat offers a number of indictments of Mitt Romney's failure in today's New York Times, but this one particularly hits the nail on the head:

His party didn’t particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012. You could see this belief at work in the confidence with which many conservatives insisted that the Obama presidency was not only embattled but self-evidently disastrous.

Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes yesterday, and Massachusetts voters approved an initiative eliminating civil and criminal penalties for the medicinal use of the drug.

Will these measures be a further move toward the localization of drug policy? Can the U.S. turn away from a national drug ban toward more local heterogeneity and control?

Unions went for broke in Michigan and they lost big time.

Michigan voters soundly defeated a measure that would have given public-sector unions a potent tool to challenge any law -- past, present or future -- limiting their benefits and powers. It would also have permanently barred Michigan from becoming a right-to-work state where payment of dues is no longer required as a condition of employment in unionized companies.

After going 0-for-32 in states where gay marriage was on the ballot through this summer, gay marriage won in all four states where it was on the ballot last night. Gay marriage backers should get comfortable with that, as they are likely to be going to the polls a lot over the next decade.

In Maine, Maryland and Washington, gay marriage will now be legal. Minnesota voters rejected a constitutional ban on gay marriage; they also returned both houses of their legislature to Democratic majorities, so watch for legislative action on gay marriage this year.

This is part of a continuing dialogue between Margaret Carlson and Ramesh Ponnuru about the 2012 campaign.

Margaret: Let us be grateful, Ramesh, for small victories against the Republicans' coarsening of America. Let us join as parents in celebrating the second defeat of Linda McMahon, who sought to buy a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. She made her fortune on the premise that professional wresting wasn’t vulgar enough -- appearing in the ring herself in dominatrix gear -- yet successfully lobbying to get the programming a PG rating.

Whatever else happened this Election Day, marriage equality passed another important milestone. Maine became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage at the ballot box. Maryland voters approved a similar measure.

The issue of legalization was also on the ballot in Washington state. Voters in Minnesota were asked to approve a ban. Those results will come in later.

The victory of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts marks the arrival in the Senate of a major new figure in American politics.

To be effective, she will have to lay low for a few years, as Hillary Clinton and Al Franken did. We’ll see if she has the patience and good sense to do so. But if she does, she will have a long and illustrious career.

President Barack Obama’s victory today instantly destroys three myths of this election.

Pocketbook issues are decisive.

Elizabeth Warren is living proof that taking on the banks can be very good for your career.

Just a few years ago, Warren was a little-known law professor at Harvard University, focusing on consumer debt and bankruptcy issues. Today, she’s a U.S. senator from Massachusetts after unseating Republican Scott Brown. Her soaring trajectory is thanks to one thing: The Democrat spoke truth to power about Wall Street.

Did Hurricane Sandy deal a crippling blow to the Mitt Romney campaign?

“If you hadn’t had the storm,” said Karl Rove, “there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy.”

There was never much doubt who was going to win Indiana tonight: Mitt Romney has taken the state back from President Barack Obama fairly easily. But we can still learn something from the returns in this early-closing state.

The best microcosm may be Vigo County, on the Illinois border, west of Indianapolis. Since 1888, the residents of the county seat, Terre Haute, have sided with the presidential winner in all but two races. In 2008, Obama won the county by nearly 16 percent over John McCain, more than two and a half times the cushion George W. Bush had over John Kerry in 2004.

Even before the (notoriously inaccurate) exit polling comes in, here are some early voting numbers to chew on. 

Bloomberg Businessweek's Joshua Green received some early voting/absentee voting data from the  micropolling outfit Catalist: "Colorado: 1,853,586 total votes -- 44% Democratic, 43% Republican, 12% Independent ... Ohio: 1,442,536 total votes -- 50% Democratic, 36% Republican, 14% Independent."

Long lines at many polling sites across the U.S., especially in areas along the East Coast affected by Hurricane Sandy, make it tempting to ask: "Why are we waiting in line when we could be voting online?"

Today's election offers a test: New Jersey announced it would let displaced voters cast their votes by e-mail or fax.