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Every Republican in America is pontificating about the "lesson" of last week’s Democrat avalanche. The ones who hate the religious conservatives say the party has catered too much to that group and paid the price for its position on embryonic stem cell research. The conservatives (like me) will blame the Republicans In Name Only for abandoning GOP principles on taxes and spending. The Pat Buchanan crowd that opposes the war and hates Israel will blame Bush and the unhappiness with Iraq.

The answer might be all of the above or none of the above. What is clear is that anybody with the Republican name on the ballot was in big trouble. Mark Green didn’t lose because he ran a bad campaign or because the public didn’t care about Jim Doyle’s sleaziness. He lost because Doyle is a Democrat. To put this in perspective, the most liberal Republican in the state Senate, Ron Brown of Eau Claire, lost. The most conservative Republican in the state Senate, Tom Reynolds of West Allis, also lost.

Nationally, the most liberal Republican in the U.S. Senate, Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island (a RINO), was slaughtered. One of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, also was slaughtered.

Race? It was also irrelevant. Black Republicans lost statewide elections in Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But the only Republican who won a close race beat a Democratic opponent who is black.

A Republican senator who uttered a racial slur, George Allen of Virginia, lost. A Democratic congressional candidate who uttered a racial slur, Steve Kagen of Appleton, won.

A Democratic candidate who campaigned almost exclusively on his military background, Jim Webb of Virginia, won. In Racine County, a convicted draft dodger won election for the state Senate. Military service obviously didn’t matter one way or another. All that mattered was the party label.

The magnitude of the Democratic win is best demonstrated by the results of the election for Wisconsin state treasurer. The incumbent Republican, Jack Voight, recognized by leaders of both parties as one of the best state financial officers in America, lost to a clerk at the Boston Store. Her lone fiscal experience is as treasurer of her union and keeping the books for her father’s electrical business. Voight had no position on the war, stem cells, taxes or anything else. He was just a good manager of the state’s money. But 2006 was so overwhelmingly Democratic he couldn’t beat an opponent whose most complicated fiscal document is a checkbook.

But while the voters were electing Democrats, they weren’t voting liberal. The Wisconsin gay marriage ban passed overwhelmingly and the advisory referendum on the death penalty also passed with a healthy margin. Californians rejected an oil company tax, and gay marriage bans passed all over the nation. The implication is that while the voters are real mad at the Republicans, they aren’t exactly in love with the ideas espoused by Democrats.

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Correct "Jeopardy" question: "Who is only Democrat in America so ludicrously liberal as to lose in 2006?"

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Kathleen Falk will go down in history as a trivia question for her failure to capitalize on the mother of all landslides. But sources tell me she isn’t humbled by her defeat. Instead, Falk, who was recruited to run for attorney general by Gov. Doyle, is lobbying Doyle to name her as head of the state Department of Natural Resources. If Falk, who never met a corporation she didn’t want to sue or a snail she didn’t want to protect, gets the DNR job, it would be even more disastrous for the state’s business climate than Doyle’s re-election.

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So what will the Democrats do with their new power? Here are my predictions.

In Wisconsin, in order to pay back the massive debt raided from the state transportation budget last year and to pay back the state road builders for their successful slander of Tom Reynolds, they’ll try to raise the gasoline tax. They will also push to eliminate all caps on spending and property taxes for schools and local governments. They’ll justify this by cutting state aid to both. Doyle will approve the Kenosha casino to thank developer Dennis Troha for the hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions but will insist that a percentage of the profits be given to the Potawatomi tribe to pay it back for the hundreds of thousands of its contributions.

In Washington, they’ll block every Bush judicial nominee, cut off funding for the war in Iraq, try to raise taxes and will force a showdown over the federal budget that could shut down government operations. In other words, they’ll screw it all up and lose all their power in two years.

(Mark Belling is the host of a daily WISN radio talk show and a Sunday television show. His column runs Wednesdays in The Freeman.)