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Washington (CNN) -- A midterm election that cost more than any other in history headed to completion Tuesday with voters overwhelmingly concerned about the economy expected to give Republicans major gains in Congress and governors' offices.

Early returns showed Republican running strongly, with Rand Paul projected by CNN to win his Senate race in Kentucky and another conservative, Dan Coats, projected to win the Senate race in Indiana.

Paul, the son of Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, had the backing of the conservative Tea Party movement.

His projected victory to claim the seat held by retiring Republican Sen. Jim Bunning showed the impact of the movement that emerged in 2009 in opposition to expanded government and the growing federal deficit.

More on the Senate races

Coats will take over the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, giving Republicans their first pick-up of the night.

Heated campaigning continued to the last minute on Tuesday, with President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton exhorting Democrats and independents to hold off a Republican surge while GOP candidates promised to change how Washington operates.

Minute-by-minute results on CNN's Live Election Blog

While Democrats continued to offer upbeat assessments of their party's chances Tuesday, multiple senior Democratic sources said privately that they expected to lose their House majority just four years after taking control of the chamber.

One thing was giving Democrats hope during the day: Reports from key districts about high turnout and a big influx of volunteers to help get out the Democratic vote.

Still, the question that many House Democratic sources were asking was not whether they would lose the House, but by how many seats.

Everything you need to know at CNN's Election Center

The long and bitter campaign season drew more than $3.5 billion in spending, making it the most expensive nonpresidential vote ever, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.

With about 100 of the 435 House seats at stake considered "in play," or competitive, an anti-Democratic mood is predicted to result in big Republican gains.

On the Senate side, where 37 of the 100 seats are being contested, the majority will be decided by key races in Nevada, Washington and a few other states where Democratic incumbents face strong challenges.

Republicans need to win an additional 39 seats to claim the House majority and 10 Senate seats to overtake Democrats there.

If a Republican landslide occurs, it could surpass previous major shifts in congressional voting, such as the GOP's 56-seat gain in House seats in 1946.

In addition, the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement has added a new element to the election cycle, roiling Republican races by boosting little-known and inexperienced candidates to victory over mainstream figures in GOP primaries across the country.

No matter how many of the so-called Tea Party candidates win against Democratic opponents Tuesday, the impact of the movement is expected to shift the Republican agenda to the right.

Exit polling showed voter dissatisfaction with both parties, as each received a 53 percent unfavorable rating.

The economy was rated the most important issue by 62 percent of voters, far eclipsing health care reform (19 percent), immigration (8 percent) and the war in Afghanistan (7 percent), according to the exit polling.

Most voters, 88 percent, rated economic conditions as not good or poor, and 86 percents said they were very worried or somewhat worried about the economy, the exit polling showed.

Obama's approval rating was 45 percent, while 54 percent disapproved of his presidency so far, the exit polling revealed. Those figures were similar to the ratings for his two predecessors -- George W. Bush and Clinton -- who both saw their parties lose control of the House in the first mid-term election after they took office.

In a signal that Democratic campaign messaging was reaching voters, the exit polling showed 35 percent of voters blamed the nation's economic woes on Wall Street bankers, while 29 percent blamed Bush and 24 percent blamed Obama.

Voters across the country offered a variety of reasons for their choices Tuesday.

In Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, restaurant manager and internet entrepreneur Stephen Smith, 40, went to the polls hoping "that the entrenched incumbents get booted out of office," he said.

Melissa Bacon, 24, of Sacramento, California, cast her ballot partly for the thrill of the experience, she said.

"You don't get to vote every day. It's sort of its own holiday. You research the issues, vote and then wait to see if your position was the majority. It's as exciting to me as the World Series last night," she said on the heels of the San Francisco Giants' victory.

Nadya Alvarez of Parrish, Florida, went to the polls with her son to teach him about the importance of voting.

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"My youngest is almost 2 years old, and I showed him the ballot, and he wanted to help fill in the circles," said Parrish, 28.

"It is good to teach them from an early age to be involved in the welfare of our country and that we all have rights and duties to preserve," she said.

And Susy Kosh, 37, of Dripping Springs, Texas, said she plans to wear her "I voted" sticker all day.

"Politics might not thrill me," she said. "But democracy rocks."

Unemployment -- at a rate of 9.6 percent amid a slow recovery from economic recession -- has been the dominant issue, with Republicans accusing Obama and the Democrats of pushing through expensive policies that have expanded government without solving the problem.

Obama has led Democrats in defending his record, saying that steps such as the economic stimulus bill and auto industry bailout were necessary to prevent a depression, while health care reform and Wall Street reform will lay the foundation for sustainable future growth.

On Tuesday, Obama phoned in to three high-profile radio shows and taped a message for AOL users, saying his "ability to work on behalf of middle-class families is going to be hampered if I do not have people in Congress who want to cooperate."

Clinton worked the phones on behalf of Democrats in Ohio, where first-term Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland is fighting to hold on to his seat.

The former president also called in to four Ohio radio stations during a day of campaigning that will take him from New York through West Virginia and Kentucky before he ends up in Florida.

Paul, the Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Kentucky, voiced the sentiments of many in the grass-roots, anti-establishment movement who seek change in politics as usual.

"What I'm going to work to try to change is the whole government," Paul said on CNN's "American Morning." "I think government's broken from top to bottom."

He insisted that the government needs to balance its budget, loosen regulations on business and cut waste in the defense budget.

Conservative groups and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce funded attack ads that skewered increased spending under Obama and the health care reform bill he championed, while labor unions and traditional Democratic donors warned that a GOP victory would bring back Republican deregulation and policies that caused the recession.

Observers warned that the expected Republican gains offer little chance of compromise or bipartisan approaches on major issues.

Ohio Republican Rep. John Boehner is expected to be the new House speaker if the GOP wins control of the chamber. He already has signaled little appetite to negotiate with the White House or congressional Democrats, saying last week that "this is not a time for compromise."

Boehner and other conservatives say the top priorities must be spending cuts to try to balance the budget and job creation to spur the economy. However, they also advocate extending Bush-era tax cuts for everyone at a cost of $4 trillion over the next decade.

In the Senate, legislative gridlock is likely if Republicans strengthen their current minority of 41 seats. Obama and Democrats accuse Senate Republicans of using obstruction tactics as a political tool, showing the distrust and animosity that already exists.

Democrats are also wary of a recent comment by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who told the National Journal, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

The first test of a new relationship will come in mid-November, when Congress convenes a post-election lame-duck session to try to clear unfinished legislation before the newly elected Congress gathers in January. Among other issues, lawmakers must decide whether and how to extend Bush-era tax cuts.

Voters on Tuesday also will decide governors' races in 37 of the 50 states, with the outcome potentially having an influence on redistricting based on the results of the 2010 census.

Every 10 years, the states redraw House district lines to reflect population shifts. Some states gain more House seats due to population growth, while others lose seats due to declines.

In most cases, state legislatures draw the lines, and governors have the power to approve or veto the maps. Governors also can influence whether any loss or gain of seats in their state involves districts represented by Republicans or Democrats.

The list of states that will gain or lose seats is released in December. However, Election Data Services issued estimates based on preliminary census figures that indicated Texas will gain four seats; Florida will gain two; and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington will each gain one. The estimates also indicate Ohio and New York will lose two seats, and Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania will each lose one.

The first wave of exit polls Tuesday told us what the pre-election polls did: voters are unhappy with the way the federal government is working and majorities have negative views of both major parties, according to the Associated Press.

The economy is by far and away the overriding issue of the campaign, with about a third of those surveyed saying someone in their household had lost a job during the past few years. Four in 10 consider themselves worse off financially than they were two years ago and an overwhelming majority are concerned that the economy might get worse in the coming year.

Sixty-two percent say the country is on the wrong track compared to 35 percent who think it's headed in the right direction.

CNN said that 62 percent named the economy as the most important issue, followed by health care at 19 percent, illegal immigration at 8 percent and Afghanistan at 7 percent.

However, as other polls have shown, voters are not ready to put most of the blame on President Obama, although about half believe his policies are not good for the country.

Thirty-five percent put most of the blame for the economy on Wall Street, while 29 percent blamed former President Bush. Twenty-four percent said Obama was responsible for current conditions, according to CNN.

Voters had mixed opinions on the economic impact of the big stimulus package approved last year. Thirty-four percent said it had hurt the economy, 33 percent said it helped and 31 percent said it had made no difference, according to CBS News.

The New York Times said the exit polls showed that for those voters who were motivated by the desire to send a signal about Obama's policies more were likely to describe it as a vote against those policies rather than in support of them.

Fifty-four percent disapprove of the job Obama is doing while 45 percent approve, according to CNN.

Roughly four in 10 voters say they support the tea party movement and those who do mostly backed the Republicans.

In other findings:

-- There's a big divide between Democrats and Republicans on the role of government and health care reform. Two of three Democrats say government isn't doing enough while four of five Republicans say it's doing too much. Sixty-one percent of Democrats want to expand the health care law while 82 percent of Republicans want to repeal it. When it comes to the overall electorate, 48 percent favor repeal, 31 percent want the measure expanded and 16 percent say it should be left as is.

-- -- In exit polls from Kentucky, half of voters say they had reservations about the candidate they backed today in the Senate race between Republican Rand Paul, who has been projected as the winner, and Democrat Jack Conway, according to CNN. Three-quarters of voters described themselves as dissatisfied or angry with the federal government, and they voted for Paul by a nearly two-to-one margin. Of the 62 percent of voters who said they disliked Obama, 82 percent backed Paul. A plurality of Kentucky voters (43 percent) said they supported the Tea Party movement.

The exit poll was conducted in 268 voting precincts across the nation on Tuesday, and supplemented with interviews done Oct. 22-31 with people who voted early or by absentee ballot.

Stofsk wrote:It just goes to show that you can get elected with all the best slogans and promises and happy feel-good bullshit you can throw in speeches, but if you can't fucking get the job done people will punish you. Which goes for the Republicans in the House as well. If they act obstructionist they will get hammered next time.

By comparing these 2008 national exit polls and these from yesterday, both from CNN and asking essentially identical questions, we learn some useful things.

Certain figures weren't very different from 2008. The men/women split was the same over both elections, 47% male and 53% female. The "white-no college" category, which we roughly equate with the concept of the white working class, accounted for the same 39% of this year's vote as it did in 2008. Those voters did vote somewhat more Republican this time. They went for McCain by 58-40% and voted Republican this year by 62-35%.

Here, as far as I can see, are the three big top-line differences:
1. The 2008 electorate was 74% white, plus 13% black and 9% Latino. The 2010 numbers were 78, 10 and 8. So it was a considerably whiter electorate.
2. In 2008, 18-to-29-year-olds made up 18% and those 65-plus made up 16%. Young people actually outvoted old people. This year, the young cohort was down to 11%, and the seniors were up to a whopping 23% of the electorate. That's a 24-point flip.
3. The liberal-moderate-conservative numbers in 2008 were 22%, 44% and 34%. Those numbers for yesterday were 20%, 39% and 41%. A big conservative jump, but in all likelihood because liberals didn't vote in big numbers.

Add to these figures the fact that overall turnout was down by about a third, or more, from nearly 130 million to about 82.5 million. That's at least 45 million no-shows, and the exits tell us the bulk of them were liberal, young, black, Latino. If 25 million of these no-shows had voted, Democratic losses would pretty obviously have been in the normal range, and they'd still control the House.

There tends to be a lot of hand-wringing after an experience like this about the Really Big Questions of what the party stands for, and I have and will do some of that, because it matters. But it may well matter less than electoral mechanics. Democrats would probably do far better to invest $200 million in 2014 GOTV operations than in soul-searching, who-are-we projects. Off-year turnout is a perennial problem for the party, and it's only going to get worse as ideological battle lines in society become more rigid, which they are. So this will be something I'll be watching for to see if Democrats understand the climate they're in.

Ten minutes was the absolute maximum I could endure of any one television news outlet last night without having to switch channels in the futile search for something more bearable, but almost every time I had MNSBC on, there was Lawrence O'Donnell trying to blame "the Left" and "liberalism" for the Democrats' political woes. Alan Grayson's loss was proof that outspoken liberalism fails. Blanche Lincoln's loss was the fault of the Left for mounting a serious primary challenge against her. Russ Feingold's defeat proved that voters reject liberalism in favor of conservatism, etc. etc. It sounded as though he was reading from some crusty script jointly prepared in 1995 by The New Republic, Lanny Davis and the DLC.

There are so many obvious reasons why this "analysis" is false: Grayson represents a highly conservative district that hadn't been Democratic for decades before he won in 2008 and he made serious mistakes during the campaign; Lincoln was behind the GOP challenger by more than 20 points back in January, before Bill Halter even announced his candidacy; Feingold was far from a conventional liberal, having repeatedly opposed his own party on multiple issues, and he ran in a state saddled with a Democratic governor who was unpopular in the extreme. Beyond that, numerous liberals who were alleged to be in serious electoral trouble kept their seats: Barney Frank, John Dingell, Rush Holt, Raul Grijalva, and many others. But there's one glaring, steadfastly ignored fact destroying O'Donnell's attempt -- which is merely the standard pundit storyline that has been baking for months and will now be served en masse -- to blame The Left and declare liberalism dead. It's this little inconvenient fact:

Blue Dog Coalition Crushed By GOP Wave Election

Tuesday was a tough night for Democrats, as they watched Republicans win enough seats to take back the House in the next Congress and began to ponder life under a likely House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). But one group hit especially hard was the Blue Dog Coalition, with half of its members losing their seats.

According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, 23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down on Tuesday. Notable losses included Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.D.), the coalition's co-chair for administration, and Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), the co-chair for policy. Two members were running for higher office (both lost), three were retiring and three races were still too close to call.

The Blue Dogs, a coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House, have consistently frustrated their more progressive colleagues and activists within the party . . . .

Half of the Blue Dog incumbents were defeated, and by themselves accounted for close to half of the Democratic losses. Some of us have been arguing for quite some time that the Rahm-engineered dependence on Blue Dog power is one of the many factors that has made the Democratic Party so weak, blurry, indistinguishable from the GOP, and therefore so politically inept, and would thus be stronger and better without them -- here's a 2008 Salon article I wrote making that case. Despite viewing last night's Blue Dog losses with happiness, I wouldn't point to this outcome as vindication for my argument, as there are many complex factors that account for last night's crushing of Congressional Democrats: widespread economic suffering, anxiety over America's obvious decline, the perception that Obama has done little to undermine destructive status quo forces and much to bolster them, etc. etc.

But for slothful pundits who want to derive sweeping meaning from individual races in order to blame the Left and claim that last night was a repudiation of liberalism, the far more rational conclusion -- given the eradication of 50% of the Blue Dog caucus -- is that the worst possible choice Democrats can make is to run as GOP-replicating corporatists devoted above all else to serving corporate interests in order to perpetuate their own power: what Washington calls "centrists" and "conservative Democrats." That is who bore the bulk of the brunt of last night's Democratic bloodbath -- not liberals.

* * * * *

One other point about the standard pundit line: for all the giddy talk about the power of the "Tea Party" -- which is, more than anything else, just a marketing tactic for re-branding the Republican Party -- the reality is that the Tea Party almost certainly cost the GOP control of the Senate. Had standard-issue GOP candidates rather than Tea Party fanatics been nominated in Delaware, Colorado, Alaska and Nevada, the Republicans would have almost certainly won those seats (in Alaska, rejecting the GOP incumbent in favor of a Tea Party candidates appears to have ensured that Lisa Murkowski will return to DC as a GOP-hating reject rather than a loyal Republican, the way Joe Lieberman returned after 2006). That's not a criticism of the Tea Party -- I think it's admirable to support candidates who represent one's views and be willing to take a few extra losses to do so -- but the Tea Party storyline from last night is one that is far from unadulterated success; in the case of Senate control, it's quite the opposite.



UPDATE: On a related note, in The New York Times today, one finds the spectacle of Evan Bayh -- who gave up his Senate seat to a Republican while he frolicks around in the millions of dollars his wife receives from the health care industry -- demanding massive entitlement cuts for the poor and freezes on the pay for government workers, while also blaming the Democratic loss on the alleged fact that "we were too deferential to our most zealous supporters." Is he referring there to the escalation in the war in Afghanistan, the massive increase in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks, the virtually wholesale embrace of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties architecture, the defense of Don't-Ask/Don't-Tell and DOMA, the multi-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, the failure to stem the tide of the foreclosure crisis, or the elimination of the public option? Apparently, the lesson Evan Bayh -- and most pundits -- took from last night's results, and which they want the Party to learn, is that if only Democrats had suppressed the enthusiasm of their base just a little more, they would have won.



UPDATE II: The number of Obama followers writing to me on Twitter and elsewhere telling me that left-wing critics of the President are the primary cause of last night's outcome -- rather than massive economic suffering and the actions of their Leader -- is even more than I expected. Bizarrely, they actually seem to have convinced themselves of this; I suppose one who is desperate to cling to their leader-love will find any theory that shields him from responsibility. Behold the supreme power of the Professional Left!!