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Roland Burris is My Senator

…and the same goes for 12,419,292 other Illinoisans, as the Democrats are about to seat him.

What else is there to say? In our poll last week, a significant number of you — about 40 percent — saw this coming and predicted that Burris would be seated by mid-January.

All right, here’s one thing I’ll say. Although seating Burris is modestly unpopular nationwide, there was nobody on either side of the aisle — in the blogs, in the mainstream media, or in the Congress — that was really ready to take ownership of the issue and lead some kind of anti-Burris crusade. There are a lot of ‘distractions’ right now: Israel, Gitmo, the economy, the stimulus, the transition, the agenda, Hillary, Caroline Kennedy, Al Franken, the RNC Chair Battle, Republican retirements, Rick Warren, and of course Rod Blagojevich himself. Reid and Durbin had no reason to believe there would be a sustained public outcry if they seated Burris, and so they let inertia take hold and seated him.

Nate Silver founded and was the editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.

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