The South

Alabama

In the presidential race, the home of the Crimson Tide stayed reliably red: John McCain won the state by more than 20 percentage points. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) also won in a walk, taking 63.5 percent of the vote in a race against a state senator.

State officials reported record turnout, perhaps 80 percent, in a state that saw some of the civil rights movement's most grim confrontations.

In the state's U.S. House races, Democrats successfully defended one seat -- in the 5th District, where state Sen. Parker Griffith will replace retiring Rep. Robert E. "Bud" Cramer. The party gained a seat when Montgomery Mayor Bobby N. Bright defeated a Republican state representative by less than a percentage point in the 2nd District, where Rep. Terry Everett (R) is retiring.

Arkansas

McCain won big here, taking a 20-point victory in the state that launched the last Democratic president, but which has not been blue since 1996. Barack Obama had essentially written off Arkansas after he defeated Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

The state's other races all went for incumbents. Sen. Mark Pryor (D), without a GOP challenger, routed Green Party candidate Rebekah Kennedy. The state's House members -- three Democrats and a Republican -- all won big.

Florida

Obama won the nation's most (in-) famous battleground state by more than two percentage points, or about 190,000 votes. Exit polls showed that the Democrat's attempts to woo Hispanic voters -- a demographic that helped twice swing the state to George W. Bush -- had worked, and that black voters had also turned out in large numbers.

Pundits had predicted that the race might come down to the Interstate 4 corridor across Florida's midsection, a tossup within a tossup, set between the state's conservative north and Democrat-leaning south. Obama won crucial counties in that region, including those around Orlando and the Tampa-St. Petersburg area.

In the state's U.S. House races, Democrats gained one seat, but they remain outnumbered in the Florida delegation, 15 to 10.

Two Republican incumbents from the Orlando area-- Tom Feeney and Ric Keller -- both lost, as expected. But Rep. Tim Mahoney (D), whose candidacy foundered after a sex scandal, was crushed by lawyer Tom Rooney, part of the family that owns football's Pittsburgh Steelers.

And both Diaz-Balart brothers, Republican congressmen from South Florida, won reelection. Lincoln Diaz-Balart beat former Hialeah mayor Raul Martinez by 15 percentage points, and Mario Diaz-Balart took a five-point win over Joe Garcia, a former Miami-Dade Democratic chairman.

Georgia

McCain won by about five points here, as the state burnished its reputation as a Republican stronghold in the Deep South. GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former state representative Jim Martin are headed to a Dec. 2 runoff to decide their race, which featured heavy negative campaigning.

Incumbents won in all 13 of the state's congressional districts, with seven Republicans and six Democrats returning to the House. Rep. John Lewis (D), who was beaten during civil rights protests in the 1960s, will serve for a 23rd year. And Rick Goddard (R) was unable to unseat Rep. Jim Marshall in one of the closer contests for a House seat. Goddard hammered away at Marshall's support of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but fell short with voters.