Collins: Dinner party politics

What do you think the election results mean?

The ones on Tuesday. They had primaries all over the place. Stop squirming. Sometime soon, you'll be sitting at a dinner party and someone will say, "So, who's going to take control of the Senate in November?" And you will be so grateful that we had this conversation.

For instance, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, won renomination by beating the tea party in Kentucky. He totally clobbered a wealthy businessman named Matt Bevin. This was either because of McConnell's exceptional popularity or the fact that Bevin was the worst candidate anywhere in the current election season.

All right, possibly not as bad as the guy in Idaho who showed up for the gubernatorial debate in a leather biker jacket. But Bevin did campaign at a pro-cockfighting rally, which is something I don't think we've seen before. Then he defended himself by arguing that both cockfighting and dogfighting were pastimes in which the Founding Fathers were "very actively involved."

Yeah, blame it all on John Adams.

So, a good day for McConnell. Except that his total share of the vote against Bevin and an assortment of even more pathetic Republican challengers was 60 percent. And, as Eric Ostermeier of the University of Minnesota pointed out, that's the lowest primary margin for an incumbent Kentucky senator since 1938 when Alben Barkley did not have the advantage of an opponent who was linked to fighting roosters.

McConnell now faces Democrat Alison Grimes. It's supposed to be one of the big contests this fall, and when it comes up at the dinner table you will be able to provide all of this colorful background.

The tea party had a terrible week! The Republican establishment is euphoric because it managed to beat back a raft of crazy right-wing candidates and nominate a raft of boring right-wing candidates all around the country.

For instance in Georgia, the guys who were supposed to be the tea party favorites for the Republican Senate nomination, Reps. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, were destroyed. Perhaps this was because Broun once called the theory of evolution "lies straight from the pit of hell" and Gingrey said that former Senate candidate Todd Akin was "partly right" about his theory that a woman can't get pregnant when she's raped.

Or, perhaps this was because the two top finishers, David Perdue and Rep. Jack Kingston, spent a lot more money. After all, Kingston — who we first met when he made headlines by arguing that poor students should be required to do janitorial work to pay for their subsidized lunches — doesn't believe in evolution either.

Perdue is a wealthy businessman whose cousin used to be governor. You may remember him as the candidate who criticized one of his opponents for never having gone to college. "I mean, there's a high school graduate in this race, OK? I'm sorry, but these issues are so much broader, so complex.") He frequently suggests that he has thoughts so deep, only another wealthy businessman could appreciate them. ("There are five people in the U.S. Senate who understand what I just said.")

Perdue and Kingston are going to have nine more weeks to fight it out, so this is something you can bring up over a barbecue on the Fourth of July if conversation really starts to flag. (Remember, pompous business guy versus congressman who wants to make third-graders sweep the floors.) The winner will go up against Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn.

Georgia and Kentucky are the only Republican Senate seats the Democrats feel they have a chance of winning. If the tottering tea party was one theme this week, women were definitely another.

"On the Senate side, you've got women in some really key races," said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics. On the gubernatorial side, however, things were a little dimmer. Rep. Allyson Schwartz lost the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania, which she was once favored to win. Schwartz even failed to get 20 percent of the vote, which would at least have made her the most successful Democratic female gubernatorial candidate in the history of her state. Also, Walsh pointed out, Pennsylvania will now be "another state with no women in their congressional delegation."

Pennsylvania, I'm sorry. This looks terrible. Get your act together.

Schwartz lost to a businessman named Tom Wolf, who ran some compelling ads featuring his family joking about Wolf's affection for his old stick-shift jeep. Do you remember the time Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley for the Senate in Massachusetts with an ad about his truck? Do you think lack of interest in banged-up motor vehicles is a problem for women in American politics?

Or could it just be that Wolf spent $10 million of his own money? So much to talk about over dinner. And only 167 more dinners until the election.

Gail Collins is a columnist for the New York Times.