Mr. Cameron wasted no time, making a 15-minute call to Mr. Clegg as the final vote tally confirmed that the Conservatives, though the largest party in the new Parliament, had fallen short of a majority by a margin of 20 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons.
The victory of the secular Call of Tunisia Party with a margin of 16 seats ahead of the Islamist Ennahda Party, sends a message to the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia just like the one the Egyptian people sent to the Muslim brotherhood there, as if to say: We do not want you to rule us.
Their hope is to cling to a margin of about 10 seats over Mr. Chen's party.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee, said the un-prime time was just fine, even though the Republican majority, with a margin of just 13 seats, is not as good shape as the Bush candidacy appears to be.
Had Mr. Gingrich still been speaker, he would almost certainly have outstripped his own fund-raising records, working to maintain the razor-thin Republican margin of seven House seats, analysts say.
In local government the SDLP still leads, but by a margin of only nine seats.One of the most telling sights of the election was that of Mr Trimble and his wife Daphne, outside the count for his Upper Bann constituency, surrounded by Paisleyites screaming "traitor", throwing punches and kicks at them.
That is because the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens together in effect tied the combination of CDU and FDP but, when the final tallies came in just before midnight, eked out a margin of one single seat in the new state parliament.
In an unusual number of seats, margins are so narrow that every vote will count.
To be fair, pulling the Coalition's margin back to a sprinkling of seats was a reasonable achievement and everyone can basically sit back and watch the right destroy themselves and the country for the next three years.
Similarly, for 46 of those years, Democrats ruled the Senate by a margin of at least 10 seats.
