Doug Hoffer's victory in Tuesday's state auditor's race wasn't just surprising. It was historic.

For the first time, Vermont voters elected a statewide candidate with the Progressive Party label. Hoffer ran as a fusion candidate with endorsements from both the Democrats and Progressives.

But many see Hoffer as a Prog at heart, pointing out that he came to Vermont 30 years ago to work for Bernie Sanders when the latter was mayor of Burlington, and later worked for Progressive mayor Peter Clavelle. Hoffer also provided paid staff assistance to Progressive city councilors and research for the Peace & Justice Center.

On election night, Hoffer stopped by the Progressive Party gathering at Magnolia's Bistro in Burlington before joining the Democratic victory party at the Hilton.

"This is my family," Hoffer told the assembled Progs.

Unlike lieutenant governor candidate Cass Gekas, who ran as a Progressive/Democrat, Hoffer elected to run as a Democrat/Progressive. No doubt, Hoffer's Democratic label helped him enormously in a year when President Barack Obama topped the party's ticket.

But Progressive stalwarts such as state Rep. Chris Pearson (P-Burlington) view Hoffer's 51-to-45 win over Republican state Sen. Vince Illuzzi as an "extremely significant" victory for the Progs. Combined with wins by fusion state Senate candidates Tim Ashe and David Zuckerman — and a strong showing by Gekas — Pearson says the Hoffer victory "sort of suggests that the Progressive label is something voters are pretty comfortable with."

Maps are cool! Especially these maps created by Stone Environmental's Charlie Hofmann for the Vermont Secretary of State's elections web site.

Since they rely upon data from the state's voluntary election night reporting website, they are sadly incomplete for now. Town clerks reported the results from just 206 precincts that night — roughly 75 percent of the state's 275 precincts.

The secretary of state's office hopes to release unofficial results this weekend and certified results next Tuesday. We'll try to bring you complete maps when they're available.

Despite the missing info, these maps show some pretty interesting regional trends. The most obvious, of course, is the northbound retreat of the Vermont Republican Party. The GOP still has a couple southerly pockets of strength — particularly in Rutland County — but they are few and far between.

You can check out all the maps here. Also, in case it's not obvious, you can zoom in to view town names and check out a town's results by clicking on it.

President: This is both the most and least interesting map. Yeah, we all know President Obama beat Mitt Romney 67 to 31 percent in Vermont, but this map shows just one town going for Romney: Maidstone. (Of course, it's likely several other of the 69 precincts not included in the map also voted for Mittens.) Even in Maidstone, it was a close one. Romney won 52 votes to Obama's 50. If only the two voters who backed Gary Johnson and Rocky Anderson had backed Obama, it would've been a tie!

Peter Hirschfeld over at the Vermont Press Bureau has a good story today about the guy who helped make that happen: 26-year-old Nick Charyk, director of the Vermont Democratic House Campaign. Here's a little snippet:

Effective recruitment is the kind of labor-intensive undertaking for which professional staff is usually needed. Charyk spent much of 2011 embedding in Republican districts he believed Democrats could win, or in Democratic districts where outgoing officeholders would leave open seats.

“I sat down with as many people as I could, had coffee, developed a list of people, five or 10 people in town that might make great candidates and worked hard to recruit them,” Charyk said. “The metaphor we use is find out who built the Little League field, and go talk to them first.”

We've made this point before — a couple of times — but it's worth repeating: You just can't win if you're not putting up good candidates. I mean, duh. But really.

Anyway, check out Hirschfeld's story. Two-thirds of it is posted on the Press Bureau's blog. But you should really go buy a copy of the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus or the Rutland Herald. Because, hey, newspapers are totes dying, right? And someone's gotta pay Hirschfeld's salary.

When Vince Illuzzi was first elected to the Vermont Senate, Ronald Reagan was the president-elect, The Empire Strikes Back was in movie theaters and John Lennon was still alive.

The year was 1980. Illuzzi was 27 years old.

Over the next three-plus decades, Illuzzi became a fixture in the state Senate and a powerful legislator known for cutting last-minute deals in the waning hours of legislative sessions to the benefit of his Northeast Kingdom constituents.

That storied Senate career came to an end — or at least a pause — yesterday. Illuzzi retired from his seat representing Essex and Orleans counties this year to run for state auditor, a race he lost to Democrat/Progressive Doug Hoffer, a policy analyst making his second run for the job. Riding a Democratic wave that turned out big for President Barack Obama, Hoffer beat Illuzzi by a margin of 51 to 45.

What's next for the "King of the Kingdom" remains to be seen. For now, Illuzzi says he'll continue in his day job as Essex County state's attorney while pondering his options. Standing beside him at the Republican Party gathering in Montpelier last night, his wife, Eileen Maher (pictured), chimed in, "And spend more time with his family."

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"It's a real privilege," Shumlin said. "It's humbling to get the kind of results we did last night."

Surrounded by dozens of workers on break, Shumlin said he chose to bring his victory tour to Dynapower Corp., because it's just the sort of growing business he believes it's his job to support.

"I really came to say thank you to Vermonters," he said.

Shumlin's remarks followed a big night for a governor whose last two electoral victories — in the 2010 primary and general elections — were nail-biters to the end. This time, he routed Sen. Randy Brock (R-Franklin), winning 58 percent to Brock's 37.

Despite his formidable cash advantage — much of which he ended up keeping in the bank — Shumlin characterized Tuesday's results as a win for truth over money and "grassroots citizens' democracy" over "outside political consultants."

The media spotlight last night focused on the statewide races and that Obama guy, but there were some spirited races on the local level, as well. The big wins Democrats showed at the top of the ticket trickled down to the Legislature; as it stands Democrats added two seats for a "supermajority" of 96 seats in the House of Representatives, while Progressives picked up a couple seats and Republicans lost three. The 22-8 split in the state Senate in favor of the Democrats appears it will hold, although each party holds a seat, for now, that could still change.

For the most complete results page, head over to Vermont Public Radio's elections page. The Secretary of State's unofficial results site once again lagged behind local media outlets on election night, and currently shows only about 75 percent of precincts reporting results.

With the caveat that results are still unofficial, here's how some of Vermont's other interesting races shook out.

Each week in Fact Checker, reporters and editors from Seven Days and VTDigger.org will evaluate the veracity of statements and rate them on a five-point scale: True, Mostly True, Debatable, Mostly False and Udder Bull.

CLAIM: "The Fact Checker is on indefinite hiatus," Seven Days' Off Message blog, Nov. 7, 2012.

FACTS: The Fact Checker has been running candidate statements and other claims through the BS detector for a good few weeks now. But with the campaign season over and the next legislative session not yet begun, the pace of outrageous claims has slowed down considerably. Therefore, the editors have decided to put the feature on administrative leave (unpaid, of course). The Fact Checker reserves the right to come back at any time, but will not appear weekly in Seven Days or on VTDigger.org for the next several weeks. If you have a fact you want checked, however, email us and we'll check it out.

SCORE: Judging from the byline of this post, and the website it's appearing on, this claim appears to be totally legit. For that reason, we rate it "True."

Vermont Democrats went wild as newly-elected State Treasurer Beth Pearce took to the stage late Tuesday night in a crowded ballroom at the Burlington Hilton.

As Pearce settled into her victory speech, the crowd went even wilder. But it wasn’t just for her. To the side of the stage, a television tuned to CNN was flashing some pretty big news. “I think I just heard that Obama won Ohio,” Pearce said. “Boy, I hope I got that right.”

She did.

This was a night of euphoria for Vermont Dems — up and down the ballot. Within minutes of the polls closing, the AP called it for their top officeholders: Gov. Peter Shumlin, Sen. Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucueses with Democrats) and Congressman Peter Welch. And Vermont once again sent Obama his first three votes in the Electoral College.

In the race Vermont Democrats focused on the most, Pearce handily defeated Rutland’s Republican city treasurer, Wendy Wilton, by a 52 to 41 percent margin.

But the biggest surprise of the night came when Burlington’s own Doug Hoffer (pictured above), a Democrat and Progressive, defeated 32-year Republican state Sen. Vince Illuzzi 51 to 45 to become Vermont’s next state auditor.

In a speech as low-key as his win was unexpected, Hoffer — a self-employed policy analyst running in his second race for state auditor — concluded by saying, simply, “I’m going to get to work.”

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It's Election Day — and that means we here at Seven Days are getting ready for a night of hitting 'refresh' on our laptops.

It also means we'll be firing up the venerable Seven Days election night live blog just as soon as the polls close at 7 p.m. We'll be joined by our co-host, Channel 17/CCTV, as well as by reporters from the Stowe Reporter, Waterbury Record, Addison County Independent, Bennington Banner, Windham County's The Commons and hopefully more!

Seven Days' Tyler Machado and Cathy Resmer will be anchoring the live blog. Andy Bromage will be reporting from the Republican gathering at Montpelier's Capitol Plaza, Kevin J. Kelley will be with the Progressives at Burlington's Magnolia Bistro, and I'll be with the Democrats at the Burlington Hilton. Ken Picard will anchor live election coverage on Channel 17/CCTV, which will be streamed alongside our live blog, and Kathryn Flagg will be covering everything else there is to cover in the state.

Please join us at sevendaysvt.com at 7 p.m. and share with us what's happening in your neck of the woods. And remember, if you're out and about today and tonight, be sure to tweet election-related content with hashtag #vtpoli so we can pull it into the blog.

Photo credit: Cathy Resmer (Pictured: Voting in Winooski)

If you're jamming out to WCAX's election night coverage Tuesday, you might find yourself watching this 60-second ad from Vermont's favorite lefty super PAC, Priorities PAC:

According to Priorities PAC consultant Todd Bailey, the group paid roughly $3000 to produce the ad and another $1500 to air it — just once — on election night. He said they may re-purpose it down the road to support the super PAC's advocacy work in the Statehouse.

What kind of advocacy work, you ask? To put super PACs out of business, of course!

Well, not exactly.