Greg Sargent, the prolific TPM reporter, announced today that he's heading to the Washington Post to run a new blog. Sargent is an unrepentant Democratic partisan, which means he should fit in well with the staff at the Post, but also a top notch reporter. During the campaign, Sargent would ping the McCain press shop with questions all day long. Because TPM is so overtly partisan, he rarely got the answers he was looking for, but for his persistence, if nothing else, Sargent earned a grudging respect from the McCain staff.

Sargent pretty much carried TPM over the last year, and it's not clear to me how that site survives in its current configuration during a Democratic administration (which they have no interest in investigating) and without their best reporter. Still, for online partisan reporting, TPM set the bar pretty high this election. Republicans have no equivalent outlet. Any strategy to revive the party's fortunes will require developing the kind of online infrastructure the Democrats now have in place, but you can't do that without a bunch of right-wing Greg Sargents.