Howe do I ess a newspaper article statistically? College Help.?

You can tally the total votes and see what the standard deviation was on each side, Rep. and Dem., but there probably isn't the information in the article for that. You can compare the actual results to exit polling or pre-election polling to see how they compare and if they fall within the margin of error, or create your own confidence interval to see whether they fell into that. If they had enough data you could do a regression ysis to see if it would have been possible to predict the outcome after a few polls.