If you’re a polling firm who always shows Rs ahead, an election where lots of Rs win doesn't validate your methods.
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— @DrewLinzer
David Wasserman:
The election of a historically large Republican majority coincided with the lowest turnout in a midterm election since 1942. But the 2014 race for the House played out in two very different sets of states. In the 24 states hosting high-profile, competitive Senate or gubernatorial races, raw votes cast in House races were down an average of 30.5 percent from 2012.2 But in the 26 states that weren’t, raw votes were down a much more severe 43.9 percent.3
Political types call these places “orphan states.” In 2011, Republican operatives began using the term to describe worrisome House races in states where the 2012 presidential race wasn’t competitive. Republicans fretted that without a robust GOP presidential campaign driving out their voters in places like California, Illinois and New York, they were in danger of letting more energized Democrats run up the score in down-ballot races. Their fears were warranted; those three states alone produced Democrats’ entire eight-seat House gain in 2012.
But in 2014, Republicans took advantage. In a midterm election, heavily Democratic groups such as young and low-income voters and Latinos are less likely to turn out to begin with. And in plenty of states, the lack of a competitive statewide race sent turnout plunging to unforeseen lows and led to down-ballot disasters for Democrats.
John Judis:
The chief obstacle that any Democratic nominee will face is public resistance to installing a president from the same party in the White House for three terms in a row. If you look at the presidents since World War II, when the same party occupied the White House for two terms in a row, that party’s candidate lost in the next election six out of seven times.
The one exception was George H.W. Bush's 1988 victory after two terms of Ronald Reagan, but Bush, who was seventeen points behind Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis at the Republican convention, was only able to win because his campaign manager Lee Atwater ran a brilliant campaign against an extraordinarily weak opponent. (Democrats might also insist that Al Gore really won in 2000, but even if he had, he would have done so very narrowly with unemployment at 4.0 percent.)
More politics and policy below the fold.
Frank Newport:
But the bottom line is that about 36% of eligible voters voted. Since that calculation is across all districts and states, the percentage is actually much less in some states and in some districts. The United States Elections Project, for example, estimates that just 28% of eligible voters turned out in Indiana, apparently the lowest statewide turnout in the nation. Voters sent politicians to Washington to represent…whom? That's the central question.
Aaron Blake:
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has participated in a keg stand. She has run this desperate ad. She lost an energy committee chairmanship that she often touted, when the GOP took the Senate on Nov. 4. She has clashed -- in front of reporters -- with a leader of her party. That same party basicallyabandoned her in her runoff campaign for a fourth term.
But on Tuesday, she suffered the biggest indignity of her 2014 campaign, and possibly of her political career.
Landrieu, reduced to a relatively pointless gambit to demonstrate her clout in Washington, failed to secure the 60 votes required to move forward with the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. She came up one vote shy.
This was basically Landrieu's final play. With no party funding for her campaign, she has been drubbed on the airwaves -- as in, exponentially so. And even before that, few gave her much hope in her runoff with Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).
So in a last-ditch effort to move the needle, she launched the Keystone campaign. Nevermind that the very same bill will probably pass with ease once Republicans take control of the Senate in January. She wanted to prove she could make it happen two months earlier -- because why not.
And Senate Democrats -- who, again, have abandoned her financially -- have now abandoned her in spirit too. The vote wasn't just meaningless because Republicans will pass the bill come next year; it was also meaningless because the White House has basically said it would veto the bill, as the State Department is still reviewing the project.
And despite all of it -- despite the whole dog-and-pony show of the past week -- Democrats couldn't even give Landrieu enough votes to breath a little life (hypothetically, at least) into her long-shot campaign.
Why would they? What would anyone support a meaningless vote that the WH opposes, that votes against the national interest, that spits in the face of a younger generation of voters that's pro-environment and anti-stupid politics?
Landrieu is going to lose the runoff. Why mortgage your party's future to support a hopeless cause?
Oh, yeah. Because it's the Senate.
Nate Cohn:
Ms. Landrieu’s colleagues have done her the courtesy of giving her a vote on a controversial issue. It’s just hard to understand why. Ms. Landrieu is all but doomed, and even a successful Keystone vote would have been too little too late.
Julie Rovner:
But, while there may be agreement that the U.S. needs more primary care providers, it's not clear to everyone considering the problem whether all of those people need to be doctors.
"There are a lot of primary care services that can be provided by a lot of people other than primary care doctors," says health economist Gail Wilensky. She and a colleague recently led an expert panel that looked at the funding of advanced training for doctors.
Nonphysician primary care providers can include physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and social workers, for example — often working together in teams with a medical doctor. Teams are thought to provide more cost-effective care, according to some health policy analysts. And, says Wilensky, more nonphysician health practitioners, each providing a different set of services, might lessen the need for more primary care doctors.
"What will we allow nurses to do — work up to the limits of their license?" Wilensky asks. "Work up to the limits of their training? What will we allow pharmacists to do? Those together would determine how many physicians it would be useful to have around."
Wilensky also points out that past studies predicting shortages of doctors have been laughably wrong.
Virginia Hughes has a fascinating series all this week in National geographic on personhood. Here are the first two pieces:
Personhood Week: Conception Is a Process:
I went to a Catholic high school, where I was taught in religion class that life begins at conception. I don’t remember my teacher getting into the biological details, but we all knew what she meant: Life begins at the moment that an earnest sperm finishes his treacherous swimming odyssey and hits that big, beautiful egg.
That’s what many Christians believe, and it’s also the fundamental idea behind the personhood movement. The website of Personhood USA, a nonprofit Christian ministry, highlights this quote by French geneticist Jérôme Lejeune: “After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being. It is no longer a matter of taste or opinion…it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.”
That’s not a common belief among biologists, however. Scott Gilbert of Swarthmore calls the conception story a “founding myth,” like The Aeneid. As he jokes in a popular lecture, “We are not the progeny of some wimpy sperm — we are the progeny of heroes!”
In reality, conception — or more precisely, fertilization — is not a moment. It’s a process.
Personhood Week: Do Kids Count?:
“No right is held more sacred or is more carefully guarded by the common law than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law.”
This is just one of many examples from U.S. case law illustrating that a big part of personhood is autonomy. In our society, people are supposed to have control over their own bodies and make independent decisions about their lives. This idea drives the modern medical concept of informed consent, in which an individual is supposed to give permission before receiving medical therapies or participating in a research study.
That autonomy principle, though, gets sticky when applied to a subset of humans that most of us would surely call persons: minors.