Updates – Page 11

Oh Deer

They’re hot to trot this time of year, and that means trouble for motorists:

On average, 2 million deer-vehicle collisions occur yearly, costing more than $4 billion in vehicle damage. About 5% of those collisions involve human injury, and sometimes deaths. Most of those collisions happen in November because deer are on the move, looking for a hook-up. As days get shorter, male testosterone production increases. Fall is rut season, and male deer roam widely in search of females. If you’re driving at dusk or dawn in November, you’re on a Highway to the Danger Zone: the majority of deer collisions happen this month. The average cost of a deer-vehicle collision is $8,388, and $30,773 for a moose-vehicle collision.

Updates from several readers:

The deer are crazy plentiful in San Antonio. The key to avoiding a deer car collision is to head straight for them.

This seems counterintuitive, but remember that the deer don’t understand evasive maneuvers, and swerving can result in something akin to a greeting between two different cultures you spoke of earlier. Deer are just trying to run away and if you maintain a course right at them they will usually get away unscathed.

Sometimes they will run right into the side of your car. I don’t get that at all, but knock wood that has never happened to me. The city should hire a task of bow hunters to kill some of the deer and put the meat into the food bank.

Another reminds us that “Louis CK hates deer”:

Another reader:

This post pretty much requires me to share one of my favorite anecdotes on the topic. My significant other is from a small town in Northern, WI. There is one big feeder high school up there that all the “nearby” communities send their kids to and which she graduated from several years ago. Every fall up there, the entire student body apparently knew exactly when that year’s driver’s ed class reached this important and (especially there in Northern Wisconsin) life-saving lesson in surviving a deer-car collision because of the memorable manner chosen by the instructor in order to drill it into the students’ heads. Specifically, on that day of the curriculum, the driver’s ed students could be heard throughout the school, in every hallway and classroom, as they chanted at the top of their lungs the following simple, memorable phrase, over and over: “Hit the damn deer! Hit the damn deer!”

Another did:

Funny, I saw that post literally 10 seconds after I got this photo from a friend – the collision was last night. Thankfully, all the people are OK.

(Photo by Fabrice Florin)

Walker 2016? Seriously?

In John Dickerson’s interpretation, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s victory last night – his third in four years – “isn’t just a win for Walker, it’s a win for a theory of governing”:

After Walker became the first governor to defeat a recall attempt, he argued that he had found a way to appeal to Obama voters by governing as a conservative. He said that almost 10 percent of the electorate voted to re-elect President Obama and keep him in office, too. In the Wall Street Journal, he argued he was a model for the Republican Party—someone who could govern as a conservative and still win in a purple state. The midterm electorate is much different than in a presidential year, but Walker won some new ammunition for his argument. Walker won 11 percent of the “liberal” vote and, while he lost those who self-identified as “moderates” by six points, that’s a small margin for someone who has been considered as enemy number one for liberals. Walker will now return to the top of the presidential speculation, arguing that he knows how to win and govern as a true conservative in a purple state. Oh, and 34 percent of union households voted for Walker.

On the presidential front, I can only say he seems to me utterly unprepossessing. He has the same problem some other GOP hopefuls have: he just doesn’t seem presidential. He looks like a product of a college debating club, his appeal is very tied to the governor’s role and to the fight with organized labor – which are not federal issues. Foreign policy? No idea. You need something more – either the charisma of an Obama candidacy or broader national exposure or a distinct image. Maybe this will come, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test to me at this point in the cycle. Philip Klein differs:

Although Walker polls in the single digits in most surveys, the 2016 field has no clear front-runner and a number of attributes put him in a unique position. There is well-publicized split within the Republican Party between its conservative and pragmatic wings, and of all the potential candidates out there, Walker is the one who is most likely to unite the two.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner in March, Walker rejected the idea that there was a tradeoff between conservatism and pragmatism. “You don’t have to compromise one for the other, meaning you can stand up for your principles, you can push your core beliefs, and you can still govern effectively,” Walker said. The fact that he demonstrated this in Wisconsin is what makes him such a potentially strong candidate. His fight for limited government reforms in the face of a ferocious assault from national liberals endeared him to activists on the right. At the same time, his ability to successfully govern and get re-elected in a blue state is comforting to Establishment Republicans.

But Ana Marie Cox damps the enthusiasm over Walker’s victory:

Nothing about the exit-poll results besides Walker’s win itself suggests that Wisconsin voters are especially enamored of conservative ideals. They were evenly divided over how Walker handled the Affordable Care Act (or didn’t handle it, really); they were almost evenly divided in their view of government unions (slightly more with an unfavorable view); they were almost evenly divided over whether “government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals.” About half of voters had a negative view of the Democratic Party. About half had a negative view of the Republican Party. The only policy issue that rallied a significant majority of Wisconsin voters was the minimum wage—two-thirds favored raising it.

None of this sounds like proof that Walker has succeeded in making conservative arguments more appealing to more voters, or that he’s gained more voters because he’s made conservative arguments. (The same rich, white, married, male church-going coalition pushed him over the top this time as last.) Rather, Scott Walker may have succeeded because he’s been able to make all of his races about Scott Walker.

Update from a reader:

Here’s a factoid: If Walker were elected, he would be the first president since Harry Truman not to have graduated from college. It would be curious to look back at contenders over recent decades, and leaders of other foreign countries, to see if there is any other example of this. Certainly not the UK or France. Italy or Australia? Russia, China certainly possible.

Another:

UK? Surely not. Two of the last six UK Prime Ministers did not go to college: Jim Callaghan and John Major. That is two since 1976.

Another:

Funny that UK and Australia had Prime Ministers in the 1990s without tertiary educations – John Major and Paul Keating. The last Russian/ Soviet example was Chernenko.

(Photo by Darren Hauck/Getty Images)

Prowlers And Perennials

In light of this year’s theft of an ultra-rare water lily from London’s Kew Gardens, Sam Knight examines the world of horticultural lawlessness:

One big problem with plant crime is that it is so difficult to distinguish from the act of botany itself. Many of those who stand tallest in the annals of plant science – Joseph Dalton Hooker (Kew’s most celebrated director), André Michaux (who introduced 5,000 trees to France), Robert Fortune (who brought tea out of China) – spent years traveling the world and uprooting tens of thousands of plants that they liked the look of. …

Even the acts that were recognized at the time as larcenous have rarely been remembered that way. The Dutch tulip industry was more or less founded on the repeated theft of bulbs from the gardens of Carolus Clusius, a botanist in Leiden, in the 1590s. In the summer of 1876, Kew paid £700 to Henry Wickham for thousands of rubber seeds that he smuggled out of the Amazonian rainforest and were subsequently planted in Singapore and Malaysia. In Brazil, Wickham became known as the príncipe dos ladrões (prince of thieves) and the carrasco do amazonas (executioner of the Amazon). In 1920, he was knighted by George V for services to the rubber industry.

But while plant theft is now decidedly against the law, its incidence seems likely to grow:

In this late, degraded chapter in our planet’s conservation, it is possible to see plant theft as part of a general, depressing quickening: as more plants become endangered, because their habitats are destroyed, they become more desirable to collectors, because they are rare, and so on. Around 20% of the world’s 380,000 plant species are now thought to be threatened by extinction, the same proportion as for mammals. (The only order of life in more trouble are the amphibians). We treasure things in the last second before the lights go out. That is certainly the case with the Nymphaea thermarum.

Update from a reader:

Here is a water lily theft story with a happy ending.

The Freshman Lawmaker Who’s Actually A Freshman

West Virginians just elected 18-year-old Saira Blair to their state Senate, making her the youngest state lawmaker in the country. Sam Brodey has more:

The college freshman was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates in a landslide—she earned 63 percent of the vote to her 44-year-old Democratic opponent’s 30 percent—and officially became the youngest lawmaker in the country. She’ll represent a district of about 18,000 people in the eastern part of the state, near the Maryland border. The Wall Street Journal describes Blair as “fiscally conservative,” and she “campaigned on a pledge to work to reduce certain taxes on businesses.” Her website boasts an “A” rating from the NRA and endorsements from West Virginians for Life. As a 17-year-old, Blair primaried the 66-year-old Republican incumbent Larry Kump and advanced to the general election—all while legally being unable to cast a vote for herself.

Kris Maher highlights her opponent’s uncommonly civil response:

Ms. [Layne] Diehl congratulated Ms. Blair on running a good campaign and said she knew she was also up against broad dissatisfaction with Democrats in the state, partly from the widely held view that the Obama administration’s energy policies are hurting the coal industry. “I’m very proud of the race that was run on both sides,” Ms. Diehl said. “Quite frankly a 17- or 18-year-old young woman that has put herself out there and won a political campaign has certainly brought some positive press to the state. I look forward to seeing what her leadership brings to the state of West Virginia.”

Mahler notes that only 5 percent of the nation’s 7,300 state legislators are under 30, let alone 20. Update from a reader:

I think it’s important to highlight that Saira’s father is Craig Blair, a state senator in WV who has represented that part of the state in the House of Delegates or Senate for most of the last 12 years and managed her campaign (something that Brodey’s article mentions in the last paragraph). I’m a young voter and am happy to see someone of my generation writing laws. But the story around Saira is much more “up by her bootstraps” than “silver spoon.” I’m sure she worked hard to get elected, but I highly doubt she would have made it past the primaries if not for her dad’s connections and name recognition. It feels a bit disingenuous on the part of most of the media to neglect to mention this.

Will The GOP Take An Axe To The ACA?

While total repeal of healthcare reform isn’t in the cards as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House, Brett LoGiurato predicts that “the overall GOP strategy will likely be to chip away at parts of the law in bills that could make it to the president’s desk”:

A full-repeal bill would certainly prompt a presidential veto. One item Republican House and Senate aides think is likely to make it to Obama’s desk, and potentially get his signature, is a bill to repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical devices. A similar amendment, championed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is in line to become the next chair of the Senate Finance Committee, passed by a 79-20 vote in 2013. “I think the med-device tax and some other little areas would be the best place to start, because that is the ‘possible,'” a senior GOP aide on the Senate Finance Committee told Business Insider of Republicans’ pursuit of Obamacare-related legislation in the next session of Congress. Republicans could also take aim at so-called risk corridors in the health law, a potential fight that some Republican senators have already begun discussing as part of a shutdown battle.

Cohn wonders whether the new Senate will try to kill the individual mandate:

Of all the proposals Republicans might pass, this is the one that would probably threaten to wreak the most havoc.

Economists say that the requirement to get health insurance (or pay a fine) entices lots of people, particularly young and healthy ones, to buy insurance—and, in so doing, keeps premiums for everybody else lower. If their projections are right, then taking away the mandate would mean more people without insurance, and higher premiums for those who hold onto it. Obama, a skeptic of the individual mandate during his presidential campaign, eventually decided the economists were right. He’s fought to keep the mandate ever since and there’s no reason to think he’d back off that position now. But the provision is unpopular with the public and Republicans might be able to pick up enough Democratic votes to pass a bill, just to force a very public veto.

The GOP’s statehouse victories are also bad news for Obamacare, as the newly elected or re-elected Republican governors aren’t likely to move forward on expanding Medicaid and might well tinker with or scale back existing expansions:

In Arkansas, where Democratic Governor Mike Beebe pioneered a way to use Medicaid expansion funds to subsidize private coverage, the future of that program is in doubt under the incoming Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson. Republican leaders in moderate states have expanded Medicaid, including Rick Snyder in Michigan (who won last night) and Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania (who lost). Republicans taking over in blue states, including Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts, may seek permission from Washington to revamp those Medicaid programs to make them look more like the privatized versions in Arkansas, Indiana, and a handful of other places.

Overall, Gerard Magliocca concludes that the ACA “is still not settled law”:

While Congress cannot repeal the Act over the President’s veto, the issue will remain a live one through 2016. More important, the election results may influence the Court’s thinking on whether to take the cert. petition in King. Court watchers noted the other day that the petition was relisted, which is often (though not always) a prelude to a grant. The timing of the relist to correspond with the midterm election may be a coincidence, but in any event the election result may embolden the Justices who dissented in NFIB to take a statutory crack at the Act.

Meanwhile, Igor Volsky glosses over the GOP’s other likely legislative targets:

Republicans promised to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — a project 16 senate Democrats endorsed when the body voted on a non-biding resolution in March of 2013 — and have pledged to pass a budget in both chambers. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the likely chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — has promised to tackle tax reform (a project he told Bloomberg on Tuesday night would ideally attract 60 votes in the Senate) and insisted that Republicans still plan to advance immigration reform — on a step-by-step basis that begins with border security. Obama endorsed such a process last year. Other issues with bipartisan support include an insistence that the administration submit any deal to stop Iran from developing a nuclear program to Congress and approving fast-track authority for trade deals with the European Union and nations in Asia.

Correction from a reader:

One of the quotes on your recent post on the ACA at the state level said the following: “Republican leaders in moderate states have expanded Medicaid, including Rick Snyder in Michigan (who won last night) and Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania (who lost).” Former Governor Corbett did not actually expand Medicaid. He submitted his own privatization plan to the federal government, but it was never approved or enacted.

Political Brutes

Justin E. H. Smith argues that humans “are not the only political animals”:

There are overwhelming empirical data revealing, to anyone who is willing to look, complex social organization across the animal kingdom, including collective deliberation, division of labor, ritualized conflict resolution, and other forms of behavior that, when identified in human society, are deemed political without hesitation. We know that elephants plan elaborate raids on human settlements to recover the remains of their slaughtered loved ones. We know that in ant colonies the appearance of elaborate systems of task-allocation is related directly to the size of the colony: just as in human society, the more individual members of the society, the more we may expect to find social differentiation. Thanks to the primatologist Frans De Waal’s popular work, we are now slowly warming up to the idea that there is such a thing, at least, as “chimpanzee politics.” …

[T]here is another way of understanding animals as political that even the most defiant human-exceptionalist cannot dispute:

not as separated out into their own discrete political societies, each according to its kind, but rather as part of a single, global political formation that includes, notably but not exclusively, human beings. Some recent political philosophy, in fact, is starting to approach its subject from just such a trans-species perspective. In their groundbreaking 2011 book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue compellingly that animal rights theory has been limited to the extent that it has emphasized only negative rights of animals, a category that is conceived as universal and without any distinctions of moral significance within it. They argue instead that theorists would do well to focus on relational obligations that human beings come to have to animals that figure in different ways in human society. For them, nonhuman animals belong to the polis, too.

Update from a reader:

I came across this item regarding animal politics. Several species seem to make decisions by voting. A couple examples:

Red deer

The red deer of Eurasia live in large herds, spending lots of time either grazing or lying down to ruminate. Some deer are ready to move on before others are, and scientists have noticed that herds only move when 60 percent of the adults stand up — essentially voting with their feet. Even if a dominant individual is more experienced and makes fewer mistakes than its underlings, herds typically favor democratic decisions over autocratic ones.

A major reason for this, according to research by biologists Larissa Conradt and Timothy Roper, is that groups are less impulsive: “Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions, rather than because each individual has an influence on the decision per se.”

African buffalo

Similar to red deer, African buffalo are herd herbivores that often make group decisions about when and where to move. In the 1990s, researchers realized that what initially looked like “mundane stretching” is actually a type of “voting behavior,” in which females indicate their travel preferences by standing up, staring in one direction and then lying back down.

“Only adult females vote, and females participate regardless of their social status within the herd,” biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote in a 1997 study. “When the average direction of gaze is compared with the subsequent movement of the herd, the average deviation is only three degrees, which is well within measurement error. On days in which cows differ sharply in their direction of gaze, the herd tends to split and graze in separate patches for the night.”

The Goldilocks Principle Of Grading, Ctd

A reader advances a great idea for the thread on grade inflation:

I teach upper-division cell biology at a major research university with more than 200 students a year, many of them desperately hoping to get into medical or dental school. It doesn’t matter what type of grades we give; they all want the highest possible so they can get into professional school.

The only thing that I believe will limit grade inflation is if the median score was reported along with every class grade (and the all important cumulative GPA would be reported along with the cumulative median GPA of the student’s classes). So while an A- might sound like a great GPA, if the student’s median GPA was an A- it would be very clear that this was just an average student. One might hope that students would actually seek out classes with lower median grades since otherwise they would have no chance to actually excel, and at a minimum, it would take pressure off those of us who teach and are trying to resist pressures to inflate our grades since we could fairly point out that it was in the students best interest to not have an absurdly high median GPA.

A few more readers chime in:

In an ideal world, intellectual mastery would matter more than grades. In such a world, the smart students would flock to the toughest professors. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. Students live by the grade and die by the grade. As aren’t taken as exceptional but are expected.

Take me, for example. I was at my college on scholarship, so if my GPA fell below 3.5, I would be placed on academic probation. If it fell below 3.25, I would lose my scholarship and not be able to afford to go to school anymore. And this was on the lenient side. It’s nothing compared to the expectations for those going on to law school or trying to get into Ph.D programs.

Another protests that students actually don’t punish hard graders with harsh reviews:

It’s an academic myth that giving fewer As results in lower marks. I taught in a math department for years, and my grade distribution in my classes was pretty close to a normal distribution centered on 78 percent. Yet my evaluations were consistently among the highest in my college. The research literature backs me up. Consider this study, in which data from 50,000 undergraduate courses was analyzed:

After controlling for learning outcomes, expected grades generally did not affect student evaluations. In fact, contrary to what some faculty think, courses in natural sciences with expected grades of A were rated lower, not higher. Courses were rated lower when they were rated as either difficult or too elementary. Courses rated at the “just right” level received the highest evaluations.

Please help combat this myth!

Update from a reader:

In response to your reader’s proposal that students’ grades in a class be measured against the median so that everyone involved can accurately measure a student’s “achievement” in terms of positive or negative deviation from that median: Yikes!

It may be true that students are obsessed with grades as a path to scholarships and acceptance to graduate schools. But it’s not clear at all that professors or colleges should bend to that obsession either by further quantifying grades. Let grades be the problem of graduate schools trying to sort students or students trying to compete with each other. Our primary goal is teaching, and we need to ask ourselves whether grade inflation is a problem that interferes with that goal. In my experience, it’s not, but the obsession over grading is. We ought to think of ways we might limit that obsession rather than feeding into it.

Maps Of The Day

Many states not expanding Medicaid has denied millions of Americans healthcare:

More than three million people, many of them across the South, would now have health insurance through Medicaid, according to an Upshot analysis of data from Enroll America and Civis Analytics. The uninsured rate would be two percentage points lower.

Today, the odds of having health insurance are much lower for people living in Tennessee than in neighboring Kentucky, for example, and lower in Texas than in Arkansas. Sharp differences are seen outside the South, too. Maine, which didn’t expand Medicaid, has many more residents without insurance than neighboring New Hampshire. In a hypothetical world with a different Supreme Court ruling, those differences would be smoothed out.

Jonathan Cohn makes the economic argument for expanding Medicaid:

It’s easy to recognize the human toll of refusing to expand Medicaid. It’s not so easy to recognize the economic toll. Maybe this chart will help:

It comes from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute and looks at the implications of that state’s decision not to expand Medicaid eligibility, as the Affordable Care Act’s architects intended.

Josh Barro and Margot Sanger-Katz calculate that today’s elections “could decide whether as many as 1.3 million more people get health coverage in the years ahead”:

There are 15 governor’s races this year in states that have declined to expand their Medicaid programs as part of the Affordable Care Act. But we count only the five where the election is likely to make a difference. The races we’re watching are genuinely competitive and could result in a policy change if a Republican governor is replaced by a Democrat or an independent. We’re also keeping our eye on a sixth state, Arkansas, which has already expanded its program, but where the legislature has to reauthorize the program every year with a three-quarters majority, leaving the program vulnerable to political shifts.

Update from a reader:

In addition to the states in which the the governorship could change, here in North Carolina, Republican Governor Pat McCrory said this week that he is “assessing” whether to expand Medicaid here, after signing a bill last year that blocked its expansion with approval of the General Assembly. “Assessing” might sound like weak tea, but it’s actually a sea change given the tenor of the NC GOP these last couple of years. (I’ll leave it to the reader to infer why he’s floated this the week before an election, when it has mostly gone unnoticed in the local news.)

The Final Midterm Predictions

Silver gives Republicans a 76 percent chance of taking the Senate. But be prepared for a long night:

Even if Republicans win, the outcome may not be determined quickly. David Perdue, their candidate in Georgia, has gained in the polls — but the model still has the race going to a runoff about half the time. Louisiana will almost certainly require a runoff. Alaska’s vote may take days or weeks to count, as it has in the past. The FiveThirtyEight model — even with its optimistic forecast for Republicans overall — estimates there’s just a one in three chance that the election will be called for them on Tuesday night or early in the day on Wednesday. For Democrats, meanwhile, there’s almost no chance to win without going to “overtime;” the party will hope to extend the race for as long as possible.

There are two Republican wins, however, that could end the race quickly. Pay attention to races in North Carolina and New Hampshire. Both states have early poll-closing times (7:30 EST for North Carolina and 8:00 EST for New Hampshire) and a Republican win in either state would require Democrats to run the table in almost every other competitive race. But Republican wins would simultaneously indicate that the polls might be biased toward Democrats rather than against them, making a Democratic sweep the rest of the night very unlikely.

Cassidy’s guess is 53-47 for the GOP:

In a post on Friday, I pointed to evidence that late deciders appear to be breaking to the Republicans, particularly in the South. In states like Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana, that trend is clearly visible in the latest polls. Alarmingly for the Democrats, something similar may well be happening in Colorado and Iowa, two seats they currently hold. Of the ten battleground states, the Democrats’ best bets are now North Carolina and New Hampshire, where their candidates are holding on to narrow leads. Then there is Kansas, where the contest between Greg Orman, an independent businessman, and Pat Roberts, the three-term G.O.P. incumbent, remains a toss-up.

Sabato also forecasts 53-47. On the close races:

The Kansas race between embattled, weak Sen. Pat Roberts (R) and independent Greg Orman is perhaps the closest, most difficult-to-predict Senate race in the country. However, at the end of the day, a Republican has not lost a Senate race in this state since 1932. It may happen, but we just can’t pull the trigger and predict it. LEANS REPUBLICAN

We’ve been calling Georgia and Louisiana “Toss-up/Leans Runoff” in recent weeks because we expected both to eventually go to runoffs. Louisiana will, and Georgia might, but we now believe Republicans are favored to eventually win both. So we’re just going to call both LEANS REPUBLICAN going into Election Day: If both do in fact go to runoffs, then the Leans GOP ratings will apply, at least initially, to the overtime contests.

John Sides joins the chorus:

[W]hen we debuted Election Lab on May 5, we estimated at that point that the GOP had a 77 percent chance of winning and was predicted to win 53 seats. We predict 53 seats again today. The only change is that Michigan and Colorado are flipped relative to that earlier forecast.

Morrissey bets that a “Republican wave will run the table”:

And even if Republicans only manage to win six seats while not keeping Kansas, another dynamic will come into play, which is the desire to be part of a majority. Orman might end up caucusing with Republicans, although that seems temperamentally unlikely, but that’s not as true for Angus King of Maine. King endorsed Lamar Alexander in Tennessee last week, so he’s not hostile to the Republican caucus. If the GOP ends up with 51 or more seats, King may cut a deal to strengthen Republican numbers even further. Whether he’d do that in case the GOP wins only 50 seats is anyone’s guess, but the Maine Sun-Journal thinks that would be unlikely.

Waldman doesn’t expect a “wave,” much less a mandate, for the GOP:

If they manage to take the Senate, it will be because most of the incredibly close races this year tipped their way in the end. Which would undoubtedly be a victory, but it would be hard to argue that the GOP squeaking out wins in deep-red states in the South and adding a couple in swing states like Iowa or Colorado represents some huge shift in public sentiment. New polling data suggests that even if Republicans do take the Senate, we’re hardly looking at a “GOP wave.” The final pre-election poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal was released today, and it shows the two parties nearly deadlocked (46-45 in Republicans’ favor) in the generic ballot test among likely voters. Democratic voters’ interest in the campaign has risen to match Republicans’, and approval of the GOP as a party remains abysmal. There’s also evidence to suggest that turnout will be low.

Charlie Cook calculates that “a seven-seat gain would seem the most likely outcome for the GOP, with eight a bit more likely than six, but either highly possible.” What would qualify as a wave?:

The first test of the existence of a political wave is whether the benefiting party avoids losing many of its own endangered seats. The second is whether it wins an overwhelming number of the purple, competitive or, in this case, light blue Democratic-tilting but still endangered seats. So, if Republicans limit their own losses to just one of their own competitive seats (for example, Roberts in Kansas) and win at least three of the four key purple states (the open seat in Iowa and the three seats held by Democratic incumbents—Kay Hagan in North Carolina, Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Mark Udall in Colorado), that starts qualifying as a wave. Just winning one or two out of the four neutral-site contests might well help the GOP secure the majority, but it hardly qualifies as a wave. These are seats where it is the political environment and President Obama, not the map itself, that are the cause of Democratic pain. Obama carried all four states in both 2008 and 2012; losses in these would mean voters who voted for him have officially reversed course.

The third test of a real wave is the ability of a party to pull off real upsets, knocking off incumbents who were not on the lists of first- or second-tier vulnerable seats. If, for example, someone like Mark Warner in Virginia, Al Franken in Minnesota, or Jeff Merkley in Oregon were to lose, that would be a wave in the sense of 1980, 1994, 2006, or 2008. These years saw wins that were way more than just a result of the map. There now appears to be little chance that any of these three will lose their races.

Update from a reader:

Cook says that Obama carried Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Colorado in 2008 and 2012. This is not correct, as Mitt Romney won North Carolina in 2012.

The State Of The Race In Kansas

Last night a reader wrote from the Sunflower State about being “beaten to a pulp … on my phone”:

Hey Andrew & Co., I don’t know if you’re getting any traffic/messages on this, but the robocalls here in Kansas are incessant, demoralizing, and one-sided … at least if my experience, and the experiences of my friends and colleagues, are any sort of indicator. I have used my mobile device to record four calls today – to my office phone. I work at a state university here in Kansas. Pat Roberts has decided to beat people into submission. Here’s Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz [embedded above], and Dr. Milton Wolf (he was the biggest threat to Roberts during the primaries and was exposed for sharing autopsy photos on his Facebook account and blog … and making jokes about them).

Again, this is ONE WORK DAY … so far.

My message light has been blinking all morning, which means there are messages from the weekend and Friday night. I’m sure I have more. I averaged about one or two per evening last week, just before Halloween. Tim Huelskamp’s wife called one evening. I think that’s the only state candidate I’ve heard from – all the other calls have been stumping for Pat Roberts.

I can’t wait for Wednesday morning.

Join the club. Update from a reader with some crucial perspective:

I’ve worked on two Congressional campaigns and managed a state legislative campaign.

Every campaign manager with any sense knows robocalls have no effect whatsoever. This has been known, and proven over and over, for at least 10 years. Money quote:

Don Green, a political science professor at Yale, subjected robo-calls to 12 randomized experiments for his 2004 book “Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout.” The results, he says, were revealing. “These calls never raise voter turnout. They have no mobilization effect, and no persuasion effect either. What matters is whether they change the probability of voting, and robo-calls have proven they do not.”

Never. Raise. Turnout. No Persuasion Effect. Ever. Any campaign sending out even one robocall is wasting its money and hurting its own cause.

Previous reader dispatches from Massachusetts, South Dakota, and Texas.