Tag: Premium

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.

The Curious Case Of Zivotofsky v. Kerry

Since 1948, the US has declined to formally recognize Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem, maintaining that the final status of the city remains unsettled as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does. But in 2002, Congress passed a law regarding “United States policy with respect to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel”, which, among other provisions, permitted US citizens born in Jerusalem to have their place of birth listed as “Israel” on their passports. State Department policy is to list only “Jerusalem” without designating a country. Bush signed the legislation but issued a signing statement protesting that it interfered with his authority to conduct foreign policy.

Enter Menachem Zivotofsky, the plaintiff in Zivotofsky v. Kerry.

When Zivotofsky was born in Jerusalem shortly after the 2002 law was enacted, his parents requested “Israel” as the place of birth on his passport. The State Department denied the request, so the Zivotofskys went to court, arguing that State had violated the law. The government countered that the law infringed the president’s constitutional power to decide whether to recognize foreign nations. The DC Circuit first dismissed the case as a “political question” that the courts could not decide; SCOTUS reversed that decision and sent the case back to the circuit court, which ruled in the government’s favor. The family appealed, and the case is now before the Supremes for a second time. Amy Howe reviews Monday’s oral arguments, in which “lawyers for the two sides painted very different pictures of the potential effects of the law”:

Representing the United States, Solicitor General Don Verrilli told the Justices that the “question of the status of Jerusalem is the most vexing and volatile and difficult diplomatic issue that this nation has faced for decades.”  He cautioned the Court that upholding the statute would undermine the president’s credibility in the Middle East peace process, and he reminded the Justices that the passage of the law had prompted “mass demonstrations in Jerusalem, thousands of people in the streets, some turning violent.”

Alyza Lewin, representing Zivotofsky, downplayed the government’s warnings about the possibly dire international consequences of the law, dismissing them as “grossly exaggerated.” Eventually, she suggested, listing Israel as the birthplace on the passports of U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem would “become a non-issue.”  And Congress has the power to require the State Department to do so, she maintained, pursuant to its power to regulate passports.

Though he suspects that the amici curiae care more about whether the US recognizes Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem than about the separation-of-powers question at the heart of the case, Noah Feldman doesn’t buy Lewin’s argument:

Congress has indeed passed laws authorizing issuance of passports, and it’s not obvious that the world would shake if a handful of passports read “Israel” instead of Jerusalem. The problem is that the argument undercuts itself. After all, why is Zivotofsky bringing the case in the first place if not to make it appear that the U.S. has now recognized Jerusalem as part of Israel? Why, for that matter, did Congress pass the law if not to send that message?

In the real world, if the court held for Zivotofsky, it’s true that sophisticated observers would understand that Congress, not the president, had set the policy — but that would precisely reflect a conflict between the different branches of government, a circumstance that the Constitution for the most part has been interpreted to prohibit. Of course, it’s impossible for a tripartite government truly to speak with one voice on foreign affairs. But it’s definitely a goal toward which a rational constitutional system should aspire.

Jack Goldsmith favors the government’s position and urges the court to rule that Congress never had the authority to enact the 2002 law in the first place:

The beauty of ruling against petitioner on the basis of a lack of congressional power for the statute is that it allows the Court to avoid the super-hard problem of defining the contours of exclusive presidential power based on the vague and uncertain textual materials in Article II.  In other words, the Court can resolve the case, and mark off a narrow presidential power to determine what country should be designated on a passport, without reaching or discussing Article II (at least not discussing it very much), by focusing instead on the more precise terms of Article I.

And for you legal realists out there, this way of resolving the case satisfies two larger imperatives, somewhat in tension, that will certainly be in the back of the minds of many Justices: (1) not wanting to cross swords with the Executive on an important Middle East policy at a very fraught time of Middle East relations; and (2) not wanting to grant the president a large or vague exclusive presidential power related to recognition.

But Yishai Schwartz sees the case differently – as an opportunity to reassert Congress’s authority in international affairs:

Congressional supremacy is the basis of our entire constitutional system, and congressional oversight our best protection against tyranny. To be sure, a powerful executive, capable of acting against sudden threats and during periods of Congressional dysfunction (like now), is essential. Someone must fill the void. But allowing presidential discretion to become presidential supremacy undermines basic principles of democracy. In a democracy, after all, it is the people that are sovereign. It would be bizarre if their representatives, tasked with confirming treaties, regulating international trade and declaring war, had to bow to the president in smaller matters of foreign policy.

Dahlia Lithwick contends “that the worst-situated government agents to decide Mideast peace policies and whether what’s written on passports perhaps implicates Mideast peace policies, are the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court”:

Nobody is quite sure, after argument, which side will cobble together five votes, or for what. One thing that is certain is that even if the court wants to try to look neutral on the subject, it will have taken sides, in a massively consequential fashion. And while it’s always fascinating to hear the nine Justices bat about matters of foreign policy “Taiwan!” “Crimea!” “Barcelona!” the way they might do at a dinner party, it’s clear that dinner party knowledge is pretty much what they have to offer. And by deciding who the decider will be, at least on matters of foreign policy, even the neutral justices, aren’t.

Garrett Epps hopes the court rules clearly and decisively, noting that separation-of-powers cases can have surprisingly broad consequences:

Consider that a minor dispute over the sale of machine guns to Bolivia is still quoted today. That 1936 case, United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., provided the opportunity for Justice George Sutherland to proclaim (though the issue was not even present in the case) the “the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations”—language that presidents have relied on since in issues more important than Bolivian arms sales, most notably George W. Bush’s claim of unilateral authority to attack foreign nations without congressional authorization.

The GOP’s Lock On Congress

Chait declares that “Democrats stand almost no visible prospect of attaining a government majority”:

The structural advantages undergirding Republican control of both chambers of Congress are so imposing that only extraordinary circumstances could overwhelm them. Democrats managed, briefly, to gain control of Congress when the catastrophe of the Bush presidency created two successive national wave elections in their favor.

Only that sort of freakish event would suffice.

And Democrats might notice that, since winning back Congress requires a backlash against the president, their “positive” scenario requires first surrendering to Republicans’ total control of government. As long as Democrats hold the White House, Republican control of Congress is probably safe — at least for several election cycles to come.

The second conclusion is simpler, and more bracing: Hillary Clinton is the only thing standing between a Republican Party even more radical than George W. Bush’s version and unfettered control of American government.

But Suderman argues that last night was bad news for Clinton:

Knowing Clinton, she’ll likely attempt a tailored version of the strategy that Democrats in close races adopted this time around—positioning herself as separate from the president but not actively opposed to him. She’ll highlight the parts of policies that are widely liked, but acknowledge that many need to be fixed, tweaked, or updated—while providing as few specifics as possible about what those specifics should be. Indeed, to some extent, this is already the approach that Clinton has taken, vaguely moving away from Obama in ways designed to cause as little real friction as possible. She’ll be neither with Obama nor against him, emphasizing distance but not disagreement.

That awkward, fence-straddling approach led to some slightly ridiculous moments, and ultimately failed to work for Democrats in this year’s midterm. It’s not likely to work for Clinton (or any other Democratic nominee) in 2016 either.

“Amnesty” In Jeopardy?

Even though Press Secretary Josh Earnest swears the plan is still on, Yglesias expects the GOP wave to scuttle Obama’s promise to take executive action on immigration reform by the end of the year:

To see why, just think about the speech that the president would have given had he announced this initiative back in June. He would have said that immigration reform was a pressing problem. He would have praised the Senate for passing a bipartisan reform bill with an overwhelming majority behind it. He would have noted that the House of Representatives had refused to bring any kind of immigration legislation to the floor. He would have argued that the public was behind him, and made the humanitarian case for action, and flagged the business community’s desire for reform. He would have bemoaned Republican obstructionism. And he would have plowed ahead with a controversial expansion of executive authority.

His argument, in other words, would have been that House Republicans were obstructing something the public, the business community, and even a bipartisan majority of the Senate wanted. But can you really cry obstruction right after losing an election? Republicans are now able to claim not just that Obama was stretching his authority in a novel way, but doing so specifically to overturn an adverse result in the midterms.

With nothing left to lose, though, Allahpundit fears he’ll go all-in:

Obama has nothing to fear from voters anymore. Even in a worst-case scenario, where he issues the order and there’s a public backlash, Hillary and the rest of the 2016 crop are free to condemn him for it. “I support the president’s noble goal of bringing the undocumented out of the shadows,” she’ll say, in perfect left-speak, “but we need to let the people’s representatives work this out in Congress.” That’s a win/win answer, pandering to the Latino voters she needs in 2016 while distancing herself from O for the benefit of independents. And of course, amnesty fans who are grateful to Obama will end up expressing it by voting for her, notwithstanding her (tepid, phony) opposition to it.

Meanwhile, issuing the order would have some nice political benefits for Obama. It’d be his way of showing his deeply demoralized base that he’s not giving up on progressivism entirely, even if he ends up making a deal or two with the evil GOP. And it’d be a clever way to throw the new Republican Congress off-balance, putting Boehner and McConnell in the agonizing position of deciding whether to pander to their base by fiercely opposing the order or to pander to Latinos they’re wooing for 2016 by going easy on Obama over it.

Obama had delayed his promised executive action out of fear of making even more trouble for Democrats in the midterms, but Esther Yu-Hsi Lee observes that the delay might actually have hurt some candidates:

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) vacated his Senate seat for Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) on Tuesday night, setting off speculation that low Latino turnout was the cause. Advocacy groups like Presente and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) have actively called on Latinos, who were a decisive force in the 2012 election, to resist voting for Democrats out of anger that the President hadn’t acted on promised action. Despite Udall’s loss, a Latino Decisions poll found that Latino voters in Colorado still strongly favored him over Gardner by a 71 percent to 23 percent margin. On the campaign trial, Democratic House members like Rep. Joe Garcia (D-FL) were confronted by Latino voters who demanded to know why the party — including Obama — had done nothing on immigration reform. Garcia lost his race on Tuesday to Republican challenger Carlos Curbelo.

Adrian Carrasquillo takes a closer look at Colorado, where new polling data “supports advocates’ contention that Udall’s defeat may have had something to do with immigration”:

According to a Latino Decisions election poll that connected with 400 Latino voters in Colorado in English and Spanish, on cell phones and on landlines, voters were not well-informed on the distinctions on immigration stances between the two candidates. A Colorado advocate with knowledge of the poll set to be released Wednesday said only 46% of Latino voters said they knew Udall’s stance on immigration and beliefs on Gardner’s stance were all over the place, with 21% saying he supported a path to citizenship, 38% saying he opposed “comprehensive immigration reform,” and 20% saying they didn’t know his stance.

And while Latino voters did turn out for Udall — in slightly higher aggregate numbers, according to early figures, than they voted four years ago — their share of the vote didn’t rise as fast as some expected. (Latinos make up more than 20% of the population of Colorado, according to federal figures.) So while Udall won 71% of the Latino vote, according to Latino Decisions, he fell short of Obama’s 87% showing in 2012 and Michael Bennet’s 81% in 2010, with the lack of clear distinctions on immigration as part of the reason why.

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.

Mencken’s Kind Of Misanthropy

Hal Crowther wonders what made the famous journalist such a notorious grump:

It’s precarious trying to isolate, precisely, just what it was about his time that most infuriated Mencken. … An educated guess is that the thing he loathed most was optimism. Animal dish_mencken optimism — animal spirits — he endorsed and enjoyed. Food and drink, sexual attraction, good music (as he defined it), good company, and good conversation were essential to his well-being. This was no sour ascetic or life-denying hermit. What he detested was delusional optimism, as he saw it — organized religion with its promises of ecstatic afterlife, the cult of human progress, American exceptionalism, popular beliefs in the essential goodness of humankind and the benevolence of representative democracy. It was this doctrine of the Ascent of Man, of cultural, moral, spiritual, and supernatural uplift, that never failed to raise his hackles and provoke his most venomous rhetoric.

Crowther goes on to imagine what Mencken would have made of society today:

[I]f he were here today to instruct us, as was his habit, he would point to the dreadful symmetry of our follies as he chronicled and predicted them. We were on the winning side in two wars, and each of them was followed by Red Scares and communist witch hunts, the notorious Palmer Raids in 1919–1921, and the equally notorious reign of Senator Joe McCarthy after World War II. These paranoid periods were characterized by jingoism, censorship, grotesque hypocrisy, and the righteous suspension of most of the liberties of which America loves to boast. Mencken would have nodded his head, ruefully, at the Patriot Act and the war on terrorism with its constitution-defying domestic spying, all spawned by the bombings of September 2001. Coddle them and they love freedom, he would have said; kick them and they destroy it.

(Photo via Flickr user mistermencken)

How Off Were The Polls?

Wang does some calculations:

In close Senate races, Republicans outperformed polls by an average of 5.3 percentage points. Prime examples of that effect could be seen with Republican wins in Kansas and North Carolina, two races that went against pre-election polls.

In gubernatorial races, Republicans outperformed polls nearly 2 percentage points on average. This was enough to put Paul LePage of Maine (tied), Rick Scott of Florida (tied), and Bruce Rauner of Illinois (Quinn +2.0%) over the top.

Silver ponders these polling misses:

Poll BiasInterestingly, this year’s polls were not especially inaccurate. Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points — well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction. That reduces the benefit of aggregating or averaging different polls together. It’s crucially important for psephologists to recognize that the error in polls is often correlated. It’s correlated both within states (literally every nonpartisan poll called the Maryland governor’s race wrong, for example) and amongst them (misses often do come in the same direction in most or all close races across the country).

This is something we’ve studied a lot in constructing the FiveThirtyEight model, and it’s something we’ll take another look at before 2016. It may be that pollster “herding” — the tendency of polls to mirror one another’s results rather than being independent — has become a more pronounced problem. Polling aggregators, including FiveThirtyEight, may be contributing to it. A fly-by-night pollster using a dubious methodology can look up the FiveThirtyEight or Upshot or HuffPost Pollster or Real Clear Politics polling consensus and tweak their assumptions so as to match it — but sometimes the polling consensus is wrong.

Joshua Tucker speculates about why the polls were wrong:

We are living in an era where poll response rates are dropping precipitously, at least for traditional phone-based surveys. This point was dramatically illustrated in a recent Pew Report showing that response rates had fallen from 36 percent in 1997 to 9 percent in 2012.

… [T]here are good reasons to think it is harder to reach young people today using telephone surveys. But of course pollsters know this, and so adjust the weights of their surveys accordingly. But with fewer young people in their surveys — combined with the possibility that the young people you can reach by phone are not representative of young people generally — the work that has to be done by these weights grows. Now, not wanting to get a mistaken estimate because of this bias, I wonder if the polling overcompensated in terms of weights in this regard because of the voting patterns observed in the 2012 presidential elections.

Wang identifies a different culprit:

Recently it’s been suggested that the polling industry has struggled lately to reach a representative swath of voters. Low response rate, increasing use of mobile phones, and hard-to-reach demographics have all been cited as possible biases. However, those difficulties would tend to undersample Democratic voters, which was not the problem this year. Instead, inaccuracy may have come from what David Wasserman at The Cook Political Report called “epic turnout collapse” in 2014. And estimating the precise effects of turnout is an older, unsolved problem that looms large for pollsters in every midterm election.

A Reid Swayed By The Wind?

Ed Morrissey doesn’t see any reason for Senate Democrats to keep Harry Reid as their leader after last night’s defeat:

[T]wo members of Reid’s caucus already have reasons to switch sides, and keeping Reid around will almost guarantee that Republicans will pressure Mitch McConnell to make the Democratic wilderness as miserable as Reid made the Republican wilderness. If that happens, both Angus King and Joe Manchin will certainly bolt, and Democrats may face another round of key retirements in the next two years, which will eat into their ability to regain the majority in 2016. McConnell doesn’t have any incentive to make that situation on Reid any easier, and plenty of incentive to force Reid out. McConnell may want to return to normal order, but not with Reid across the table from him. If McConnell wants to play hardball, all he needs to do is insist that Democrats shun Reid entirely — no leadership position, no ranking-member position on committees — for the next two years, in exchange for returning to the pre-Reid Senate environment.

But Susan Ferrechio gets the sense that none of Reid’s colleagues are prepared to challenge him:

If Senate Democrats move to oust Reid, the likely successor would come from the lower ranks of the leadership. Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer of New York and Conference Secretary Patty Murray of Washington are among the Democrats who might vie for the post. But those who know Reid best say there probably won’t be a challenge, because Reid, a former boxer who rose to power from a small town in the Nevada desert, would be too tough to beat. “If a Democrat wants to take him on, then they should know they are in for a no-holds-barred fight,” Eric Herzik, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Examiner.

In any case, Roger Pilon bets Reid is wishing he hadn’t “gone nuclear” right about now:

And where will those remaining Democratic senators who voted for Harry Reid’s nuclear option be sitting? Why on the minority side, watching Republicans enjoy their newly acquired power to block controversial Democratic nominees by the vote of a mere majority—all because of Harry’s hubris. But it wasn’t Harry’s alone. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning, after his victory speech following his 2012 re-election, President Obama walked off the stage and made separate calls to Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic campaign chairman Steve Israel, telling them “he would spend the next two years helping Democrats retake the House in 2014.” In politics as in life, hubris has its price. We will now have a proper vetting of the president’s nominees, and that is good.

But Danny Vinik encourages Reid to play some hardball of his own and filibuster the shit out of everything, to give the Republicans a taste of their own medicine:

Reid has a history of supporting the filibuster when in the minority and criticizing it when in the majority. There’s no reason to expect that to change with McConnell as majority leader. And that’s a good thing. If Republicans are going to reap the political benefits of indiscriminant filibustering, then Democrats should do so as well.

The advantage of filibustering is that it allows a party to block progress without taking all of the blame for it, for the simple reason that most of the public—and, surprisingly, most of the media—don’t realize that filibusters are basically thwarting majority rule. Presidential vetoes, on the other hand, are easy for the public and media to understand and easy to appropriate blame. If Democrats relinquished the tool now, they’d give up a chance to make the same sort of gains. It’d be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.

A Bad Night For Personhood

Fetal personhood ballot measures were defeated by solid margins yesterday in two states:

In Colorado, Amendment 67 — which sought to update the state’s criminal code to define fetuses as children — failed by a large 64 percent to 36 percent margin. It marks the third time that Colorado voters have rejected personhood. Meanwhile, in North Dakota, an effort to overhaul the state’s constitution to protect “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development” looked like it was poised to pass. Personhood proponents were hopeful that the conservative state would hand them their first major victory, galvanizing the push for similarly restrictive laws in other states. But Amendment 1 was defeated by similarly wide margins as the initiative in Colorado.

Noting that voters have turned down personhood in five separate ballot initiatives since 2008, Kliff reminds us that nobody is really sure what effects these laws would have:

Because no state has ever granted personhood rights to unborn fetuses, it’s really unclear how any specific amendment would work in practice. This was especially true with the North Dakota amendment, which didn’t give any particular rights to fetuses but instead required “the right to life of every human being at any stage” to be “recognized and protected.”

Supporters of both the Colorado and North Dakota initiatives argued that existing protections would still allow for legal abortion. Roe v. Wade, for example, protects legal, elective abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Choose Life North Dakota said that protection supersedes any state laws. But opponents argued that the amendment was written too broadly and that personhood laws would make abortion illegal. The director of North Dakota’s only in vitro fertilization clinic said that he would close his practice if Measure 1 passed. Embryos are sometimes discarded in treatment, and his lawyer warned that the practice could put workers at risk of legal action.

Even major pro-life advocates are wary of such laws:

Large pro-life groups like Americans United for Life and the National Right to Life Committee have not endorsed personhood ballot initiatives. Part of this is politics: some worried that the amendments (which opponents call draconian abortion bans) will fail so badly they’re not worth the effort, and that they will only prove an embarrassment. And there are also some policy disagreements about what it would actually mean to give personhood rights to fetuses and whether that could have unintended consequences, such as disallowing certain types of birth control. This was what Colorado’s new senator, Cory Gardner, a Republican, was getting at in March when he withdrew his support for Amendment 67.

Marcotte is particularly relieved that Coloradans shot theirs down:

Since the law would have made it a matter of homicide to cause a miscarriage, it could have been used to prosecute women who had miscarriages by accusing them of somehow failing to do more to care for their fertilized egg babies. “If you get a prosecutor who wants to make a statement about unborn life,” Aya Gruber, a law professor at the University of Colorado told Politico, “Absolutely, you could have prosecutions for miscarriages. This law allows it. It allows it!”

At the same time, 53 percent of Tennesseean voters approved an amendment to their state constitution that will make it easier for lawmakers to place restrictions on abortion. Amelia Thompson-Deveaux calls the amendment “the culmination of 14 years of work” by pro-life advocates:

They began organizing in 2000 when the Tennessee Supreme Court struck down several abortion restrictions on the grounds that they violated women’s right to privacy. That decision has until now kept Tennessee from passing anti-abortion laws like the ones that have closed abortion clinics in neighboring states. It’s been an expensive fight — in the last three weeks of October alone, the amendment’s opponents spent more than $3.4 million. Now the protections that have shielded the state’s seven abortion clinics will disappear.

Landrieu The Longshot

Residents of Louisiana can expect another month of nonstop political ads:

Landrieu officials say they believe she can win given her history of consolidating support and beating her opponents in runoffs — in 1996 she was down by 11 points in the general election and went on to win by 1 point. In 2002, she was down by three points in the general election and won the runoff by 3 points. But the national political headwinds in this election could hurt her. President Barack Obama and his signature health care law remain largely highly in the state. Landrieu will have to bridge the racial divide to gin up support among whites, who have been unenthusiastic about her reelection bid, and rally a significant number of black voters to win.

Republican operatives have long thought their best chance at ousting Landrieu was through a runoff. A recent NBC/Marist poll showed that in a head-to-head match up Cassidy would get 50 percent of the vote while Landrieu is expected to draw just 45 to 46 percent.

Harry Enten doesn’t like Landrieu’s chances:

The problem for Landrieu is that Louisiana’s political environment in 2014 doesn’t look at all like it did in 2002. The state was only about 8 percentage points more Republican than the country in the 2000 presidential election. In the 2012 presidential election, it was about 21 percentage points more Republican than the nation. Moreover, the combined Democratic candidates’ vote in the 2002 Senate election in Louisiana was 47.9 percent versus 50.6 percent for the Republicans. In other words, it was a much closer primary than what occurred on Tuesday. If Landrieu is able to gain 3.8 percentage points in December, like she did in 2002, she’d still only take 47.3 percent of the vote in the runoff.

No matter how you look at it, Landrieu is in deep trouble in a month.

Nicholas Lemann notes that after yesterday’s elections, Landrieu is the only Democratic senator remaining in the Deep South. He mulls over this state of affairs:

To attract white votes, which winning statewide office necessarily entailed, a Democrat required either Olympic-level political skill (think of Bill Clinton in Arkansas) or the trust that comes from bearing a famous political-family name (think of Al Gore in Tennessee, or, almost, Michelle Nunn in Georgia, or, for that matter, Landrieu) or a powerful orientation toward delivering for the folks back home mixed with a partial disavowal of the national Democratic Party. Landrieu had all three in some measure, and still perceived every campaign as a political near-death experience.

Political realities can and do change. Formerly Confederate states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida are regularly capable of casting their electoral votes for Democratic Presidential nominees, and it’s not impossible that Tennessee, Arkansas, and Georgia might, as well. Even Louisiana went Democratic in the 1996 Presidential election. Those who care about how this goes in coming years should take note, though: if there is a future for Southern Democrats running statewide, it will belong to people who don’t get angry on television and who don’t yell at Republican Presidents or applaud Democratic ones. Republican candidates can get away with all of that; Democrats can’t.