Vox Sentences: Republicans, pot smokers, minimum wage workers, and other midterm winners

1. The winners

Senate Minority Leader US Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) answers questions during a press conference after it became clear his caucus won the Senate. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• Republicans will end the election with at least 52 Senate seats, at least 10 new seats in their House majority, and three net new governorships, while flipping a whole bunch of state legislatures. Click the link below for full results.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop, Danielle Kurtzleben, and German Lopez]

• Nine big takeaways from the election.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• The polls really underestimated how well the Republicans were going to do in Senate races.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Some beautiful, insanely detailed maps of Senate race from The Upshot.

  [NYT / Amanda Cox, Mike Bostock, Derek Watkins, and Shan Carter]

• A deep dive into the GOP strategy behind the win: "Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama."

  [Washington Post / Philip Rucker and Robert Costa]

• The GOP Senate wins are large enough that it'll be hard for Democrats to take it back in 2016.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Democrats control fewer state legislatures than they have since 1860.

  [National Conference of State Legislatures]

• One thing that the lame duck Congress will have to address (if something can pass that quickly): Obama's request for $6.2 billion to fight Ebola.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• The GOP victory makes Keystone XL approval significantly more likely.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Obama will probably still pursue executive action on immigration. Here's how.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Matt Lewis: Democrats' "war on women" rhetoric utterly failed.

  [The Week / Matt Lewis]

• National Review: Republicans shouldn't "prove they can govern" by cutting deals; they should put up legislation even if it won't pass to show voters what they stand for.

  [National Review]

• Jonathan Chait: "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."

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• Danny Vinik at The New Republic on how Democrats should respond: "If Republicans are going to reap the political benefits of indiscriminant filibustering, then Democrats should do so as well."

  [New Republic / Danny Vinik]

2. The voters

You can tell these are voting booths because it says "vote" on them. (Frederic J Brown / AFP / Getty)

• We don't have final numbers, but it looks like 2014 turnout is even lower than normal for midterms.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Carl Bialik and Reuben Fischer-Baum]

• As expected, many fewer Millennials voted than did in 2012, but senior citizen turnout was high even for a midterm, helping Republicans.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Defeated Democratic Sen. Mark Udall is a great example of why these demographics matter; he aggressively pursued women voters, and won them, but they made up a smaller share of the electorate than they have in any Colorado election since 1992.

  [Washington Post / Nia-Malika Henderson]

• Colorado and Oregon, which both only allow voting-by-mail, saw turnout pass 50 percent — a pretty impressive figure.

  [Taniel]

• There were tens of thousands of voting complaints.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• Republicans made really impressive gains among Asian Americans.

  [Bloomberg View / Lanhee Chen]

• But Democrats still have the Jewish vote locked up.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The shocking GOP win in the Maryland governor's race was because Democrats just didn't turn out and vote.

  [NYT / Derek Willis]

• Ramesh Ponnuru: the election shows that Obama's coalition is precarious

  [Bloomberg View / Ramesh Ponnuru]

3. The issues

Next season, on Portlandia ... (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

• Marijuana legalization passed in Oregon, Alaska, and DC (though DC's legalization doesn't cover sales, only possession).

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota approved minimum wage increases, but only Alaska and South Dakota had the foresight to automatically increase theirs in the future to account for inflation.

  [Vox / Danielle Kurtzleben]

• It was a bad night for the pro-life movement.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Other big referenda: a really important prison/criminal justice reform measure passed in California, and Washington approved stricter background checks for guns.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• FiveThirtyEight's Ben Casselman: "So voters want a higher minimum wage, legal pot, abortion access and GOP representation. Ok then."

  [Ben Casselman]

• How could voters back both Republicans and minimum wage initiatives? Josh Barro has a theory: "Most voters don’t live in households where anyone earns it, or are even close enough to it to get a raise when it goes up. If you ask people whether they favor a higher minimum wage, most will say yes, and even vote that way on a binding referendum. But if a politician opposes raising it, middle-class voters won’t necessarily get angry, and their votes may not be moved."

  [NYT / Josh Barro]

• Sorry, federal workers — DC may have legalized pot, but you're still banned from using it.

  [New Republic / Claire Groden]

4. Misc.

• Canada's blocking people from Ebola countries from entering. It's a bad idea.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Political donations, by the occupation of the donor.

  [Business Insider / Andy Kiersz and Hunter Walker]

• Disappointed by the military's response, vigilantes are fighting back against Boko Haram in Nigeria.

  [NYT Magazine / Alexis Okeowo]

• Linguists are trying to prevent the North Korean and South Koreans dialect from diverging too strongly, in case the countries reunite.

  [Agence France-Presse]

• What we know about how murderers use Facebook.

  [Washington Post / Caitlin Dewey]

• Dartmouth's faculty voted in favor of abolishing the college's infamous fraternity system.

  [Inside Higher Education]

• Happy birthday to Bryan Adams and Ryan Adams! (Yes, it's the same day.)

  [Stereogum / James Rettig]

5. Verbatim

• "What a wonderful time it is for the scammer, the conniver, and the cheat: the underage drinkers who flash fake I.D.s, the able-bodied adults who drive cars with handicapped license plates, the parents who use a phony address so that their child can attend a more desirable public school, the customers with eleven items who stand in the express lane."

  [New Yorker / Patricia Marx]

• "The only way to make progress is to use empirical methods to rip from the sea of the plausible the thing that actually matters. Otherwise we drown in storytelling."

  [Dan Kahan to Chronicle of Higher Education / Paul Voosen]

• "I’ve long thought that the marshmallow experiment is nearly universally misunderstood: kids wait for the marshmallow for exactly as long as it makes sense to them to wait."

  [mathbabe / Cathy O'Neil]

• "Vivien Thomas was paid a janitor's wage, never went to college, and still became a legend in the field of heart surgery."

  [Washingtonian via Longform.org / Katie McCabe]

• "Modern Farmer is not widely read by farmers."

  [New Yorker / Alec Wilkinson]