"Pro-Trump users were about three times more likely to visit fake news sites supporting their candidate than Clinton partisans were to visit bogus sites promoting her."

So says a study done by 3 political scientists at Dartmouth College and reported in the NYT, in "‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests."

But how did they decide which sites were "fake news sites"? Does this "three times more likely" finding have more to do with the sort of mind that embraces Donald Trump or more to do with how they went about classifying websites as "fake news sites"?

The team defined a visited website as fake news if it posted at least two demonstrably false stories, as defined by economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow in research published last year. On 289 such sites, about 80 percent of bogus articles supported Mr. Trump.

Does that mean that there was more bogosity in support of Trump or that those doing the classifying were more likely to see bogosity when it supported Trump? Once there were more pro-Trump websites in the set of fake news sites, did that skew the finding that pro-Trumpers were 3 times more likely to visit fake news sites? There were more than 3 times as many pro-Trump sites as pro-Clinton sites (80%, not 75%), so perhaps means that pro-Trumpers were less likely to go to pro-Trump fake news sites that pro-Clinton people were to got to pro-Clinton sites.

And, by the way, I don't see how a website deserves to be called a "fake news site" just because it publishes "two demonstrably false stories." I'd assume that the most respected news sites, including the NYT, published "two demonstrably false stories." Or is "demonstrably" a technical term that works to exclude the kinds of falsities that make it into the Times? I know there were some blatantly made up things like Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump, so maybe that's what these researchers counted as "demonstrably false."

I know, I could read the older article by economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow to find out what definition of fake news was used in this newer study, but isn't it annoying that we're not just told the definition?! It's not as though there's any reason to believe that Allcott and Gentzkow nailed down the true meaning of fake.

Now, I actually am scanning Allcott/Gentzkow. They don't use the words "demonstrably false." Okay, here's the relevant text (boldface added):

We define “fake news” to be news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers. We focus on fake news articles that have political implications, with special attention to the 2016 US presidential elections. Our definition includes intentionally fabricated news articles, such as a widely shared article from the now-defunct website denverguardian.com with the headline, “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder-suicide.” It also includes many articles that originate on satirical websites but could be misunderstood as factual, especially when viewed in isolation on Twitter or Facebook feeds...

Our definition rules out several close cousins of fake news: 1) unintentional reporting mistakes, such as a recent incorrect report that Donald Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office in the White House; 2) rumors that do not originate from a particular news article; 3) conspiracy theories (these are, by definition, difficult to verify as true or false, and they are typically originated by people who believe them to be true); 4) satire that is unlikely to be misconstrued as factual; 5) false statements by politicians; and 6) reports that are slanted or misleading but not outright false (in the language of Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Stone 2016, fake news is “distortion,” not “filtering”).

If that's the definition, I'd say it's impossible to avoid subjectivity in making the classification. And the definition itself contains bias. For one thing, it's designed to get mainstream media off the hook. Anything false will be presumed to be "unintentional reporting mistakes."

But what matters more than whether people clicked through to various low-quality articles is whether they read competently and maintained their critical thinking. And critical thinking is even more important when the distortions and dishonesty of a website is outside of the Allcott/Gentzkow definition.

The NYT article about the Dartmouth study stresses that it found that "fake news paled in influence beside mainstream news coverage." But the kind of "fake news" that's in mainstream media is much more difficult to discern and defend yourself from than these outright fabrications and misunderstood satires that fit the Allcott/Gentzkow definition. I assume most people are learning how to spot crude and obvious fakery and not embarrass themselves by passing along stuff that their Facebook friends will tell them is satire or a fabrication. It takes a much high level of critical thinking to resist the "fake news" that's excluded from the Allcott/Gentzkow definition.

One more thing in the NYT article that I wanted to highlight: "Perhaps confusingly, moderately left-leaning people viewed more pro-Trump fake news than they did pro-Clinton fake news." I don't find that confusing. Just switch the term "pro-Trump" to "anti-Clinton" and it makes perfect sense. Lots of lefties were against Clinton.

Trend watch: under-edited stream-of-consciousness writing by stressed-out liberals.

I don't know if this is a trend, but I encountered 2 examples on the same day, so I want to set up a trend watch.

First, there's a Salon article by Paul Rosenberg that was linked at Real Clear Politics (even though it was the opposite of real clear). Both Meade and I (independently) clicked on the click-bait headline: "Why are these clowns winning? Secrets of the right-wing brain/Bush tanked the country. Now the right's again running the show. Neuroscience explains incompetence of all sides."

The photo at the top is a composite of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Scott Walker, but these people aren't even named in the article. Why they are "clowns" or why they won is not the topic.

I quickly skimmed, adjudged it junk, and left. But later that day, Meade called attention to it, and I, needing to rest my eyes, said: "Read it to me." And he did. He read the whole, huge thing out loud. It was an endless, meandering screed that seemed like the author's raw notes scribbled as he rifled through various books on academic theories of politics and brain function and talked to some scholar on the telephone. He dumps the full text of the email he sent to the scholar before the interview:

"Undercutting the president’s staff at a time of transition to a new majority is pretty outrageous."

"For Krone to do this and there’s no retribution? Unbelievable."

Said William M. Daley, Obama's former chief of staff, commenting on Harry Reid's top aide, David Krone, in the NYT article "Reid Unapologetic as Aide Steps on Toes, Including Obama’s."

Mr. Krone said he was simply protecting Mr. Reid. A few days before the midterm elections, he said, he was hearing from reporters that the White House was blaming the legislative strategy devised by him and Mr. Reid for the party’s lousy electoral prospects. “I’m going to go meet with these reporters,” Mr. Krone recalled telling Mr. Reid. “And he’s, like, ‘O.K.’ ”....

A few thoughts on reading the transcript of the President's immigration speech.

1. What, if anything, is really changing? Here's the deal:

If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes – you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily...

You have to register and the protection from deportation is only temporary? Who even wants this deal? The alternative is to continue as before, knowing that the government lacks the resources and will to deport you as long as you don't commit a crime other than the violation of immigration law. We, the citizens of the United States of America, are urged to picture this as "living in the shadows." But that "shadows" rhetoric — which appears 4 times in the speech — is aimed at us citizens. And I'm trying to think of a comparably dramatic replacement for "if you register." The word "register" appears in the speech once. Isn't there something ominous and oppressive about a government registry?

2. Overstated reactions to Obama's announcement of his pragmatic continuation of immigration enforcement make his opponents look extreme, and I think that was the idea. Didn't his party lose the elections earlier this month because the GOP had managed to mute its immoderate voices? The Democratic Party needs the Tea Party/Ted Cruz element to speak up, and Obama's speech built a nice stage upon which they can strut, declaim, and chew scenery.

3. Obama got to sound elevated and aspirational: "[O]ur tradition of welcoming immigrants... [has] kept us youthful, dynamic, and entrepreneurial... And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like..."

4. The speech is studded with conservative themes — not rewarding bad behavior, requiring people to take responsibility, keeping families together: Give people who want to "play by the rules" a way to "embrace... responsibilities."

5. On mentioning law, Obama proceeds to a double sleight of hand. Obama presents his independent action as a last resort, a temporary fix, while he waits on needed congressional action:

But until that happens, there are actions I have the legal authority to take as President – the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic and Republican Presidents before me.

Almost immediately after that statement, he intones the big generality "we are... a nation of laws," but that does not come in the context of explaining how he himself is following law that binds him. It's about the problem that "Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable – especially those who may be dangerous." See the 2 moves in that sleight of hand? First, he shifted away from presidential power to the law that the "undocumented workers" are violating, and second, he broke that group in two, separating the whole law-violating category into those who are only violating immigration law and those who are "dangerous" for some other reason. The next bit is:

That’s why, over the past six years, deportations of criminals are up 80 percent. And that’s why we’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mother who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day. 

So, those law-violating people who are not "dangerous" are completely good people who deserve our compassion. How does that fit with the idea that "they must be held accountable"? We're supposed to lose track of who's supposed to be held accountable and think that only the dangerous subgroup needs to be held to account.

6. Does the President ever return to the topic of his legal authority? No, but he does seem to refer back to the (nonexistent!) place in the speech that maybe listeners will blame themselves for forgetting:

The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican President and every single Democratic President for the past half century. 

Now, there is a legal argument for presidential power that is premised on "a systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned, engaged in by Presidents who have also sworn to uphold the Constitution." (That's a quote — from the famous steel seizure case — that I discussed here a few days ago). But Obama doesn't say he's using that argument. He doesn't say "The actions I’m taking are lawful because they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican President and every single Democratic President for the past half century." He says "not only" are his actions lawful, but they are also the kinds of actions that other Presidents have taken. The past practice of other Presidents comes as a reason to be persuaded that it's a good, practical, not immoderate policy.

7. Do past presidential actions establish either the legal authority or the good politics and policy of the President's proposed actions? I don't know! Obama only states a conclusion that there are all these other examples of the same kind of thing, but to assess any legal/political argument he might intend to be making, we'd need to study each example and make a sound judgment about whether it's parallel to what Obama is doing now. Let's say you buy into the proposition in that quote (in point #6) from the steel seizure case. That quote is from Felix Frankfurter's concurring opinion, and he took the trouble to examine past actions and decided that — other than 3 things FDR did in 1941 — they were not comparable.

8. Obama seems to claim a power to do what must be done even in a nonemergency.

And to those Members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.

First, we — and he — should always question a government official's authority, and it's absurd to accept the idea that Congress's only way to object to the abuse of power is through the passage of a law. Second, Obama's claim of power doesn't include the premise that we are in a position where it is necessary for action to be taken. He just wants "to make our immigration system work better"! That doesn't sound like an emergency, just a policy tweaking. And, as I said in point #1, I don't see how what he's doing changes things that much, not enough to be characterized as a fix to get us through an emergency until Congress gets its gears in motion. If I'm wrong, and Obama is doing a lot, creating a substantial new policy, that weakens his argument for legal power. But if I'm right, and he's not doing much, then what's all the prime-time to-do about? For an answer to that question, please refer to point #2.

9. He acknowledges the objections of some Americans, then insults them: "... I understand the disagreements held by many of you at home," but this is "about who we are as a country." You people are not who we are.

10. Religion! "Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger – we were strangers once, too." What scripture is that? I assume it's Matthew 25:35-40.

Mary Burke says she got "dragged through the mud" in the Wisconsin governor's race.

What mud? Hers was the campaign using swastikas. Scott Walker was doggedly positive. What is she talking about? The Wisconsin State Journal bolsters her assertion with this paragraph:

Critics accused her of copying campaign materials after parts of her jobs plan and other proposals included segments that were identical to those other Democratic candidates. And just days before the election, a pair of former Trek employees with conservative ties alleged that she had been fired from her family’s company, which was founded by her father.

That's mud? Trying to figure out the source of her jobs plan — upon which she relied heavily — and seeking to understand a gap in her professional résumé — the primary qualification she presented?

"O’Malley had been not-subtly hoping to spin a vague impression that he did a decent job running Maryland into a position as the guy the Democratic Party will turn to..."

"... when or if Hillary Clinton self-immolates. The total shellacking of O’Malley’s lieutenant governor and direct party heir makes the M.O.M. 2016 pitch a non-starter."

I find myself attracted to trifling stories this morning.

I got started with: "Cab company responsible for failed ride to airport, appeals court says."

Larry and Donna Peters... had sought damages of $5,225 for airline tickets, which had to be re-booked in a short time frame; $300 in ticket exchange fees; and $615 for hotel fees for the days they missed because of their late departure.

Small claims.  More smallness: "Hugh Jackman sliced the tip of his finger onstage during a preview of his Broadway show 'The River' Wednesday night":

A witness said the “Wolverine” star accidentally cut himself with a knife as he chopped a lemon around 30 minutes into the performance, and noticeably bled for an hour.

That caught my eye while I was reading the NY Post in an effort to learn exactly how the movie "The Social Network" hurt Mark Zuckerberg's feelings:

"They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found really hurtful. They made up this whole plot line about how I somehow decided to create Facebook to attract girls."

And he'd never even heard of an appletini.

I also felt drawn into the details of this 1912 brothel menu. Interesting, what 50¢ bought back then and the language used to convey the differences between the various services.

I don't know. Maybe it's the after-effects of the election. Everything was so big the other day. It was a wave election. No! It was a tsunami!! (There are "About 15,700 results" for the Google news search "tsunami election.")

Oh, shut up, all you blowhard commentators and pollsters who didn't know what was going to happen before that gigantic thing happened. Your post-show is pointless. I watched none of that last night.

I taught my law school class — about Christmas decorations — had a glass of wine in a café with a friend, watched the most boring episode of "Survivor" ever with Meade, and went to sleep at 10. Had a dream about going to a bookstore and lugging along an entire bookcase full of one's own books, as if the owned books needed to socialize with the unbought books. Woke up at 5 and started reading the above-mentioned stories on my iPhone in bed. Got into a conversation about the election and its aftermath again. Meade said: "I'm ready to love Obama." But to explain that is to get past the topic of this post, the attraction of trifling things.

"As the cable shows signed off last night, it was dawning even on the most conventional pundits that the Republicans had not elected an escadrille of Republican archangels..."

"... to descend upon Capitol Hill. It was more like a murder of angry crows. Joni Ernst is not a moderate. David Perdue is not a moderate. Thom Tillis is not a moderate. Cory Gardner -- who spiced up his victory by calling himself 'the tip of the spear' -- is not a moderate. Tom Cotton is not a moderate. And these were the people who flipped the Senate to the Republicans. In the reliably Republican states, Ben Sasse in Nebraska is not a moderate.  James Lankford in Oklahoma is not a moderate. He's a red-haired fanatic who believes that welfare causes school shootings. Several of these people -- most notably, Sasse and Ernst -- won Republican primaries specifically as Tea Partiers, defeating establishment candidates. The Republicans did not defeat the Tea Party. The Tea Party's ideas animated what happened on Tuesday night. What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net. They did nothing except send the Tea Party to finishing school."

Wrote Esquire's Charles P. Pierce, live-blogging the election results. I note that he called Scott Walker "the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin."

Yes, it's interesting to go back and relive Tuesday night from the perspective of someone who — we know in retrospect — is going to get deeply wounded.

A few stray observations about Pierce's style of humor:

1. Why is "red-haired" considered acceptable as an insult?

2. Why is it considered okay to call attention to what seems to be an eye disorder? Whether something is wrong with Scott Walker's eyes or not, the epithet "goggle-eyed" is disrespectful to all of the people who suffer from conditions like esotropia.

3. To speak of teaching the Tea Party "to wear shoes" is to try to be funny by evoking the stereotype of barefoot hillbillies. When will elite urban white people ever get the feeling that it's bigoted to mock rural white people? Oh, the answer is easy. You can find it in the book title "What's the matter with Kansas"? There's something wrong with these people as long as they fail to vote for Democrats.

(By the way, "escadrille" is how you say "squadron" or "small squadron" in French. I'll refrain from adding an anti-French kicker, given my attention to political correctness above.)

Get the transcript. What did Obama say about the elections of 2014?

Here's the transcript. (Video too if you've got the patience.) Man, it's long! I'm reading the whole thing, but what you see below are excerpts with my immediate reactions:

Obviously, Republicans had a good night. And they deserve credit for running good campaigns....

Obama is in his element in campaign mode, and so he understands what happened in terms of the capacity to campaign.

Beyond that, I’ll leave it to all of you and the professional pundits to pick through yesterday’s results. What stands out to me, though, is that the American people sent a message, one that they’ve sent for several elections now. They expect the people they elect to work as hard as they do. They expect us to focus on their ambitions and not ours. They want us to get the job done. All of us in both parties have a responsibility to address that sentiment....

What job? Nothing is preferable to the wrong thing. Who believes that we want government to do something, anything?

... So, the fact is, I still believe in what I said when I was first elected six years ago last night. All the maps plastered across our TV screens today and for all the cynics who say otherwise, I continue to believe we are simply more than just a collection of red and blue states. We are the United States. 

Yeah, and then he said "I won" and rammed through his own party's agenda, without even the support of a majority of us voters.

We can and we will make progress if we do it together.

I'm uneasy at the word "progress." It assumes the existence of a road and knowledge of where it leads. I see no reason to believe in President Obama's idea of "progress." America rejected it yesterday.

Wait. I was wrong. I'm not reading the whole thing. The questions and answers go on forever, and I've got a life to live.

ADDED: Before the election, Obama said his policies were on the ballot. Which policies? And why won't he acknowledge that those policies were rejected? Because he was bullshitting when he said the polities were on the ballot? If his people had won, he'd have claimed we endorsed those policies, that he had a mandate. So when the reverse happens, how can he evade the reverse meaning?

Scott Walker says he wants to "build the economy from ground up that’s new and fresh and organic."

"The difference between Washington and Wisconsin—the folks in Washington like this top-down approach that’s old and artificial and outdated and says that government knows best."

A quote from last night's victory speech, featured in a Slate article subtitled "Why no one can beat Scott Walker."

I like "fresh and organic" as a way to refer to free enterprise. That's new. Also quoted in the article is the old-fashioned rhetoric: "First off, I want to thank God.... I want to thank God for his abundant grace and mercy.... Win or lose, it is more than sufficient for each and every one of us."

Meade — who apparently watches me when I'm watching Scott Walker on television — says "I don't remember ever seeing you look so thrilled at something on TV." I appreciate sincere modesty and moral values, whether they are based in religion or not. And I appreciate it when I feel that a politician is speaking on that level and from the heart. And I'm saying that as a law professor who has taught Religion and the Constitution for over a decade and who really believes deeply in the separation of religion and government.

Ezra Klein has "9 takeaways from the 2014 election."

"1) The Democrats lost...."

I know Vox is about explaining things to people who are presumed to be newcomers in need of spoon-feeding, but come on!

And it's not as if the next 8 items get much more sophisticated. "2) The night had few bright spots for Democrats...."

"T]he average Senate poll conducted in the final three weeks of this year’s campaign overestimated the Democrat’s performance by 4 percentage points."

"The Democrats’ complaints may have been more sophisticated-seeming than the skewed polls' arguments made by Republicans in 2012. But in the end, they were just as wrong. The polls did have a strong bias this year — but it was toward Democrats and not against them...."

Says Nate Silver.

Now, he tells us. Isn't it his job to figure this sort of thing out before the elections?

"Berkeley election 2014: Voters pass historic soda tax..."

News from the left coast.

When Mitt Romney lost to Obama in 2012, commentators said the Republican Party was dead or ... or doomed to minority status for the next generation.

I don't think I'm misremembering, but I guess we were all supposed to have forgotten that by now. I wonder what equivalent nonsense I might be wasting my time consuming this morning.

Settle in and watch the returns roll in...

... here.

Who needs TV? TV is just for company. But you can find company here, where we can talk to each other.

UPDATE 1: McConnell has already won, according to CNN, where everyone is talking freakily fast.

UPDATE 2: It's all about Ed.

UPDATE 3:  Looks like I've lost my pick-an-upset bet, and Meade is going to win. (I bet Scott Brown, and Meade picked Thom Tillis.) As for Scott Walker, the prime concern here in Wisconsin, it looks like he's well ahead, but how much of the Madison and Milwaukee votes are in?

UPDATE 4: Ed is slipping.

UPDATE 5: One more GOP pickup needed now to take the Senate, Cory Gardner having won Colorado.

UPDATE 6: The race is called in Wisconsin. "It's over. We will stand with Governor Walker," says Meade.



UPDATE 7: We got in the car and drove up to the Capitol to check out whether there were any protests or celebrations. All was calm. We drove around the square, and I had to restrain Meade, who wanted to do the "This is what democracy looks like" horn beeping.

UPDATE 8: The view of the Capitol just now. [PHOTO MOVED TO THE NEW POST, ABOVE.]

UPDATE 9: The GOP gubernatorial candidate won in Illinois. And it looks like Tillis did win in North Carolina.

UPDATE 10: Joni!

UPDATE 11: Scott Brown finally concedes at midnight. So I lost the pick-an-upset bet, and Meade won. Still not clear if Meade wins the bet on Scott Walker, who must win with at least 53%.

UPDATE 12: Let's call it a wave.

I was surprised to see that this headline was for an article written by Thomas Frank.

"Righteous rage, impotent fury: Thomas Frank returns to Kansas to hunt the last days of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts."

That makes Thomas Frank sound insane and menacing, like he's the one with righteous rage and impotent fury. How else can you read that? And then "hunt the last days"? That sounds like the kind of language that people were resolving to avoid after the Tucson massacre. 

Predict an upset.

There are many ways to have fun watching the election returns, and one way it to place some bets. I've told you about the bet Meade and I have about the Wisconsin gubernatorial election, but yesterday I came up with another topic for betting. Predict an upset. This led to some boring discussion of what counts as an upset, and I came up with the boring idea that it's an upset if a candidate with a predicted 58% chance of winning loses. By this standard, in the Senate races, there can be no upset in Kansas, but all the other races have a predicted winner whose loss would be an upset.

So pick an upset to bet on. I picked Scott Brown to beat Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Meade picked Thom Tillis to beat Kay Hagan in North Carolina.

"Why 2014 Isn’t as Good as It Seems for the Republicans."

Amusingly lame NYT headline.

It's also kind of a conundrum. Two days before the election, the author is only in a position to tell us how good it seems. What's with the seeming and not seeming? Either he's saying: I'm right and those other people are wrong. Or maybe it's more subtle: My notion of "good" is much more nuanced than the notions of those who think the coming big blow-out victory for Republicans is actually good for them.

Here's why that headline isn't as good as it seems for the NYT: I don't really give a damn what the author (Nate Cohn) has to say in his drearily long essay. It looks like a holding pen for people with the sads.

What happened to that Democrats-regret-their-gender-politics article that topped the NYT page earlier this morning?

Drudge had it at the top of his page last night even before it was available on the NYT page, and it's still at the top of Drudge's left-hand column, with the teaser "NYT PAGE ONE: Dems second-guessing strategy of focusing on women's issues over economy... "

But try to find it on page 1 now. I had to do a word search on the page to find it in fine print under "more news," with the title "Democrats Count on Edge With Women to Limit Losses," which sounds like the opposite of what Drudge saw in the article.

Let's look at the article — which is by Jackie Calmes — and see what's actually in it.

Democrats are nervously counting on an enduring edge among female voters....

So that's the idea in the NYT headline.

Yet... some are second-guessing the party’s strategy of focusing more on issues like abortion and birth control than on jobs and the economy.

And that's the part Drudge extracted.

We get the opinions of a couple Democratic Party pollsters. Geoff Garin says: "If Democrats weren’t running on [issues like abortion and birth control], the situation would be much worse." And Anna Greenberg says: "It’s certainly true that we’d be doing better if we were doing better with women, but I do not see a disproportionate drop with women relative to men." That seems to mean Democrats are losing men at a faster pace than they are losing women. But Greenberg's comment, unlike Garin's, doesn't purport to know whether, overall, emphasis on the female body is a net benefit to Democrats.

All the way down in the second-to-last paragraph, Greenberg is quoted again. She's complaining that Republicans were "deliberately misconstruing" the Democrats' gender politics. She says the term "war on women" is a Republican term for what the Democrats are saying about Republicans.

Yet [Greenberg] and other Democratic strategists complain their party has not effectively espoused a broader economic agenda, when women tell pollsters their top concern is jobs and the economy.

And there's the Drudge take on the meaning of the article, buried at the bottom of the article, with no direct quotes and no names for the "other Democratic strategists" who, apparently, "complain."

IN THE COMMENTS: After Jake asked "Since when is 'War on Women' a Republican term?," chickelit "What does the venerable Althouse archive say? When did Althouse first pick up the term and in what context?" Back in 2012, I traced the present-day use of the term to a February 2011 NYT editorial, "The War on Women":

These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.

UPDATE: The "Democrats Count on Edge" story now — at 4 Eastern Time, November 1 — has no link on the front page at all, and when I got to the page of links on "U.S. Politics," I have to scroll down the space of 2 screens before I see the story. 

"The GOP’s chances of winning the Senate are 68.5 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast..."

"... its highest figure of the year."