Now that Republicans are set to control both houses of Congress, the great question is: What will they do with it?

The message from Washington (and Louisville, Ky., where the incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell spoke) on Wednesday was of constructive desire to find areas for common ground. The question is what concrete legislation that might lead to, and whether it will dissolve the first time that concrete legislation makes its way to the Senate floor.

As we wrote earlier, moments like this — when a president in his final two years of an eight-year run faces a sharply hostile Congress — are certainly not when big, ideologically polarizing legislation is likely to be enacted. Republicans may have a comfortable majority in both the House and Senate, after all, but not enough votes to override a presidential veto. My colleague Carl Hulse reports that Republicans are eager to show they can be a governing party and seek to move legislation that many Congressional Democrats might object to but which Mr. Obama is likely to sign.

When there has meaningful lawmaking in this environment, it has tended to be on more below-the-radar issues in which the party leading Congress has greater enthusiasm. Analysts who try to handicap what will happen in Washington have been grappling with what, if anything, that might consist of in the 114th Congress, which begins in January. Here’s a rundown of the possibilities.

Keeping the government running.

Republicans will have to decide how aggressively they will use the need to fund the government to extract policy concessions from the Obama administration. Will these be the Republicans of 2011 through 2013, when a hard-edged approach culminated in a two-week government shutdown driven by demands that the president agree to a repeal of his signature health reform law?

Or will they be the Republicans of 2014, who presented themselves as a responsible governing party while looking to chip away at Obamacare and other White House priorities piece-by-piece and without a grand, disruptive showdown?

One way or another, the debt ceiling will need to be raised sometime in the first part of 2015 to prevent a government default, and deals will need to be made to continue funding the federal government without the high drama of standoffs like that over the debt ceiling in 2011, the “fiscal cliff” of late 2012 and the shutdown in 2013.

It will pit two sides of the G.O.P. against each other. One team of Republican leadership seeks to bolster the party’s brand in the run-up to 2016 elections and is responsive to business interests who prefer stability. The other is the harder-right contingent of the caucus that wants to try to shut down Obamacare at any cost. Presidential politics may come into play as well, as potential candidates like Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky push for a harder-edged approach than that preferred by the majority leader Mitch McConnell. (“Let me be clear: There will be no shutdowns and no default on the national debt,” Mr. McConnell said Wednesday in his appearance in Louisville).

Sean West, who heads the United States practice of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, argues that the odds of a return to disruptive showdowns of the recent past is only about 25 percent. “The Republicans have no incentives to play games,” he said. “They’re focused on looking like a party that can govern.”

A trade deal on the way?

The likelihood of a major trade deal with Pacific Rim nations is, if anything, higher after the Republican victory than before. The soon-to-be-former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and many other Democrats have been skeptical of further American trade agreements because of union opposition and a fear of the impact of continued globalization on American wages. The Obama administration has pursued the deals, viewing them both as positive for American exporters and as part of a geopolitical strategy of creating stronger ties with Asian nations that can counter Chinese influence.

So the Obama administration may have better luck with the Republican Senate than it would have with a Democrat-led chamber in obtaining passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping trade agreement with 11 countries stretching from Japan to New Zealand to Chile.

That said, there are many hurdles to getting a complicated deal done. They need to finesse a two-step process in which Mr. Obama first wins “trade promotion authority” to fast-track negotiations and then separately secures passage of a finished agreement, which has many moving parts. Early signs are that the Republican Congress could move on that authority early next year.

Republicans will probably demand greater heed to businesses’ wishes than the organized labor and environmental concerns that are priorities for Obama. And with just over two years left in his presidency, the clock is ticking.

A second trade agreement, with Europe, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is moving more slowly and will be even more challenging for Mr. Obama and congressional Republicans to enact in the coming two years.

Is it time to overhaul the corporate income tax?

The tax system for American corporations is, by all accounts, a mess. It places higher tax rates on businesses than most other advanced nations, yet raises less revenue relative to the economy thanks to a byzantine set of carve-outs and special deductions. It makes possible so-called corporate inversions, in which American firms cut their tax bill by buying a smaller company overseas and relocating their headquarters. The tax code hasn’t been systematically reformed since 1986.

In other words, it would seem ready made for a bipartisan compromise to cut the rate, cut the deductions, and make the system overall more fair and efficient. It is easy in theory to imagine a bill that a Republican Congress might pass that President Obama would happily sign. “The political noise on inversions obscures the broad similarity of the political parties’ approach to tax reform,” wrote Terry Haines, head of political analysis at ISI Evercore, in a report. “If anything, the continued inversions controversy continues to provide a powerful stimulus for both parties to address the fundamental noncompetitiveness of the U.S. tax code.”

The challenge is not the theory, but the practical dimensions.

Tax reform legislation is almost by definition a hard slog even when the parties broadly agree, pitting lobbyists for companies that win from the changes against those who would lose. Things are also complicated by Republicans’ desire to keep reform of the individual income tax code on the table as part of the process, with an eye toward reducing tax rates — most likely a nonstarter for Mr. Obama and other Democrats.

Some less likely policies.

There are other areas that superficially would seem to fit the model of a policy area where there is room for bipartisan compromise, but in which legislation appears unlikely to make it to President Obama’s desk before he leaves office.

First, immigration reform. Although the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill last year, it has been bogged down in the House as conservative members object to what they see as amnesty for illegal immigrants. While the bill, or one like it, has strong support in the business community, as a practical matter it’s not clear that anything has happened that would change that dynamic. If anything, Congress has become more conservative.

Second, housing finance reform. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been under government control since 2008, leaving the government managing a vast proportion of the mortgage market.

But Democrats and Republicans remain far apart on how much government support should exist for home lending in any deal, and neither side shows much interest in compromising. Throw in the fact that the status quo is working O.K., making a lot of money for taxpayers and keeping a flow of cheap money into housing that makes the politically powerful real estate industry happy, and it’s not clear what would force a compromise.

Given those realities, writes Brian Gardner, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, a financial services consultancy, “we remain confident that mortgage finance legislation is unlikely to pass Congress until 2017 at the earliest.”

That’s what everyone wants to hear: confidence in Washington.

Tuesday night, Joni Ernst of Iowa won her Senate race, and in her acceptance speech she said she was going to go to Washington and “make 'em squeal!” The line referred to her famous hog-castration campaign ad, “Squeal,” which introduced her as a Senate candidate to the state and the nation almost eight months ago.

Political advertising — when done well — can shape a race. And although candidates in these midterm elections were all facing the same national trends and challenges, they made unique connections with voters through ads. Whether positive or negative, the success of the ads depended as much on how they connected the candidate to the voters as on how they framed the opponent.

One fundamental goal of candidates is to convey to voters that they are “just like you.” Mrs. Ernst did this by highlighting things like working with hogs on an Iowa farm and making biscuits at Hardee’s. Her Iowa roots suggested an authenticity to which other Iowans would respond.

Mrs. Ernst’s early ads were about castrating hogs on a farm, but in the last two weeks, according to data on advertising from Kantar/CMAG, the theme of her ads shifted. They became focused on government spending, the budget and taxes. More than 80 percent of her final advertising was promotional and positive. She rarely attacked anyone in the final stretch of the campaign.

In contrast with Mrs. Ernst’s mainly promotional end game, in Kansas nearly 80 percent of the ads from Pat Roberts, the incumbent Republican senator, were negative — and all of them were about President Obama. Kansas was the most negative race for Senate in the country in the last two weeks of the campaign.

The strange thing about Mr. Roberts attacking his opponent by running ads about Mr. Obama’s incompetence is that the candidate running against Mr. Roberts was not even a Democrat. Greg Orman ran as an independent. Yet Mr. Roberts successfully ran against him by attacking Mr. Obama’s handling of such things as health care and financial regulations. Like Mrs. Ernst’s approach, this strategy worked, but for different reasons.

Attack advertising is not subtle, but one aspect of it is: It not only works to define the target of the attack, but it also implicitly defines the sponsor. When a candidate attacks his opponent for liking chocolate ice cream, the implication is that the sponsor likes vanilla. Mr. Roberts defined himself as being different from Mr. Obama by attacking the president’s policies in his ads, even though his opponent was not a member of the president’s party.

But Mr. Roberts’s strategy did more than define him politically. It may also have helped him implicitly make a connection with voters. As Tuesday night’s exit polls showed, a good portion of the electorate is displeased with the direction of the country, and more people disapprove of Mr. Obama’s handling of his job than approve.

Coming out as someone who is disappointed in the president’s performance in office is just another way that Mr. Roberts conveys that he is “just like you.”

How did Larry Hogan, a Republican commercial real estate broker who had never run for office, pull off such an upset in Maryland’s governor race on Tuesday? By benefiting from a huge drop-off in Democratic turnout in the state’s largest population centers and winning big where it counts for Republicans.

The path to a Republican victory in what is usually a Democratic stronghold begins with holding down the margins in Democrat-rich Baltimore and in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. That was exactly what happened on Tuesday night. Although Anthony Brown, the Democratic candidate, won Baltimore with 75 percent of the vote, Prince George’s with 84 percent and Montgomery with 62 percent, his vote totals were far off from the 2010 election, when the Democrat Martin O’Malley won his second term as governor.

Mr. O’Malley won 189,304 more votes than Mr. Brown in the five largest jurisdictions (Montgomery, Prince George’s and Baltimore, and Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties). That’s 18 percent of the 2010 Democratic governor’s vote that did not turn up for Mr. Brown this year.

It was even worse for Mr. Brown, the state’s current lieutenant governor, in Montgomery County: His vote total was 47,000 less than Mr. O’Malley’s in 2010, but he also ran behind other statewide Democrats this year in the county, which is home to wealthy Washington suburbs. Both Peter Franchot, the state comptroller, and Brian Frosh, who was elected attorney general, garnered at least 12,000 more votes in Montgomery County than Mr. Brown, who would have been Maryland’s first African-American governor.

In Prince George’s County, another area adjacent to Washington, Mr. Hogan’s vote total was slightly larger than that notched by Bob Ehrlich, the Republican candidate for governor in 2010, but that wasn’t the difference. Mr. Brown underperformed by 28,000 votes compared with Mr. O’Malley — especially surprising because Prince George’s has a black majority and is home to Mr. Brown. It may not have hurt with some voters that Mr. Hogan’s father, Lawrence Hogan Sr., served as a congressman and county executive of Prince George’s, but that was in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Mr. Hogan cemented his victory by winning big in Baltimore County (just outside the city), where statewide Republicans have done well in the past, and in Anne Arundel County, site of the state capital, Annapolis. Mr. Hogan beat Mr. Brown by more than 20 points in Baltimore County; in 2010, Mr. O’Malley tied his Republican opponent there. Mr. Hogan won Anne Arundel with two-thirds of the vote.

Finally, Mr. Hogan ran up the margin in Maryland’s rural areas. While not particularly populous, the areas outside Baltimore and the Washington suburbs are the most sympathetic to Republicans, and Mr. Hogan dominated them. He polled ahead of Mr. Ehrlich in every one of these counties (in fact, in all Maryland jurisdictions, including Baltimore).

Overall turnout for the governor’s race was down 11 percent from 2010, yet Mr. Hogan’s vote totals were on par with Mr. Ehrlich’s or exceeded them in most parts of the state. In Allegheny County, in Maryland’s western panhandle, Mr. Hogan won 14,850 votes, slightly more than Mr. Ehrlich did four years ago. But the drop-off from Mr. O’Malley to Mr. Brown was more precipitous: Mr. O’Malley got 7,933 votes in Allegheny in 2010, compared with Mr. Brown’s 4,363 this year.

That pattern repeated itself all over the state, as some Democrats either opted for Mr. Hogan or did not vote at all. In a stinging rebuke, even Howard County, the home of Mr. Brown’s running mate, Ken Ulman, flipped to Mr. Hogan this year, helping to bring divided government (the Democrats still control both houses of the legislature) to Maryland’s statehouse for the first time since 2006.

Yesterday’s elections provide further ammunition for the idea that we should pay less attention to polls of voters’ intentions, and more to polls asking them who they think will win.

It’s an idea supported by work that I’ve done with my former graduate student David Rothschild of Microsoft Research. And surveys of voters’ expectations have become a key tool in our election forecasting arsenal here at The Upshot. So far, the evidence points to that being a good choice.

Our analysis suggests that surveys of voters’ expectations were, once again, more accurate than the standard survey of voters’ intentions most often used by pollsters.

The evidence for this claim comes from a New York Times/CBS News/YouGov poll of about 100,000 likely voters taken in mid- to late October. I’m zeroing in on this poll in particular because it was the only one to systematically ask voters both who they thought would win in their state, and whom they intended to vote for. This allows for particularly clean comparisons, as measures of voters’ expectations and intentions are based upon the exact same people answering the exact same survey, with the only difference being the set of answers analyzed.

The norm among most election-watchers is to focus almost exclusively on whom voters say they intend to support. However, this focus led to three missed calls in Senate races, as surveys of voters’ intentions suggested (wrongly) that the Democrats would win in Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina. For sure, some polls did a little better, and some did a little worse, but this performance is roughly representative of the state of public opinion three weeks ago. Statistical models, like Leo and its competitors, are also largely based on polls of voters’ intentions, and so they too made similar projections in mid-October.

By contrast, if you focused instead on whom voters thought likely to win, you would have correctly picked the Republican, Cory Gardner, to beat the incumbent Democrat in Colorado, and you would have been even more confident in forecasting victory for Joni Ernst, the Republican in Iowa, who won handily.

Why is this true? Asking voters about their expectations allows them to reflect on everything they know about the race — which way they currently intend to vote, how likely they are to vote, whether they’re persuadable, the voting intentions of their friends and neighbors, and their observations about bumper stickers, yard signs, the resonance of a candidate’s message and the momentum they sense in their communities. By contrast, asking voters only about their intentions leaves this other knowledge untapped.

All told, surveys of voters’ expectations picked the Senate winner in every state except one. More impressively, they did so three weeks ago. The one miss was in North Carolina, where both the questions asking about voters’ expectations and their intentions narrowly but wrongly suggested that the Democratic incumbent, Kay Hagan, would beat the Republican challenger, Thom Tillis. (Also, neither polls of voters’ expectations nor their intentions saw any hint that the Virginia Democrat, Mark Warner, would face such a difficult fight for re-election.)

Moreover, voters’ expectations yielded fewer false signals. For instance, while pollsters analyzing voters’ intentions had suggested that both Kansas and Kentucky might yield competitive Senate races, voters were confident that the Republicans would win both races easily. And they were right.

Surveys of voters’ expectations outperformed those of voters’ intentions by an even greater margin in governors’ races.

Five Republican candidates — in Massachusetts, Michigan, Maine, Illinois and Maryland — won governorships despite being behind in the polls of voters’ intentions, and an independent candidate who also trailed in those polls, Bill Walker, was ahead in Alaska.

But the surveys of voters’ expectations did forecast Mr. Walker’s lead, and the victories notched by the Republican incumbents Rick Snyder of Michigan and Paul LePage of Maine.

In other words, surveys of voters’ intentions missed the outcomes of governors’ races in six states, while the exact same survey focusing on voters’ expectations missed in only three.

Perhaps the most interesting case study here is the Alaska governor’s race, where most voters expected Mr. Walker to win, despite polls of voters intentions saying otherwise. The poor showing of standard polls there had been foreshadowed by various analysts, who argued that it is a difficult state to survey accurately. It is no surprise, then, to learn that Alaska voters know themselves better than the pollsters do.

Alaska is also particularly interesting, because it represents the leading edge of the problem that all pollsters face. Generating representative samples in an era of high cellphone penetration, low response rates, and demographic and linguistic diversity are increasingly the problems they will face in the mainland United States, too.

As it becomes harder for pollsters to take the pulse of the electorate, perhaps we should ask the voters to take it instead.

Conservatives in the next House of Representatives will be more conservative and its liberals more liberal.

The Upshot calculated changes between this Congress and the one that will be seated in January using an ideological measure developed by Crowdpac, a site that tries to match voters to candidates who fit their issues based on campaign contributions, votes and statements.

It makes sense that more Republicans in the House would yield a more conservative House over all. But an expanded conservative majority doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will get whatever they want. There were times in the current Congress when House leaders struggled to advance legislation that enjoyed bipartisan support but faced opposition from many of the most conservative lawmakers. In some cases, House Speaker John Boehner relied on Democratic votes to pass legislation that a majority of Republicans opposed.

More conservative members can be expected to produce more conservative legislation that would pass the House, particularly with a Republican-led Senate in place next year. But it also could force some of the new Republicans who won previously Democratic seats to take tough votes that could be used against them in the 2016 campaign.

For Democrats, a more liberal caucus, and the loss of moderate and conservative Democrats who routinely provided votes for Republican bills, could make it harder for House leaders to construct legislation designed to attract Democratic support. The dozens of votes the House has held to repeal or defund all or parts of the Affordable Care Act usually picked up some Democratic votes, but many of the people who did so will be gone in 2015.

The Crowdpac scores are on a scale of negative 10 for most liberal to 10 for most conservative. Even with 14 seats still remaining to be decided in the 435-member body, the average score for current or previous lawmakers in all House districts where results were known on Wednesday morning was 0.72, or marginally conservative. For the incoming members it was 1.05.

In 12 of the 20 seats where a retiring Republican is being replaced by another Republican, the incoming lawmaker is more conservative, according to Crowdpac. In three Georgia House districts where incumbents decided to enter the Republican primary for an open Senate seat, two were replaced by candidates judged more conservative ideologically by Crowdpac.

The biggest ideological changes came in districts where a Democrat was being replaced by a Republican, or vice versa. In Iowa, the Democrat Bruce Braley’s failed bid for the Senate opened his House seat, which was won by Rod Blum, a Republican businessman from Dubuque. The gap between Mr. Braley’s ideological score, -6.8, and Mr. Blum’s, 8.5, is the largest of any district. But even in open seats where the party retained control, the movement was toward the ideological margins.

The movement toward the extremes is clearer in some House districts where a long-serving lawmaker retired in a safe seat. In Wisconsin’s Sixth district, the Republican Tom Petri is being replaced by Glenn Grothman, who is one of the most conservative candidates elected to the new House, according to Crowdpac.

The movement in districts where Democrats retired and were replaced by Democrats is smaller. That’s the case in Hawaii’s First District, where Colleen Hanabusa’s replacement, Mark Takai, has a Crowdpac score of -6.9, more liberal than Ms. Hanabusa’s -6.1.

A president in the final two years of an eight-year run in the White House. Congress held by an opposing party that loathes the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A staff that is depleted and exhausted by six-plus years of governing.

That is the situation that Barack Obama will face in the final two years of his presidency, with, we learned Tuesday, a Congress now controlled by Republicans in both houses. But it is not particularly uncommon. Three times in the last 30 years it has occurred: with Ronald Reagan in 1987 and 1988, Bill Clinton in 1999 and 2000, and George W. Bush in 2007 and 2008.

So what can we learn about what Mr. Obama — and the country — is in for these next two years? The president has wide latitude to lead foreign policy, but in the domestic sphere achievement generally means getting Congress to pass laws he is willing to sign. So is this destined to be a time of partisan rancor and little accomplishment? Or could there be room for some actual, gulp, lawmaking, in contrast with the last couple of years in which no major legislation has found its way to the president’s desk?

The historical record actually points to some intriguing possibilities for pragmatic action if President Obama is able to put aside his own ambitions and vision and find some less polarizing, below-the-radar issues where Republicans are more eager for change than his Democratic allies.

As you might guess, those historical episodes offer no reason to think that the president has any hope of signing major legislation of his own initiative and design. It’s hard to imagine anyone would dare tackle something like immigration reform, which has attracted bipartisan support in the past but is the subject of a deeply polarized political debate.

Instead, the kinds of legislation that are passed during the tail end of two-term presidencies usually fall into two buckets: things that were forced upon Congress by emergency circumstances; and things that were more eagerly supported by members of the opposition than the president’s own party.

When Democrats took charge of both houses of Congress after the 2006 elections, George W. Bush’s popularity was already in a deep dive amid debacles around the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and an early second-term effort to add private accounts to Social Security.

But even a domestic policy initiative that both the president and Congressional Democrats were enthusiastic about, immigration reform, didn’t go anywhere. Republicans in Congress revolted and President Bush no longer had the clout to bring them on board.

Even though the table, in theory, seemed nicely set for a bipartisan achievement that might have helped George W. Bush’s standing in history, the actual realities of being an unpopular president in the back end of eight years in the Oval Office meant that it wasn’t to be.

By contrast, the domestic legislation that did come out of Mr. Bush’s final two years was of the emergency response variety. The financial system and the economy began teetering in late 2007. The Bush administration pushed — and Democratic leaders agreed to with varying degrees of enthusiasm — a fiscal stimulus package in early 2008; a reform of the law overseeing the housing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that summer; and, most controversially, the $700 billion bank bailout bill known as TARP in the fall.

There was little enthusiasm among Democrats for the enterprise. But there was a feeling that they had to act simply because the consequences of not doing so would be too grave.

We can all hope that the remainder of the Obama administration will not feature a global financial crisis or other emergency situation that might make Republicans willing to approve laws they would otherwise despise. So what kind of lawmaking is possible in more normal circumstances? A common thread is that the president embraced policies that the president’s party felt ambivalent about at best.

After the 106th Congress took office in January 1999, it moved to hold an impeachment trial of Mr. Clinton, hardly an auspicious beginning for a productive relationship. But there actually were a couple of significant bills that wound up becoming law.

In November 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to deregulate the financial industry, which among other things freed large banks from Depression-era rules preventing securities firms and commercial banks from being part of the same company.

The bill, which many view as a contributor to the deregulatory fervor that helped leave banks vulnerable to the financial crisis nine years later, was strongly supported by the banking industry and business groups. While it received overwhelming support from both parties, to the degree there were objections, they were on the left, not the right. The bill, for example, received “yes” votes from all but five Republican members of the House and all but one Republican in the Senate; 51 House Democrats and seven Senate Democrats voted against it.

The pattern was even more pronounced with another law of Mr. Clinton’s late second term that stands out for being consequential. In 2000, he signed a law that permanently normalized trade relations with China. It opened an era in which China has become more integrated into the global economy. At the time, business interests eagerly sought the deal to gain better access to the fast-growing Chinese market. But labor and human rights groups were opposed, since they thought it could mean opening American workers to more low-wage competition and leave the United States with fewer levers to encourage the Chinese government to respect human rights.

It was an even more lopsided vote than the one for financial deregulation, with 70 percent of House Republicans voting “yes” and only 29 percent of House Democrats doing the same.

By the final two years of the Clinton presidency, dreams of a single-payer health care were a distant memory, but he was able to get things done by going along with policies that annoyed some allies but were supported by the more pro-business wing of the Democratic coalition.

A close analogue occurred near the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. With the Iran-contra affair swirling and late-administration fatigue setting in, there was little meaningful domestic policy in 1987 and 1988. One key exception was the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a broad law that included job training, food stamps, mental health treatment and more.

Activists had long sought something along these lines, while conservatives had urged local responses and expressed no desire to expand federal social welfare programs. But amid a spate of attention focused on homelessness nationwide, Mr. Reagan set aside ideology and signed the law in July 1987.

As Mr. Obama plots how he hopes to spend the remainder of his presidency, the lessons from these three periods carry one combined message: What will prove to be in the realm of possibility in domestic lawmaking depends less on what you might want to do, and more on what circumstance puts in front of you that you are willing to sign your name to.

Democrats have greatly misunderstood the politics of the minimum wage in a way that hurt them in the 2014 elections.

They’re right about one big thing: Minimum wage increases are popular, at least to modest levels under $10, even in red states where Republican lawmakers have blocked them. Voters in four red states voted on minimum wage increases Tuesday and they all passed, three of them by wide margins. If what Democrats want is a higher minimum wage, they can keep putting the issue on ballots and most likely keep getting their wish.

What fights over the minimum wage did not do is deliver any advantage to Democratic candidates for office. Perhaps the best example of this comes from Illinois. The state has a Democratic governor and a Democratic-held legislature. If Democrats wanted to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour from its current $8.25, they could have.

Instead, they put an advisory question on the ballot, asking voters for nonbinding guidance about whether the minimum wage should be $10. The idea was to fire up liberal voters by asking about popular Democratic positions; the ballot also included nonbinding questions about taxing millionaires to pay for education and requiring health plans to cover contraception.

All the nonbinding questions passed by wide margins. And the electorate that voted with liberals on the issue questions simultaneously rejected Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, in favor of his Republican challenger, Bruce Rauner, who has mused about cutting the state’s minimum wage. (Mr. Rauner also opposes a millionaire’s tax.)

Here’s the thing about the minimum wage: 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.

The lesson of Tuesday’s minimum wage votes is that Democrats can do more on the minimum wage, not that they can help themselves politically by talking about it more. Just because a proposal is popular does not mean it can be a keystone in your economic agenda. As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones has noted, Democrats have an economic agenda that is heavily attuned to the poor; it’s much less clear what they would do for the middle class.

Many policies that help the poor are favored by the middle class. But if politicians want to win the votes of the middle class, they have to campaign on issues that affect them directly. Minimum wage increases do not serve that political end.

In places where the uninsured rate plummeted this year, Republicans still scored big electoral victories.

Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia — states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance — all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates flipped from Democrats to Republicans. And Arkansas elected Republican supermajorities to both houses of its legislature along with a Republican governor, a situation that could imperil the Medicaid expansion that helped more than 200,000 of its poorest residents get health insurance.

That places that benefited most from the law still supported politicians who oppose it should not be a surprise. Republicans were the favorites in many of these races, and polling has shown that health reform had faded as a decisive issue for many voters. Counties that showed the biggest gains in insurance coverage were more likely to be strongly Republican-leaning than Democratic based on their 2012 presidential votes, according to an Upshot analysis of data from Enroll America and Civis Analytics. That pattern appears to have held.

My colleague Abby Goodnough reported from Kentucky in September and found people who were pleased by their new coverage under the law remained unhappy with the Democrats who passed it.

“Born and raised Republican,” Robin Evans, an eBay warehouse packer who was grateful for new Medicaid coverage, said of herself. “I ain’t planning on changing now.”

On Tuesday, voters in five states considered proposals to significantly expand legal gambling and approved three of them. The two defeated proposals, in California and Colorado, had something in common: They faced strong opposition bankrolled by gambling operators that would have competed with the newly authorized gambling.

Voters in Massachusetts ratified a plan, approved by the legislature, for three full-service casinos. South Dakotans voted to allow existing casinos in the Old West town of Deadwood City to offer more games, including roulette and craps. Rhode Islanders voted 57 to 43 to add table games to an existing racino in Newport — but that won’t happen because city voters, whose approval was also required, rejected the plan.

(A total of eight states voted on gambling questions, including Kansas, South Carolina and Tennessee, which approved proposals by wide margins to authorize raffles and lotteries held by nonprofit organizations.)

The approvals, including the moot statewide vote in Rhode Island, are part of a strange trend. States have gradually expanded legal gambling over the last four decades as a way to generate revenue without unpopular tax increases. But large parts of the American market are now saturated, with revenue in decline in most major casino markets. A majority of Americans already live relatively near casinos, so opening new ones does more to shift revenue around than to generate new business. As supply has outpaced demand, some casinos are closing, and governments have missed their projections for gambling-related revenue.

Rather than discouraging states from expanding gambling, in many cases this phenomenon has encouraged them. After all, if you don’t expand gambling, you stand to lose existing revenue to your eagerly expanding neighbors. A key argument for Massachusetts casinos is that many residents gamble at Indian casinos in Connecticut, spilling revenue across the border. Rhode Island’s casino expansion was sold as a defensive move against Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Where this cannibalization crosses state lines, voters have tended to expand gambling. But in California and Colorado, it would have occurred within the state. California voters rejected an Indian gambling compact that would have allowed a new casino in the Central Valley, which was contentious partly because the operating tribe bought land far from its ancestral reservation to build it. A tribe with a nearby casino was a leading funder of the campaign to reject the compact.

Similarly, Colorado voters rejected a plan for casino-style gambling at racetracks, which operators of existing casinos in the state opposed. There and in California, new state revenue was likely to be offset by lost revenue from existing operators.

Given the interstate-versus-intrastate competition distinction, it’s no surprise that small states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island approved more gambling while California and Colorado rejected it. Casino expansion has spread like wildfire in the last decade through the Mid-Atlantic and the Rust Belt, where many population centers are near state borders. And even if revenue continues to disappoint, the states are likely to keep expanding gambling, just to keep up.