Fischer and Mourdock were first eligible to vote for president in 1972. That year, while Richard Nixon was sweeping to a landslide victory, 29-year-old Joe Biden was winning a Senate seat in Delaware; he wouldn’t even be eligible for the office until his birthday on Nov. 20. He’s about nine years older than them, but by January he’ll have completed a four-year term as vice president … after his 36-year run in the world’s most exclusive – and rapidly aging – club.

And that, in a nutshell, is a sign of one way the United States Senate has changed over the last several decades.

It’s fairly well known, I think, that the average age of members of Congress has been growing older and older over time. While the current 112th Congress turned slightly in the younger direction, before that virtually every Congress for some time broke records for age, with the 111th  Senate peaking at an average of 63.1 years.

But what’s not been reported as far as I know is that one of the big factors in the aging of the Senate is in part a consequence not of high reelection rates or delayed retirement from senators too stubborn to quit, but of changes among incoming senators. Of course, not all newly elected senators are as old as Fischer and Mourdock, and Joe Biden was hardly typical of the 1970s, but as symbols of the change, you could do worse.

Let’s go to the numbers. I looked at the three most recent classes of senators, and four famous elections from the past: the Republican Revolution of 1994; the Reagan takeover of the Senate in 1980; the Watergate babies elected in 1974; and, stretching further back, the famous class of 1958, who would reform Congress and pass civil rights and Great Society legislation. In each case, I only looked at those elected in regular November elections of those years, ignoring those elected or appointed within election cycles (many of those, after all, are just caretakers who rapidly leave the Senate).

First, the recent groups. In 2006, the Democrats took over the Senate, and 10 new senators were elected. Their average age: 54.2 years. The next cycle was also good for the Democrats. Another 10 new senators showed up, with a whopping average age of 56.6. And then Republicans stormed back in 2010; the 13 new senators from that cycle were a slightly younger 52.8. Looking at individual senators, I count 10 of those 33 senators who reached their 60th birthdays before taking the oath of office – which also means that all of them would be on the far side of 65 before their terms expired.

Things look very different if we go back only a few years. The Clinton-era class of 1995 had 11 senators who averaged 48.8 years old. The 18-strong Reagan class of 1981 was only 46.7 years old, while the 10 aptly named Watergate babies tipped the clock at just 45.5 years, over a decade less than those sworn in at the beginning of the Obama presidency. Going way back to 1959, that illustrious group of 18 was just over an average of 50, thanks to the two oldest new senators in the whole study, 69-year-old Stephen Young of Ohio and Ernest Gruening, who was one of Alaska’s first two senators. However, and while I haven’t looked any further, those two look like total flukes; they are the only two 60-year-olds that year, and there are none at all in the Watergate and Reagan groups.

And Mourdock and Fischer are just par for the course in the current election cycle, which features strong contenders David Dewhurst of Texas (he’ll be 67 in January 2013), George Allen in Virginia (60), Angus King in Maine (67) and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts (63). Or look at Hawaii: In the Democratic primary, Ed Case (60) and Mazie Hirono (65) are contending to take on Linda Lingle (59). And I really don’t think Tommy Thompson is going to win in Wisconsin (I doubt he’ll make it through the primary), but if he does make it he’ll be 71 years old at the beginning of his term. And those are only the candidates with very good chances of winning.

Now, I certainly don’t have anything against individual older senators. Plenty of members of Congress have been excellent legislators in their 60s and even 70s. But I do think that there’s something wrong when most new senators in 2010 were out of college (where they wrote their term papers on typewriters) before Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five unleashed the Message; perhaps more to the point, we’re still electing lots of new senators who grew up with Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the background, and hardly any who reached college when the Cold War was history instead of current events. Especially since many senators have said that it takes a full term for them to get fully up to speed – and after a full term, many of our recent new senators are on the far side of 70.

I really don’t have an explanation for why we’re nominating and electing much older Senate candidates these days, but I think it’s an unfortunate trend that can’t make for better representation or for a more engaged and active Senate. I’d like to see more senators in their 30s (and, yes, even in their 20s, ideally). I have no idea how to get there, but if the first part of solving a problem is to identify it, I hope this helps. If young people want Washington to be more receptive to their problems — from climate to student-loan debt — one solution might be to start electing people closer to their own ages.

Why should we care what candidates have on their websites? The truth is that politicians generally try to keep their promises once they are elected. Moreover, the more visible the promise, the more likely it is that the politician will consider herself bound by it – and face consequences if she votes the other way. Ideally, one would want to see what candidates talk about on the stump, and what they advertise in mailers, TV ads and other formats. But websites have some advantages, too. In addition to being easy to access, they also are open-ended. Presumably, candidates will list every issue they believe is important. Or at least, every issue they want to talk about. And those are the issues, again, that they’re likely to act on if they win.

So I looked through the Issues sections of the 10 Democrats who are most likely to be elected – either challengers rated as having a good chance, or open-seat candidates in Democratic or swing states. In Hawaii and New Mexico, that meant both candidates fighting in a contested primary; in six other states, it meant the odds-on favorite for the nomination.

The results should be disappointing for liberals. Two of the 10 candidates, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, don’t even have an Issues section on their websites. For the other eight, I’ll run down the numbers quickly. None of them mentioned support for adding a public option to ACA; indeed, three had no healthcare issues page at all, unless you count a page about protecting Social Security and Medicare, which was quite popular. Two of the eight support marriage equality, both of them in New England (Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Chris Murphy in Connecticut). Only two other candidates mentioned LGBT issues at all, Tim Kaine in Viriginia and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who featured it in her bio page. Filibuster reform also received only two mentions. For civil liberties and the array of issues related to torture and detention, only Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who opposed renewal of the Patriot Act, had any mention at all.

By contrast, seven of the eight candidates had a whole section of their Issues pages devoted to veterans, usually alone but in two cases bundled with something else. Now, it’s certainly true that most liberals support help for veterans, but as campaign issues go, this is surely one of the most bland.

I was pretty surprised by all of this, but I was most surprised by the candidates in competitive primaries. In Hawaii, Mazie Hirono is attempting to beat Ed Case from the left, and yet Hirono doesn’t hit at any of these issues that might help her with liberal activists in Hawaii and nationally. And it’s not as if either Hawaii or New Mexico, the two states with contested primaries, is exactly Alabama; there are plenty of liberal Democrats who are going to be voting in those primaries, and liberal positions shouldn’t be the kiss of death in the general election.

So what’s going on? It’s possible that the candidates are being overly cautious. I suspect, however, that what’s really happening is that Democratic interest groups, activists and other party actors are not pushing hard on any of these issues.

And that’s a serious mistake. It’s almost certainly the case that the best time for partisans to influence legislators is while they are running for election to some office for the first time. After all, that’s when they need party support the most – especially for those who have tough primaries, but really for all of them. Once elected, they begin to build personal connections with their constituents, based on bringing home pork or on other personal relationships. Party becomes relatively less important. Certainly, that’s what politicians have an incentive to do – to increase support based on who they are, rather than being constrained by specific policy commitments that, odds are, will make someone unhappy.

Now, it’s true, of course, that it’s still early in the cycle, so some of this could change going forward. And as I mentioned, websites are only one form of candidate advertising. It’s certainly possible that some of these Issues sections were put together exactly how I suggested – by volunteers who didn’t have the authority to commit the candidate to potentially controversial positions – and that as the year goes on things will change.

But what they’re showing right now certainly isn’t what most liberals would like to see. If activists want change on these issues after November, they need to start targeting these candidates now, before it’s too late.

Regardless of who is elected the U. S. will continue to be interventionist in its foreign policy.

Regardless of who is elected the “Bush tax cuts” will be sustained. There may be some tweaking around the edges…

Regardless of who is elected the detention center in Guantanamo will be maintained.

Regardless of who is elected the security apparatus put in place in the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington, DC in 2001 will only be expanded.

Doug Mataconis added his own list.

And yet: Republicans and Democrats fight hard over elections, and partisans on both sides certainly feel that there’s a lot at stake. Are they nuts?

Basically, there are two stories here.

One is that while presidents do in fact try to keep their promises, they are often thwarted by others within the system. That’s not just a story about Congress. The bureaucracy can also defeat presidents; so can interest groups, or the courts, or state governments or foreign governments, including at times very friendly foreign governments. Indeed, it’s usually difficult for outsiders to tell exactly who defeated the president on some policy issue – even when the final battle takes the form of a congressional vote, it may be, for example, that the permanent bureaucracy in some executive branch agency really played the key role and successfully manipulated Congress to get the result it wanted.

And yet: Just because presidential power is very limited does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Presidents often lose, but they do have some agenda-setting ability, and they have a fair amount of bargaining ability – overall, far more than any other single policymaker. To take just one fairly basic example: There’s a good chance that Barack Obama was free to choose whether to push hard for healthcare reform or climate legislation. Had he chosen the latter, or if John McCain was in the White House, there’s simply no chance that healthcare reform would have become law.

And I can hear the criticisms already: Yes, but why should liberals support a GOP-inspired policy such as the ACA anyway? What about single-payer? Which gets to the second story: For some, even if liberal presidents did get their way on every campaign promise it would still be meaningless, because it’s all within the context of accepting the basic Washington policy consensus – whether it’s a mixed economy instead of socialism, or (for libertarians) a welfare state instead of a unregulated market economy, or an internationalist foreign policy.

There’s no doubt that there’s a bit of truth in this kind of perspective. If you believe that it is critically important, say, that U.S. foreign policy and national security institutions return to a pre-WWII condition, then you’re certainly going to be disappointed in the outcome of the 2012 election. Even if your ideal state is (oddly enough, to me, but OK) the 1990s, then you’re still going to be upset that both parties buy into the Department of Homeland Security (a Democratic invention, don’t forget), drone attacks with little effective oversight and massive growth of an apparently permanent national security bureaucracy.

And yet: it’s still a mistake to ignore differences within the broad consensus. Those who care about civil liberties can be quite critical in their disapproval of Barack Obama (and Bill Clinton before him, and really most U.S. presidents), even finding some issues in which Obama might be worse than George W. Bush, and still recognize significant differences between Obama’s record and Bush’s – or, Obama’s record and Mitt Romney’s likely record. The healthcare reform passed by Obama and the Democrats might not work – but surely it’s far different, in important ways that already matter to lots and lots of people, than the old status quo. And there’s little question that a President McCain wouldn’t have passed any significant healthcare reform.

Going to Schuler’s list: Yes, both Obama and McCain will be interventionist. But if one would invade Iran and the other wouldn’t … well, that’s a massive difference, even if both would embark on Libya-type adventures. There’s a good chance that Guantanamo stays open regardless of who is elected, but Romney’s supporters include many who support reinstituting torture; that’s extremely unlikely to be U.S. policy if Obama is reelected. Again, I’d call that a massive difference. On taxes, too, one candidate supports modest increases in tax rates for upper-level taxpayers, while the other favors large tax cuts from current levels; if either party wins a landslide, it’s likely that those positions would be enacted. No, it would not be a return to 1990s levels (nor, most likely, would it get taxes quite to where Ron Paul might want them), but again, there’s quite a bit of money for both individuals and the U.S. Treasury on the line.

Dismissing these differences amounts to ignoring things that will make a huge difference in people’s lives in order to stay loyal to ideals. Which is all well and good in some circumstances, but not in politics, where the ideal generally has no place, as thinkers as far back as Plato realized. If you want to engage in politics meaningfully, you must act, and that means making what at times are very difficult, even very painful, choices. One of my favorite quotations about politics is from Bonnie Honig, working from an essay by Bernice Johnson Reagon about taking collective action:

Coalition politics is not easy.  When you feel like you might “keel over at any minute and die,” when “you feel threatened to the core,” then “you’re really doing coalition work.”

Supporting a candidate who you know will let you down is a lot harder than supporting one who you can pretend will be perfect if the impossible happened and she was elected, or just sitting out the election entirely because neither candidate measures up. It may take some courage to support someone despite important, serious, substantive reservations. It is, however, what needs to be done in a democracy. That certainly doesn’t mean anyone should support imperfect candidates uncritically – and in a complex democracy such as the United States, there’s nothing at all wrong with choosing to focus one’s energies where it will make the most difference, which is not always the presidential contest. But to pretend that the president makes no difference is just as bad a mistake as to believe he is all-powerful, and to pretend that substantive differences that will affect millions of lives are meaningless is even worse.

I’ll start with the difference between 2010 House races, which the team of political scientists studied, and a presidential election. The truth is that those types of elections – midterm House and presidential – have little in common. In both cases, party identification is important. But beyond that, there are quite a few important differences. House elections are typically low-information contests. Most of us barely know who our own Member of the House is, let alone much about him or her. We typically know even less about the challenger. In that kind of context any new information can, it turns out, be fairly potent. As Gary Jacobson has shown, knowing one “good” or “bad” thing about a House candidate (that is, something one believes is good or bad) can have a surprisingly large effect on how one votes. In the case of the healthcare study, it turned out that just knowing that a member voted for ACA was enough to make a significant change in voters’ estimates of how liberal that member was. And why not? It’s not as if people knew of all the other things going on in Washington.

By contrast, presidential elections are heavily funded, high-information contests. That’s particularly true about an incumbent president. Think about it: I bet everyone reading this can reel off a dozen facts about Barack Obama without even trying. You know about healthcare, you know about the stimulus, you know about bin Laden; you know his wife’s name, and his kids, and where he went to high school; you know, probably, about his birth certificate and his old church in Chicago and some of the other attacks that have been made against him. Learning something new about him – say, how he deals with the situation in Syria – probably won’t change what you think of him. In fact, it probably works the other way around; if you already like Obama you’ll assume that what he does in Syria makes sense, and if you don’t like him you’ll be inclined to be critical of what he does there.

Indeed, you probably know quite a bit about Mitt Romney. If you’re a partisan Democrat, you already don’t like him, and if you’re a partisan Republican … well, you may or may not like him now, but after the convention, and after Republican opinion leaders wind up fully supporting him, odds are you will.

Remember, the study found that healthcare hurt Democrats by making people think they were more liberal than they otherwise would have thought. So the question is: To what extent has ACA changed people’s opinions about Barack Obama? My guess is that whatever the answer to that might be, it’s a lot less than the extent to which it changed people’s views of their Member of Congress because it has to compete with so much other information.

At the same time, the Obama campaign apparently believes that healthcare reform could be a plus for him, at least among some key groups – such as women who will have contraception covered under the new law. I’m skeptical about much of an effect there, either, and for the same reason; adding one piece of information is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Obama. That’s not to say that his campaign shouldn’t try (or that Republicans shouldn’t attempt to pound home their ObamaCare message); after all, if you have raised gazillions of dollars, you might as well use them, and on the margins campaigns certainly can matter, even at the presidential level. It’s just that the overall effect of the entire campaign is relatively small, and so any particular piece of it or a single issue is most likely even smaller. Or, think of it this way: The Republican assault on Planned Parenthood and many of the more aggressive GOP initiatives on abortion have been legislatively separate from the ACA-related birth control wars. The Obama campaign was going to target single women and young women anyway; healthcare reform is just part of the story there.

Moreover, whatever the effects healthcare will have on Barack Obama, it’s almost certainly already incorporated in his overall polling right now; there’s no reason to expect a further change as a result of the fall campaign. I suppose it’s possible that the upcoming Supreme Court ruling could shift public perceptions of ACA somewhat and in turn move Obama’s approval a bit. But I’d expect most changes in Obama’s approval rating, and his overall chances for reelection, to be driven by events from this point on, particularly changes in the economy. There’s really no good argument – and plenty of political science theory against it – to expect healthcare to exert much effect on Obama’s reelection all by itself.

They should be careful what they wish for.

In the modern era since the nomination process was reformed before 1972, we’ve never had a real contested convention, and the institution that we have today isn’t built for deliberation and decision making; it’s built to formally ratify a decision made months before, and then serve as props and extras for the nominee’s multiday TV extravaganza. If the delegates were suddenly forced to make a decision, it’s not hard to imagine some of the nightmare scenarios that might develop.

Imagine, then, that Newt Gingrich really does stay in and win delegates, especially in the South; that Ron Paul’s delegate strategy is wildly successful; and that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum split the rest; and that the delegate count after the last primary stands at Romney 700, Santorum 650, Paul 450, Gingrich 400, with a hundred or so automatic delegates and formally unbound caucus state delegates remaining uncommitted. No one is close to the 1,144 needed for nomination as the delegates arrive in Tampa.

What happens then? Remember, the conventions are essentially the governing body of the political party. They have rules, but if they choose to change those rules there’s really no one (not the Republican National Committee, not the courts) who is going to prevent them from doing so. The majority of the convention, ultimately, is responsible only to itself. And unlike the old days, when many delegations were simply creatures of a state party chair and the individual delegates would do whatever the chair said, the delegates now would be over 2,000 free agents. They might follow the orders of the candidate they were pledged to, or not; some of them might choose to follow some other party leader. Most of them, however, would be free to choose, with little or no professional or personal risk involved.

What could go wrong?

Back when we had real conventions, one of the ways that nominations were fought out was over credentials. Rival groups would claim that they were the “real” delegation from one state or another. Ultimately, the convention itself decides. Anyone who recalls the extended dust-up over the Florida and Michigan delegations to the Democratic National Convention, a bitter fight that went on even after there was nothing at stake, can imagine how vicious something like that can be when the nomination is at stake. Given the various penalties that have been assigned as well as the dicey counting so far in the caucus states, there’s plenty of material available for some awesome, and awesomely ugly, credentials challenges.

Any platform fights that have made it to the convention floor in recent decades have been carefully staged and choreographed by the campaign that controlled the convention. No nominee, no one in control – and the choreography collapses. All those crazy amendments offered in the House of Representatives last year, or the ones you’ve seen offered by state legislators? If the convention decides to open up the platform for amendments from the convention floor, they could get a string of those — in prime time. Remember, most intense conservatives (and most intense liberals) tend to believe that their fringe, unpopular ideas are really supported by a silent majority out there.

What are the odds that it works out well for the Republican Party image? In a normal convention, if a few delegates misbehave in any way, the campaign can simply disavow them, and the story goes away quickly. In a deadlocked convention, there’s no one who can do that; the delegates are the party at that point. So if some of them turn out to have nasty stuff in their backgrounds, or decide to enjoy the convention atmosphere a little too much, or just get carried away with partisan or ideological behavior – remember how the Republican debates were marred by embarrassing behavior by the audiences – well, that’s going to get press attention. And no one is really in a position to look after the party image. To the contrary, rival campaigns might even feed the press stories about delegates for the other candidates.

The ultimate nightmare: It’s really not hard to imagine Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich becoming fed up with a credentials or platform decision and just stomping off. Perhaps taking their delegates with them. Remember, a deadlocked convention, if it ever happens, would be the end of months of hardening of positions and intensifying rivalries. Partisans who may have thought back in 2011 that it was a tough choice deciding between candidates will, by the convention, have spent months and in some cases years trying to convince everyone how great their candidate is and how dangerous the others would be, and the one set of people they’re most likely to have convinced is themselves.

How ugly could it get? What if Paul and Gingrich go off by themselves, and declare that their rump group is the real, authorized Republican National Convention and those RINOs down the street are the imposters – and the Paul/Gingrich nominee is the one who is entitled to Republican ballot slots in the fall. Hmmm … I can think of one former governor of Alaska who might be willing to head that ticket.

The truth is that Republicans are living in a fantasy if they assume that someone could just snap their fingers and 2,000-plus Republican delegates would automatically switch their loyalties to Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels and that everything would run smoothly from that point. A sensible party would do anything possible to avoid the possibility of a true deadlocked convention.