Midterms an Obamacare referendum? Not so fast.

By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Published: March 12

At 10 a.m. Tuesday, Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), the man in charge of House Republicans’ 2014 campaign, told a roomful of reporters at the National Press Club that they shouldn’t read much into that day’s special election in Florida to fill the seat of the late GOP congressman Bill Young.

“Whether we win it or lose it, the special elections aren’t too predictive for either side going forward,” said Walden, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

“If there’s any advantage of a special election,” Walden added, “it’s that you can test messages, and you can test strategies, and you can test sort of your theories on voter turnout and I.D. So, I mean, that’s kind of the takeaway . . . from a special, far more than is it indicative of what’s going to happen 239 days from now.”

But at 8 p.m., after Republican David Jolly, a former lobbyist, was declared the winner by two percentage points, Walden revised his view of the race’s significance.

(More here.)