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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barber.

This is the day.

Today, if any Democratic Senator representing a red state was going to survive the midterms

and make it to 2019, it was going to be clear McCastle.

But she didn't. My colleague Sabrina Tavernice spoke to her during her final week in office.

It's Thursday, December 20.

Back in August, daily producer Lindsey Garrison and I went to Missouri to visit the state's

only remaining abortion clinic.

Justice Kennedy had just announced he would be retiring from the Supreme Court, basically

guaranteeing a more conservative court.

The thinking was that while this might not result in Roe v. Wade being overturned, it

would probably mean that red states would become more like Missouri, increasingly emboldened

to limit abortion.

We wanted to see what that looked like.

But it turned out that it couldn't have been worse timing for abortion to come back into

...