Dan Roberts
Republicans successfully tamed their Tea Party fringe and ran against Obama, but some Democrats are ruing caution, negativity and misjudged campaign themes
The Republican party’s capture of the Senate was down largely to its leadership’s defeat of two enemies who were not even on the midterm ballot: first, an unruly Tea Party wing that threatened to displace more disciplined candidates in primary elections, and; second, the president of the United States, whose growing unpopularity in swing states was exploited with $2bn worth of campaign attacks.
Recriminations among Democrats are likely to take longer to unravel. Should Barack Obama have taken more of a lead in defending his record, even if candidates wanted distance from him? Was he wrong to seek credit for improving economic figures when so many Americans are still struggling? Or did negative campaigns and cautious messaging by moderate incumbents turn off the party’s base and keep Democratic voters at home?
Among those on the left of the party, the answer is all of the above. “It’s shocking, but only in magnitude,” said one senior union official on Wednesday. “When the economy is bad and one party says the economy is bad (though offers no ideas) while the other party’s leader says the economy is good, it’s kinda clear who will win.”
Yet the official Democratic narrative is more likely to be written by members of Hillary Clinton’s camp, who privately agree with many Republicans that Obama’s competency in office is at the core of the problem.
Some of the prominent Republicans expected to be potential opponents in any 2016 presidential run are already racing to instead link her to defeated Democrats such as Alison Lundergan Grimes, claiming the heavy defeat of a moderate candidate who had refused to even say whether she voted for Obama was also a “repudiation” of the Clinton wing of the party. “I think, here in Kentucky, I think it was a referendum, not only on the president, but on Hillary Clinton,” Senator Rand Paul told Fox News shortly after the presumptive new Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, swept to re-election in the state.
But Republicans also simply orchestrated more disciplined, effective, campaigns than Democrats did this time around.
Criticism is already growing, for example, of Grimes’s decision to run from Obama so hard that she wouldn’t even say whether she had voted for him, and of Senator Mark Udall’s relentless attacks on Republicans in Colorado for being anti-women even as his opponent, like many others who learned the lessons of shrill predecessors, barely mentioned social issues at all.
For its part, the White House began carefully shifting the blame as polling showed defeat becoming likely, insisting that campaign decisions such as keeping the president away from battleground states were driven by local candidates rather than Obama himself.
“I don’t think it is a controversial notion for the president to adopt a posture whereby candidates whose names are on the ballot are the ones who are driving the strategy for the election,” Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, told reporters on election day. “That is I think a pretty commonsense notion. And failure to do that I think could lead to some rather strange outcomes.”
Yet there were signs of late panic nonetheless. A flurry of last-minute campaign stops to support vulnerable state governors were added to the president’s schedule at the end of last week. With just 24 hours to go, an unspecified number of automated, or “robo”, calls with Obama’s voice on them were made to voters and he quietly carried out 14 separate interviews with local radio stations in an effort to boost his party’s disappointing turnout.
The bigger question is whether a more full-throated defence of his record earlier on in the campaign could have made more of a difference, especially in close races in which candidates had done most to distance themselves from his flagging approval numbers.
Here, the irony is that many of the problems that have dogged Obama most in his second term are on the wane. The Affordable Care Act is finally beginning to bring health insurance to millions of uninsured; improving GDP figures may not be felt universally but will undoubtedly bring some relief to struggling families; and the US Ebola crisis that prompted so much disdain from Republicans in recent days may be past its worst.
In one of his last-minute radio interviews, Obama prepared the ground for Tuesday’s defeat by stressing the tricky hand dealt by the Senate map this election cycle, which forced Democrats to defend seats in an unusually large number of red states.
But the crushing defeat seen by Democrats in places like Colorado and Iowa that had been carried by the president in 2012, and wins by Republican governors in deep blue states like Maryland and Illinois, rather take the wind out of this argument.
Though most second-term presidents – except Bill Clinton who had already lost Congress in his first term – fail to make gains at midterm elections, the overwhelming scale of this defeat, and Obama’s failure to defend his record, may ultimately be added to his list of operational failures.
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