Politics
On Election’s Eve, G.O.P. Is Confident, but Voters Are Sour
WASHINGTON
— The most expensive midterm campaign in American history stumbled
into Election Day on Tuesday with voters’ interest at record lows and
their divisions deep over what they want their government to do in
President Obama’s final two years.
Republicans
entered the final hours confident they will gain at least six seats and
take control of the Senate, but polls showed several races too close to
call. Likely runoffs in Georgia and Louisiana, along with late vote
counts in Alaska, Colorado and Iowa, will mean Senate control may remain
in doubt beyond Tuesday night.
The same could be true for governors’ races in Colorado, New Hampshire, Georgia and Florida.
The
uncertainty about the outcome is a fitting match for the mood of the
nation. A slowly but steadily improving economy — with six months of
strong growth, gasoline below $3 a gallon for the first time in four
years and substantial deficit reduction — has not translated into
broader optimism. Voters are more inclined toward blame than credit.
Instead, they are seemingly worn down by economic struggles and late
waves of panic, chiefly about the threats posed by the Islamic State and
the possible spread of Ebola.
Polls
show voter interest in the election substantially lower than four years
ago. The real intensity has been generated by the prodigious spending
of outside groups who have aired more than 1.5 million televised
campaign ads.
And
candidates in both parties have done little to inspire the electorate.
Unlike midterms in 1994 and 2006, when the party out of power made
strong gains, Republican candidates did not carry a defined platform
into this election, nor did they campaign on many policy specifics.
Democrats spent months playing down if not denying their support for the
president’s agenda.
Mostly,
both sides trucked in umbrage and outrage. In Iowa on Monday, the
Republican Senate hopeful Joni Ernst jumped on the comments of the
retiring Democratic senator she hopes to replace, Tom Harkin, who said
he did not care “if she’s as good looking as Taylor Swift.”
“I
am offended,” she said as she barnstormed through Iowa on the last full
day of campaigning. “To be compared to Taylor Swift, I guess that’s
O.K., though; I mean she’s a very successful woman. But if my name were
John Ernst and I were a guy he wouldn’t be saying those things about
me.”
For
their part, Democrats in New Hampshire pronounced themselves appalled
after the state’s Republican chairwoman, Jennifer Horn, announced in
Manchester: “This is our time, we need to crush it. We need to grab it,
run with it, push their heads under over and over again until they
cannot breathe anymore, until the elections are over on Tuesday night
and we’ve won it all.”
In
Kansas, another extremely close race, Greg Orman, an independent,
knocked on doors in the Kansas City suburbs just miles from where
Senator Pat Roberts, the embattled Republican incumbent, rallied his
voters.
But
the closing day of the campaign was dominated by a debate over whether
Mr. Orman had called the state’s venerated former senator, Bob Dole, a
clown when he called a Roberts campaign rally featuring the 91-year-old
elder statesman and other Republican luminaries “a Washington
establishment clown car.”
Tuesday
will be a test between the Democrats’ well-honed voter targeting and
turnout machine and a Republican ground game playing catch-up. The
NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that 58 percent of Republicans in
late October said they were interested in the campaign, statistically
identical to the 57 percent of Democrats.
At
the same time in advance of the Republican wave in 2010, 70 percent
were interested. In 2006, before the Democratic wave, two-thirds of
Democrats professed interest, well above today’s level.
At
a Republican rally at an aircraft hangar near the Ted Stevens Anchorage
International Airport, the enthusiasm for the former Massachusetts
governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney seemed as loud or louder
than for any of the homegrown candidates and dignitaries, including
Gov. Sean Parnell and Dan Sullivan, who hopes to oust Senator Mark
Begich, a Democrat, on Tuesday.
Pat
Fleming, 75, a retired medical radiology technologist, held a Dan
Sullivan for Senate sign to her chest, but asked about the outlook for
Tuesday, she mostly talked about somebody else.
“Whatever
it takes to get rid of Harry Reid,” she said, referring to the Senate
majority leader from Nevada, who is deeply unpopular in Alaska.
The
appeal of something new is weighing down incumbents from both parties.
When Mr. Orman arrived with his wife in a suburb of Kansas City on
Monday afternoon, one woman pulled into her driveway, hopped out of her
car and walked to Mr. Orman saying, “Hey, you’re not Pat Roberts.”
For
all the money and nail-biting races this year, the outcome is not
likely to result in a drastic change of policy. Mr. Obama will still be
in office to defend his health care law
and other accomplishments against Republican efforts to reverse them.
And Republican leaders in Congress will have to wrestle with political
crosscurrents that could affect their ability to confront the president
or to work with him.
At
least three Republicans — Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of
Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida — are considering runs for their
party’s 2016 presidential nomination. They will be tempted to move to
the right to appeal to Republican presidential base voters.
Mr.
Cruz, in an interview with The Washington Post, said this weekend that a
Republican-led Senate should hold Mr. Obama accountable for his
policies, and argued that his colleagues should aggressively pursue a
repeal of the president’s signature health care law.
Politically, Democrats are banking on that sort of agenda for their own comeback.
“If
Republicans take the Senate and expand their margins in the House, no
one in their right mind would believe that Ted Cruz and the Tea Party
House Republicans will say, ‘Now is the time for us to compromise,’ ”
said Representative Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee. “They’re going to double down.”
At
the same time, many more Republicans elected in the Tea Party wave of
2010 but standing for re-election in Democratic or swing states in 2016
will probably want to tack to the center. Freshman Republican senators
from New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Missouri
could have very different political imperatives than their counterparts
running for the White House.
“Quite
frankly, going into 2016, the Republicans have to make a decision
whether they’re in control or not in control,” Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr. said in an interview with CNN on Monday. “Are they going to
begin to allow things to happen? Or are they going to continue to be
obstructionists? And I think they’re going to choose to get things
done.”
Democrats will face their own soul-searching after controlling a Senate that for two years has defined dysfunction.
“The moderate and middle of the Democratic Party has really been challenged” by this campaign, said Senator Joe Manchin III, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia.
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