Trying to Seal the Deal
CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
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.
Coverage of the Midterm Elections
-
Coverage of the Midterm Elections
After the election in which Republicans retook control of the Senate, First Draft is providing running political coverage.
Polls show voter interest in the election substantially lower than four years ago. The real intensity has been generated by the deluge of broadcast television ads — more than 1.5 million have aired during this election cycle, according to Kantar Media/CMAG, which tracks political advertising.
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.”
Midterm Elections 2014
The latest news, analysis and election results for the 2014 midterm campaign.
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.
Why I’m Not Voting in the Midterms
Voters share the reasons that they will not show up at the polls Tuesday for the midterm elections. Are you voting? Tweet using the hashtag #whyvotemidterms and tell us why.
Video by Colin Archdeacon, Axel Gerdau, Mike Shum, KC McGinnis and Jason Drakeford on Publish Date November 3, 2014.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.
Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about the final hours of campaigning for the midterm elections referred incorrectly to the 1.5 million television advertisements aired during the midterm election cycle. The number includes all broadcast television advertisements, including those by candidates — not just advertisements by outside groups.