The former appears more likely: Mitch McConnell, now leader of the majority in the Senate, struck a non-confrontational tone when he outlined an agenda starting with issues that have bipartisan consensus, such as completion of free trade agreements and moderate tax reform. Republicans also must choose their course as they transition from minority to majority status in the Senate: will they show they can govern and start passing legislation with some bi-partisan support or will they listen to the base and continue the combative brinkmanship that led to a government shutdown last year? The question now is not if, but how Obama will do the same, whether by the power of his office, exercising his veto or issuing executive orders or by the real “stuff of politics”, political compromise, bargaining and consensus building. D Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan outmaneuvered opponents, and managed to shape the political agenda and leave a long shadow in the history of American politics. Even with divided government, presidents like Eisenhower, F. Six-year legislative losses for the President’s party are nothing new. With the GOP firmly in control of the two Houses of Congress, what is the next step for Obama as he enters the last two years of his Presidency? Will he defend the mandate the voters entrusted him in two elections? Or will he passively accept his “lame-duck” status and allow the new majority party to have its way? Will the author of “The Audacity of Hope” believe in his own creed about reclaiming the American Dream and “get something meaningful done” in his last 24 months at the helm? Pollsters base their model on self-reported likelihood to vote, which is not a reliable measure in mid-term elections, mainly because it is merely a vague intention but not a priority for most voters. In Maryland, turnout was especially low in urban Baltimore and the Washington suburbs. The pollsters’ miscalculation is directly related to the low turnout: minorities and students didn’t show up to cast their votes. It is not unusual however, for the White House party to lose mid-term legislative elections especially in the sixth year of a president with low approval rates, and under a political map that favored the GOP due to the latest round of gerrymandered re-districting. There was also a quite substantive amount of open seats as several senior Senators retired.ĭemocratic candidates based their campaigns on local issues, trying to distance themselves as much as possible from Obama, the extreme case being Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, running against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, who refused to answer when asked by a reporter if she had voted for Obama in the presidential election. Two circumstances may explain the huge margin of Democratic losses: turnout was low, as is usually the case in mid-term elections, and the GOP ran its campaigns on one issue only: the low approval of the President’s performance, nationally at 40% but as low as 15% in some red states. They failed to predict for example, the GOP victory in the Maryland race for governor, as well as the narrow re-election of Democrat Mark Warner in Virginia, who was projected to win by a 9.7 point-margin, but narrowly missed a recount against former Virginia Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie. The magnitude of their sweeping victory surprised many, most interestingly among them, the pollsters themselves. They also won governorships in several blue states (Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois). Republicans gained control of the Senate by winning at least eight seats (Louisiana will have a runoff in December) and expanded their majority in the House by near-historic levels. With headlines dominated by the scares of the Ebola virus and ISIS victories in Iraq, the mid-term elections came and went without much fanfare, until the stunning results were known.
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