Back in July, I wrote that Democrats would hold their Senate majority. I acknowledged that voters were frustrated with the Obama administration, that the electorate in midterm years tends to be more demographically Republican than in presidential cycles, and that voters tend to look at midterm elections as a chance to register their opinion of the national status-quo, rather than as a unique local choice. But Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu, the incumbent Democrats in bright-red Arkansas and Louisiana, had independent identities and many cycles of experience beating back conservative challenges, and I thought Republicans would have a hard time portraying them as “Obama Democrats.” Meanwhile, Democratic candidates in swing states like Colorado, Iowa, and North Carolina were polling ahead of their opponents in mid-summer, and I thought that Democrats would be able to hold those leads through November by mounting a Fall campaign around falling unemployment and Republican extremism. I was wrong.
I overestimated the extent to which voters in all the contested Senate seats, and especially in Arkansas and Louisiana, would view each election as a local choice between two candidates, rather than as a chance to express their feelings about President Obama. Members of both Senators’ immediate families were longtime officeholders in their respective states, and both of them ran campaigns that could hardly be construed as liberal: Landrieu by embracing the oil industry, and Pryor by talking about his Baptist faith. Landrieu won re-election to the Senate twice since first winning her seat in 1996, including in 2002, an election that Republicans won decisively. Mark Pryor first won his seat in 2002.
But disapproval of — and outright disdain for — President Obama was too intense for Pryor and Landrieu to be able to win against the odds yet again. In 2002, Pryor and Landrieu didn’t have a deeply unpopular liberal president weighing them down. Arkansas supported Mitt Romney by 24 points, and Louisiana by 17; there were simply too many Romney voters for Landrieu and Pryor to convince that they were different than the president. And the state of public opinion is such that conservative voters are much more motivated to vote against President Obama than liberal voters are to vote for him. This affected turnout for Democrats across all of the contested Senate campaigns.
Indeed, largely due to the economic pessimism that pervades the national psyche in 2014, liberals and conservatives alike are disappointed with President Obama’s tenure. Most voters’ approval of the President tends to be tied to their approval of the federal government’s performance more generally, and with stagnant wages around the country and only gridlock in the nation’s capital, a sense that the government is unable to address our protracted national problems cuts across party lines.
I thought Democrats would be able to fight against this malaise with a campaign that emphasized falling unemployment and Republican extremism. But the twin megastories of Ebola’s arrival in the United States and the growing power of ISIS precluded any possibility of a “good news” October.
Instead, both stories reinforced the sense that the federal government, under President Obama’s leadership, was helpless to address the problems of an apparently chaotic world. Both Ebola and ISIS seemed to take the administration by surprise. Ebola was particularly horrifying because it’s a deadly plague; by forcing American intervention in Iraq just a couple years after the withdrawal of US forces, ISIS’s advance represented a significant regression in a key area of US foreign policy. In addition, the widespread exposure of Americans to videos of our citizens’ heads being cut off by scary men in masks could only add the to the national climate of anxiety and decline.
In my opinion, the US response to both Ebola and ISIS were about as good as could have been expected of any administration, but there was no way to spin it to make it look like the President and his team had a grip on these horrifying threats. This accentuated Democratic supporters’ sense of hopelessness, and Republican voters’ sense of anger. Hopeless citizens don’t much vote, and angry ones do. This, I believe explains more than anything else why Mark Udall and Kay Hagan, who had been leading in the polls heading into October, ended up losing re-election in Colorado and North Carolina.
My biggest takeaway from watching this election play out is that, absent immediate and extenuating circumstances, the historical data on midterms, where the President’s party loses seats in midterm elections, is hard to defy. This means that so long as we’re electing Presidents, we will probably elect opposition Congresses. Back in the day when an opposition Congress could make a deal with a president, this state of affairs didn’t present an inherent challenge to our government’s efficacy. But in this polarized era, a conservative Congress and a moderate president don’t seem capable of agreeing on anything at all. Instead, we have gridlock, gridlock, and more gridlock, with no end in sight.