WASHINGTON
— The most expensive midterm elections in American history moved toward
what could be an inconclusive finish on Monday, the last full day of
campaigning before Election Day. Polls show control of the Senate
trending Republican but still up for grabs and an angry electorate
unclear on what it wants from Washington in Barack Obama’s final two
years as president.
Unlike
in previous midterms when the party out of power made strong gains,
Republican candidates did not carry a defined platform into the
elections of 2014, nor did they campaign on policy specifics. Instead,
they have been supported by a bitter electorate that is far less sure of
its views than the voters who propelled Republican majorities in both
chambers in 1994, gave Congress back to the Democrats in 2006 and swept
Republicans to control of the House in 2010.
A
new poll conducted by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal on Monday
found that likely voters favor Republican control of Congress by a
single percentage point, 46 percent to 45 percent. The same poll showed
voters favoring Republicans 49 percent to 43 percent in 2010 just before
Republicans seized control of the House and made large gains in the
Senate.
Midterm Elections 2014
The latest news, analysis and election results for the 2014 midterm campaign.
A
batch of new state polls show Senate control is anybody’s guess,
despite widespread statistical predictions showing Republicans as
heavily favored to win a majority. In New Hampshire, a poll by WMUR and
the University of New Hampshire gave Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the
incumbent Democrat, a two-point lead over Scott Brown, the former
Republican senator from Massachusetts.
A
Quinnipiac University poll put the Iowa Senate race between
Representative Bruce Braley, a Democrat, and State Senator Joni Ernst, a
Republican, dead even, after a Des Moines Register poll showed Ms.
Ernst pulling away by seven points just a day before. In Colorado,
Quinnipiac showed Representative Cory Gardner, a Republican, leading the
incumbent Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat, by two percentage points,
keeping that race too close to call as well.
Polling
still points to likely runoffs in Louisiana and Georgia, where no
candidate appears capable of mustering more than 50 percent of the vote
on Election Day. Between those two races and a late vote count in
Alaska, where Senator Mark Begich, the incumbent Democrat, and Dan
Sullivan, the Republican, are closely matched, Senate control may not be
determined Tuesday night.
All of the differences in these polls are statistically insignificant, falling within the margins of sampling error.
For
all the spending and all the nail-biting on races this year, the stakes
of the 2014 cycle are not that high. President Obama will still be in
office to defend his health care law
and other Democratic accomplishments against Republican efforts to
reverse them. And Republican leaders in Congress will have to wrestle
with political crosscurrents in their own party that could affect their
ability to confront the president or to work with him.
Interest
in the election is also at a record low. The NBC News-Wall Street
Journal poll found that only half of voters said they were interested in
the election, down slightly from the 51 percent who were interested in
June. In October 2010, 61 percent were interested, up from 51 percent
the previous June. The numbers were similar in 2006, before Democrats
took back control of Congress.
At
least three Republicans — Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of
Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida — are eyeing 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 over the weekend that a
Republican-led Senate should hold Mr. Obama accountable for his
policies, and urged his colleagues to aggressively pursue a repeal of
the president’s signature health care law.
At the same time, many more Republicans elected in the Tea Party
wave of 2010 and now getting ready to stand for re-election in
Democratic or swing states in 2016 will 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 gonna begin
to allow things to happen? Or are they gonna continue to be
obstructionists? And I think they’re gonna choose to get things done.”
If
cooperation is what they seek, Republicans and the White House could
make common cause in the decades-old quest to overhaul and simplify the
tax code. Next year, if the parties cannot come together, deep
across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration will return,
hitting defense programs favored by Republicans and domestic programs
favored by Democrats.
If
resurgent Republicans favor confrontation, a Republican Senate would
give them the power to try to send to Mr. Obama policies that they have
talked about for years: balancing the budget quickly, converting Medicare into a program that provides vouchers for seniors to purchase private insurance, turning Medicaid
into block grants to the states, and shackling regulatory agencies like
the Environmental Protection Agency and the new Consumer Financial
Protection Board.
Republicans would also have to decide how hard they will push to repeal or scale back the president’s health care law.
The
campaign of 2014 did not go the way the Senate races of 2012 and 2010
went, when poor candidates and Republican infighting kept the Senate in
Democratic hands. The Republican Party
invested early and heavily in vanquishing far-right primary
challengers. The slate of candidates that did emerge represented the
mainstream Republican Party.
Candidates
like Thom Tillis in North Carolina, the Republican Senate nominee there
and the speaker of the state House, and Mr. Gardner in Colorado have
worked to move to the center and moderate their positions against their
Democratic challengers. Mr. Udall ran a single-issue campaign focused on
women’s issues against Mr. Gardner, earning him the nickname “Mark
Uterus” and costing him the endorsement of The Denver Post, which
criticized his “obnoxious, one-issue campaign.”
Republicans
ran a highly localized campaign, focusing on individual races
specifically geared toward each state; unlike Republicans in 1994 and
Democrats in 2006, they did not offer a sweeping platform of reforms
that could serve as their governing blueprint nationally should they
win.
“I
think one of the challenges of not having had the presidency for the
last six years is it’s very hard to develop a national message, and a
larger uniform platform that Republicans can run on,” said Kevin Madden,
a Republican strategist. “A lot of the 2016 dynamic will be introduced
on the Wednesday after Election Day, and that will have a big impact on
whether or not Republicans can offer a national agenda and a governing
strategy.”
Democrats,
meanwhile, are hoping that their multimillion-dollar gamble on a robust
ground game — intended to make the off-year electorate more closely
resemble a presidential election, in which Democrats typically do better
— will pay off. But motivating reliable Democratic constituencies —
unmarried women, minorities and young voters — to turn out in a midterm
election year has always been more difficult than in presidential
election years, and perhaps even more so in a climate where the
president’s approval ratings hover in the low-40s.
Early
voting results do indicate that Democrats in some states, particularly
in Iowa and North Carolina, are doing better than they did in 2010.
But
such efforts usually matter only when results are extremely close. If
Tuesday breaks to the Republicans, the Democrats’ ground game could
prove less than adequate.
Some pollsters say that Democrats were always facing a steep disadvantage.
“I
am not sure Democrats could have done much differently given how
hostile the map is for them,” said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor of the
nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “The Wednesday morning quarterbacking
will be loud, and include voices who don’t have a clue as to what they
are talking about.”
