The horror show for Democrats began early and ran late. An hour or two before the polls had closed anywhere, Sean Hannity was chatting merrily on his radio program, saying to Scott Brown and Ed Gillespie how well the two G.O.P. Senate hopefuls were doing in New Hampshire and Virginia, respectively. The strong prospects for Brown weren’t a surprise, but Gillespie, the former lobbyist and R.N.C. official? On Tuesday morning, the Real Clear Politics poll average for his race had him running ten points behind Mark Warner, the Democratic incumbent. On all the lists of battleground states I’ve seen this year, and I’ve seen a ton of them, Virginia didn’t figure anywhere.
As it happened, neither Brown nor Gillespie ended up winning their races, but they were about the only Republican candidates who didn’t. (Gillespie has not yet conceded in Virginia, but trails Warner with ninety-nine per cent of the vote counted.) By midnight, all the networks were projecting a Republican takeover of the Senate, and they were also saying that the G.O.P. would most likely end up with fifty-four seats, which is more than forecasters and pundits, myself included, had anticipated. (I predicted that they would win fifty-three seats.) The Republicans also strengthened their hold on the House of Representatives and won some important gubernatorial races.
On Fox News, there were smiles all round, and Karl Rove was saying, “It was a wave year for Republicans.” Over on CNN, Paul Begala was calling on Democrats to ask themselves, “Why did we get drubbed like this?” In the heartland, triumphant G.O.P.ers were giving victory speeches. In West Allis, Wisconsin, Scott Walker, the union-bashing governor of the Badger state, started out his speech after comfortably defeating his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke, by paying tribute to his state’s active-duty service members, which is what you do when you have a Presidential bid in your sights. And in West Des Moines, Iowa, Joni Ernst, the hog-castrating, gun-toting farm girl turned G.O.P. icon was declaring, “Well, Iowa, we did it!” To put a cork in things, when Fox switched back to its studio from the Ernst speech, it called the Massachusetts governor’s race for Charlie Baker, the Republican candidate.
Though the night’s story line was consistent, it was hard to know which plot point was most depressing for Democrats and the Obama Administration. Was it the way the party’s support collapsed in the South, leading to crushing defeats for Mark Pryor in Arkansas (who lost by seventeen percentage points), Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky (who lost by fifteen points), and Michelle Nunn in Georgia (who lost by seven points)? Was it Republican Cory Gardner’s victory over Mark Udall in Colorado, a state that figures heavily in the argument that demographic trends favor a permanent Democratic majority? Pat Roberts’s comeback win in Kansas over the independent candidate Greg Orman? Or was it the sight of the Republican businessman Thom Tillis’s followers celebrating in North Carolina, following their man’s triumph over Kay Hagan? That, truly, was a race that the Democrats thought they had done enough to win. (I did, too.) But, in the end, it wasn’t even particularly close. Tillis, the speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, won by nearly two per cent.
So what happened? In retrospect, it was a fairly familiar midterm story. A ruling party went into a campaign with an unpopular President and a discontented electorate, and, on an Election Day characterized by low turnout among the general population, and by intense excitement among activists in the opposition party, it got trounced. What was surprising was how long it took for this story to emerge—right up until yesterday.
How dissatisfied was the electorate? According to the national exit poll, fifty-nine per cent of voters said that they were angry or disappointed with the Obama Administration. Seven in ten said that the economy is in bad shape, and just one in three said it is improving. Sixty-five per cent of respondents said that the country was seriously off-track. That last figure is twelve points higher than the equivalent finding in the exit poll taken during the 2012 Presidential election.
This toxic environment created the conditions for a classic midterm backlash against an unpopular President. Something very similar happened to George W. Bush, in November, 2006. What confused the picture this year was the strong and well-financed campaigns that Hagan and several other embattled Democrats ran, which allowed them to outperform the fundaments up until the last few days of the campaign, when things started to crater. Late last week, I noted that there were signs that the undecideds were breaking to the Republicans. But neither I nor anybody else picked up on the scale of what was happening.
All across the country, it was enough to sweep Republicans home. Naturally, the focus was on the Senate. But, as Scott Walker’s victory indicated, the G.O.P. also did very well in gubernatorial elections. In Florida, Rick Scott scraped by the ex-governor (and party turncoat) Charlie Crist, who had been leading in the polls for much of the year. In Michigan, Rick Snyder handily defeated his Democratic challenger, Mark Schauer. Even Kansas’s Sam Brownback, an irresponsible tax-cutter and budget-slasher who was, at one stage, so unpopular that it looked like he might be run out of the state, got reëlected.
The G.O.P. also scored some big pick-ups in governor’s races. In Maryland, the Republican businessman Larry Hogan came from well behind in the polls to defeat Anthony Brown, the state’s lieutenant governor. In Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman who was one of Bill Clinton’s principal tormentors during the Whitewater saga and the subsequent impeachment trial, emerged victorious. About the only good news for Democrats in governors’ races was a pick-up in Pennsylvania, where the kitchen-cabinet magnate Tom Wolf defeated Tom Corbett, the Republican incumbent, and in Connecticut, with what looked like a hold, as Dannel Malloy claimed victory over Tom Foley. (In the early hours of Wednesday, Foley was still refusing to concede defeat.) In Colorado, with ninety-two per cent of the vote counted as of this writing, the Democratic incumbent John Hickenlooper was running slightly ahead of the Republican Bob Beauprez.
And yet, despite all of this, it would be premature to call the 2014 election a major turning point. There’s little evidence that the country has taken a big swing toward the Republican Party’s ideology or policy positions, or, even, that it has any great liking for the G.O.P. The same exit poll that showed fifty-nine per cent of respondents were dissatisfied or angry with the Obama Administration found that sixty-one per cent of respondents were angry or disappointed with Republican leaders in Congress. It found that fifty-three per cent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party and that fifty-six per cent have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party.
As for policy, the exit poll showed that the economy remains the biggest issue, by far, in voters’ minds. Jobs and wages are what people care about most, and, in both of these areas, they tended to support Democratic positions. One quick example: at the same time as they were electing a Republican senator and a Republican governor, the voters of Arkansas approved, by a two-to-one margin, a raise in the state’s minimum wage.
We also shouldn’t forget that this was a midterm electorate, not a Presidential-election electorate. According to the exit poll, the number of seniors who voted yesterday was twice as large as the number of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds. In 2012, there were more young voters than seniors. I haven’t seen the final figures for the racial breakdown of yesterday’s electorate, but, according to the exit poll’s preliminary findings, the percentage of non-white voters was also down significantly from 2012. Come 2016, the 2012 demographic trends will almost certainly reassert themselves.
In short, this was a big protest vote, and a big defeat for President Obama. To that extent, it was a big victory for the Republicans. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader-elect, earned his moment of glory. (“It’s time to turn this country around—and I will not let you down,” McConnell told a group of cheering supporters relatively early in the evening, following his thumping of Grimes.) But if a “wave election” is one that signifies important changes in the underlying dynamics of the American electorate, then this wasn’t a wave election.
Read more analysis and commentary at our 2014 midterms hub.