Analysis: President Obama now needs all his oratorical powers

Barack Obama will need all his great oratorical powers to explain the Republican wins over Democrats in the US midterms elections that exceed the "shellacking" he once said the party suffered in 2010.

Yesterday was a drubbing. A Republican sweep won control of the Senate from Democrats, increased the party's majority in the House of Representatives to the biggest lead in generations and elected governors in true-blue Democratic states such as Maryland and Illinois.

Obama could be on track to see his party record the biggest losses in the House of any presidential term since Harry Truman.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the pain has not ended. Alaska, where results lags the rest of the country because of its size and timezone, may send another Republican senator to Washington.

Sitting Democrat Mary Landrieu in Louisiana was beaten by Republican challenger Bill Cassidy but faces another battle in a run-off early next month because no candidate in a multi-horse race achieved more than 50 per cent of the vote.

US congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito became the first Republican elected to the Senate from West Virginia since 1956.

The fact that Republican Ed Gillespie ran Democratic senator Mark Warner, one of Virginia's most popular politicians for a decade, so close in an unexpectedly tight race that the polls missed illustrates the sweep the GOP enjoyed.

Republican dominance in Congress, not seen on this level since the first half of the last century, will lead to more paralysis in Washington, if that were possible given the deep fissures between Democrats and Republicans that have brought the legislative machine to a standstill.

These elections became a referendum on Obama, his presidency and the direction he was taking the country as voters punished Democrats over their deep frustration with the political system. Republicans won the closest races by berating their opponents over their association with Obama whose approval ratings are near the lowest of his presidency.

In humiliating defeats for Obama, Democrats lost in Colorado and Iowa, states that he won in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, and in North Carolina, which he won once. These states had appeared to lean Democrat in this election cycle but ultimately turned Republican.

Significantly, these states - along with Florida where a Republican governor came from behind to see off a strong, big-spending Democratic - are important states in the race for the White House.

Democrats lost Mark Pryor's seat in Arkansas, the home state of former president Bill Clinton, one of most popular Democrats, and even the governor's seat in the president's home state of Illinois.

“It was a wave,” said one Democratic insider in Washington. “Good people lost with numbers even their worst polls never had it at.”

Even the star pulling power of Clinton and his wife Hillary, the probable Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, wasn’t enough to help the party’s candidates in Obama’s absence from tight Senate races.

Of the 66 candidates the Clintons stumped for, 35 lost in the elections and results had not been called in 12 races, including Louisiana, according to an analysis by ABC News.

Not missing a beat - and pointing to the next big election fight ahead - Kentucky senator Rand Paul, a GOP presidential contender in 2016, said Tuesday's biggest loser was Hillary Clinton. He posted photos of the former first lady with unsuccessful Democratic candidates from the campaign on social media with the subject line "HillaryLosers."

Mitch McConnell, buoyant on his own re-election in Kentucky and poised to become the Senate majority leader for the Republicans, said that the midterm elections were not about him or his opponent but about the fact that “people no longer trust” the government.

While the Republicans won big, it should be noted that the victories came in an unusually high number of conservative, Republican-leaning states and some of the most competitive races were in states where long-standing Democratic incumbents did not seek re-election.

Democrats suffered disproportionately due to the smaller number of younger, minority voters who tend to sit out midterm elections and to the higher number of white, older people who vote Republican.

Still, Obama, given his unpopularity, put his fellow Democrats on the back foot by tying him to their electorate fates. In a speech that kicked off his midterm election campaign last month, the president told an audience that while he was not on the ballot, his policies were.

He followed this up in a radio interview saying that Democrats in Republican-leaning states may not be willing to appear with him at campaign events but they have “supported my agenda in Congress.”

The New York Daily News cruelly played on Obama's famous 2008 "Hope" election campaign poster on the tabloid's front page today, saying that "his hope turned to," in a big headline, "NOPE."

In control of the Senate and the House, Republicans can compound Obama’s lame-duck status and make the president’s final two years in the White House tortuous with powerful Congressional committees questioning all aspects of the government’s executive branch.

The party is likely to push for the controversial Keystone oil pipeline running from Canada to Texas to be approved and may try to unpick Obamacare, the landmark healthcare legislation of his first term.

McConnell, however, offered hope of a solution to the inter-party gridlock when he said in his victory speech: “Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict.”

The president reciprocated by inviting Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate and House to a meeting at the White House on Friday afternoon. Republicans, who are themselves deeply divided along moderate-conservative lines, must show that they can govern if they are to recover to mount a viable challenge for the presidency.

"Great night, folks," Brendan Buck, former spokesman for Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, said on Twitter last night. "Now let's not totally screw it up."