The sight of Democratic spin doctors ahead of the US midterms preparing their troops for defeat by desperately distancing themselves from President Obama and acknowledging that they would lose the Senate, was a sure-fire indication things were going badly. Quite how badly, is another matter, and no amount of advance discounting was going to put a gloss on the bleakest of results.
The party got hammered, with Republicans boosting their Senate numbers to a comfortable majority of at least 52, and in the House looking set to run up more than the 426 seats won by the party last in the days of Harry Truman 60 years ago. Not least by dispatching the last white Democrats in the South. In the gubernatorial races Republican wins in the most politically significant contests – Wisconsin, Ohio, Maryland and Florida, in particular – were critical components of the GOP’s big night.
If the big loser in the prohibitive $4 billion election was an emasculated Obama, two years left in office and with his party deprived of a majority in either house for the first time since 2006, the big winner was Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky senator, currently Senate minority leader, romped home with a 15-point margin and will now fulfil his long-held ambition to become majority leader.
McConnell's triumph was all the sweeter because it comes in the wake of what many see as a decisive internal victory in the primaries by the Republican establishment over the Tea Party hard right. The balance of power has shifted in Congress significantly. "The inmates are no longer running the asylum," was how one Republican insider put it to the New York Times. "The adults are back in charge."
That reality is crucial to now preparing the ground for the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. Firstly, in removing toxic candidates who are grist to the Democratic depiction of their opponents as extremists. And secondly, because it should free McConnell and the party’s currently hog-tied congressional leadership to make some deals with Obama that may allow it boast at least some legislative achievements and remake perceptions of it as a purely negative, obstructive cornerstone of the despised Washington gridlock.
McConnell’s election night speech was clearly crafted in that perspective. “We do have an obligation to work together on issues on which we agree,” he told supporters in Louisville. “I think I’ve shown that to be true in critical times in the past. I hope the president gives me the chance to show it again ... Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict.”
More than a bit rich, given the party's obstructionist record, but this election has provided an opportunity to begin to rebrand the Republican Party, and the Senator from Kentucky intends to avail of it.