Tuesday, November 4, 2014

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Last-Minute Midterm Election Push by Both Parties - New York Times




Slide Show|6 Photos

Voters Head To the Polls



Voters Head To the Polls


Todd Heisler/The New York Times






Democratic and Republican candidates across the country are waging the final moments of a fierce, state-by-state effort to turn out their supporters on Tuesday even as voters begin lining up at the polls to express their anger and frustration at the dysfunction and paralysis in Washington.


After spending months locked in loud and often bitter contests about the direction of the country under President Obama’s leadership, national strategists for both parties conceded that the outcomes in a handful of razor-close Senate races would be determined by the composition of an electorate that pollsters have struggled to accurately predict. Republicans need to gain six seats to win control of the chamber.



“It’s all over but the shouting,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said Tuesday morning in an interview from Florida. “What matters now is who gets their people to the polls. We are kicking it into overdrive today. I think we’re going to surprise a lot of pundits.”




Play Video|2:09

How to Watch Election Night



How to Watch Election Night



David Leonhardt, editor of The Upshot, offers an animated look at the six states to watch as Democrats try to beat the odds and maintain control of the Senate.


Video by Aaron Byrd and Emily B. Hager on November 3, 2014.

The two parties also arrived Tuesday at the end of long campaigns for House seats and governorships. The outcomes of several bitterly fought statehouse races in Florida, Wisconsin, Georgia and Texas promised to offer some insight into the frustrated mood of voters in some key battleground states ahead of the presidential contest in 2016.


For Republicans, the anticipation of victory Tuesday morning was noticeable, with the party’s leaders openly betting that the election’s results would offer a salve to them for Mr. Obama’s back-to-back presidential wins.


“Victory is in the air,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, said at a rally Monday as he prepared to face voters in his bid for re-election. Mr. McConnell is poised to become the Senate majority leader if his party wins enough seats on Tuesday.


Faced with many grim predictions of deep losses, Democrats entered the final day of Campaign 2014 hoping to somehow block a Republican takeover of the Senate and head off the prospect of two years of congressional investigations and presidential vetoes to block a conservative agenda.


The two parties faced the voters on Election Day against a backdrop of a steadily improving economy but also heightened anxiety among Americans about how the world’s crises — Ebola, terrorists in the Mideast, economic uncertainty abroad — will affect them. But while polls have for months documented the public’s dissatisfaction with Mr. Obama, there remained substantial questions about which politicians voters would punish for failing to make them feel more secure.


Desperately hoping to preserve its control of the Senate for the president’s final two years in office, the Democratic Party focused its final, urgent push in Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina and several other states where their candidates must rely on a strong showing from women, minorities and young voters who twice helped to elect Mr. Obama.


In Denver and four other cities in Colorado, labor groups planned 10 hours of door-knocking in an effort to round up enough voters to send Senator Mark Udall back to Washington for a second term. Across the country, the Democratic National Committee and other party groups prepared to deploy urgent voting reminders by telephone and text message. The committee employed paid staff in two dozen states in an effort to make sure that its supporters were not denied the right to vote Tuesday, officials said.


Ms. Wasserman Schultz said she had confidence in her party’s extensive ability to identify its supporters, much the way Mr. Obama’s campaign relentlessly targeted voters in 2008 and 2012.



“We’re chasing absentee ballots, making phone calls, knocking on the doors and making sure that we use our sophisticated digital advantage to identify voters who haven’t cast a ballot yet,” she said.


Republican activists and operatives pressed what analysts said was the party’s strong advantage heading into Tuesday’s voting by employing election-day tactics similar to those perfected by Mr. Obama’s presidential campaigns. In 26 states, volunteers prepared for a final day of knocking on doors and placing last-minute calls to supporters who the Republican National Committee and other groups identified as unlikely to bother to vote.


“We’ve been very successful since changing our strategy to turning out low propensity voters before Election Day, and we expect a very good day,” said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the committee.


With several states apparently out of reach for Democrats, Republican activists focused their final-day push in places like Louisiana, Georgia, Alaska, Iowa and Colorado — states where winning was likely to put the party closer to full control of Capitol Hill. In Washington, Republican National Committee officials said they would monitor the efforts from a war room at the party’s headquarters near the Capitol building.


Mr. Obama cleared his public schedule on Tuesday and prepared to hunker down at the White House after using the election’s final weekend to campaign for the only Democratic candidates who wanted him: those in states that he easily carried in his two presidential campaigns. By contrast, Mr. Obama did not campaign over the weekend for his party’s most endangered incumbents, who have sought to distance themselves from the president and his policies.


In North Carolina, however, Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, did start airing a radio ad on Monday featuring Mr. Obama in the hopes of motivating African-American voters. In the ad, the president says: “Voting is easy, so stand with me, President Obama, and take responsibility in moving North Carolina forward by voting for Kay Hagan on Nov. 4.”


The president’s aides predicted a blizzard of speculation after Tuesday’s election about what message angry and frustrated voters were trying to send to Mr. Obama. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, on Monday explained that because many of the closest Senate races are taking place in conservative states that Mr. Obama lost in 2012, the outcomes of those contests will not say much about what the broader public thinks of Mr. Obama’s policies.


“It would not be wise to draw as broad a conclusion about the outcome of the election as you would from a national presidential election,” Mr. Earnest told the reporters.


But the results of Tuesday’s contests are likely to affect Mr. Obama’s last two years in office, no matter how they turn out. The president is almost certain to face both a Senate and a House with greater numbers of Republicans. Observers in both parties said they expect the House speaker, John A. Boehner, to increase his majority slightly.


The political math in Washington could force Mr. Obama to seek compromises with Republicans on areas like trade, infrastructure spending and a corporate tax overhaul, as some advisers have suggested. Or it could deepen the gridlock in Washington as both sides turn their attention to the presidential campaigns.









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