Yesterday’s midterms gave full control of Congress to the Republicans. The Democrats lost the Senate, where they had held a majority for eight years, and fell even further back in the House. It leaves Barack Obama as something of a lame duck president for his final two years, and makes meaningful legislative change in the United States almost impossible to achieve for either party and, while consequences for 2016 are difficult to determine at this point, the Democrats do not have much to cling to right now. But why did this happen?

The campaigns

Republican candidates raised more money than their Democrat opponents and outspent them too. In the House, the average Republican raised $1.2m and spent $930,000; Democrats averaged $0.95m and $790,000. That’s almost 25 per cent more raised and over 15 per cent more spent by the Republicans. This is a substantial difference, but neither party can complain that they did not have enough money to reach out to the bulk of the electorate if they spent wisely.

As it is, both parties instead overindulged in a negative campaigning. Even in the race in my local area for delegate for the Maryland state house, the Republican candidate put out a series of negative ads about his opponent. At the county level, both parties sought to portray their opponents in a negative light. Nationally, both Democrats and Republicans have plummeted to new depths. The net result, of course, was to further alienate already disenchanted would-be voters. That being said, the overall turnout is expected to have been higher than in the last two midterms.

At the grassroots level, the Democrats were better organised than the Republicans. This was reflected in the amount of money raised from small donors, but also in the number of campaigners each party got out in the run-up to the election knocking on doors and making phonecalls. Since 2008, the Democrats have also been markedly better at exploiting social media. Although the GOP improved online campaigning, even outplaying its opponents in a number of districts and states outplayed their opponents, the Democrats nevertheless maintained its advantage in terms of the reach and professionalism of their internet activity.

Democrat apathy

Nonetheless, while there were more Democrats volunteers across the US, registered Democrat voters did not turn out in as high numbers, while the Democrat base was largely apathetic. Many of those who might perhaps have been counted on to support the party – notably minorities such as Hispanics who feel Democrats have let them down on immigration reform – did not make the effort to do so, including on polling day.

Republican motivation

This election was mainly about someone who is not even running. The president has become a liability for the Democrats, and the key Republican platform was an anti-Obama one. This is where we really begin to get to the heart of why the Republicans were able to retake the Senate. Obama’s approval ratings were at -14 points going into the final week. Part of this, no doubt, is that there has always been a strong core of the electorate who believe that Obama should never have been allowed to have been elected president because he is black, because they believe he is a Muslim, or because they think he is a socialist whose sole aim is to erode the central tenets of the America nation.

Executive competence

Much more important, however, is the widespread feeling that the Obama administration is incompetent. One of the key issues that cost the Democrats the election is not that Obama introduced the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), but that the implementation was so shoddy. The party had hoped that, as the blips in the early roll out of Obamacare were ironed out, the president’s popularity would increase, and by the end of March some polls were showing 49 per cent in favour. But the optimism steadily declined since then – not least as a result of continuous chipping away by the GOP – and every poll in the last month has shown strong majorities against the ACA of around 15 per cent.

There are other reasons too why Obama is portrayed as someone who just can not get things done. He has very low approval ratings on gun control and immigration, despite these being areas where a majority of the electorate agrees with him. Obama wants to regularise illegals already in the country while tightening border controls, and he would love to see tighter gun restrictions on a federal level. On both these issues he is tune with the country as a whole. A key reason Democrats have turned against the president is because he has failed to deliver what they wanted.

Polarisation of voters

Fundamentally, Obama is a middle way politician in a country that is in the depths of a political civil war. For many, if not most Americans, Obama has either let them down by failing to bring about reform, or he has changed so much that America is no longer recognisable. This is true in both the domestic sphere as in foreign policy: America is divided on whether Obama hitting back against Islamic State is too late or too much; it is divided on the what the appropriate response should be to Ferguson and mass shootings in schools; it is divided on political corruption and the economy; and it is divided on social issues like abortion. And on issues such as gay marriage, while some see Obama as a civil rights hero, others decry him for fiddling while Rome burns. Those who voted were more ideologically polarised than the electorate as a whole, but those who voted for the Republicans were more ideologically motivated, more angry, more frustrated, more vengeful by some considerable degree than those who voted Democrat. And they won.

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Photo: Kynan Tait