When Republicans won a commanding midterm victory in 2010, President Obama decided, for multiple reasons, to accept the outcome as a blow to his own legitimacy. He conciliated Republican leaders. He adopted as his own the nominal goal of their economic agenda: deficit reduction. He set aside progressive tax increases, climate change mitigation, immigration reform—all the unfinished business of his first term.

This decision was a substantive disaster. It invited premature austerity, muzzled the economic recovery, and normalized, at least for a time, a cycle of legislative brinksmanship in which Republicans threatened to harm to the country—to shut down the government, withhold disaster relief, and default on the national debt—unless Obama agreed to more and more conservative policy objectives.

The concessions seemed then, and still seem to this day, like an error. But there was at least some logic to them. The Republican wave in 2010 was genuinely historic. In its wake, Obama had good reasons to wonder whether the voting public would still have his back if he resisted Republicans without giving their agenda a hearing. Counterfactuals are a tricky business, but as foolhardy as Obama’s 2011 strategy seems in hindsight, he and the Democrats recovered and won a satisfying victory in 2012.

None of that logic holds today. The past six years have given Obama no reason to believe Republicans are good faith bargaining partners. But even if they had, his political salvation, and the best interest of his allies isn’t in cutting conservative-leaning deals with the fully Republican Congress. It’s in the kind of partisan governing and campaigning he embraced after Republicans nearly sabotaged the economy in July 2011.

Republicans had an excellent night Tuesday. But they didn’t roar through the gates like they did in 2010. The argument that the 2014 Senate midterms, clustered heavily in the south and plains states, are a grand repudiation of a presidency that, while extremely productive, has been in check for four years, rings hollow.