Obama is betting that punting on immigration won't keep Democrats home on Election Day. Immigration gamble: Will it work?

Republicans had been licking their chops for weeks, hoping President Barack Obama would actually carry through on his immigration promise.

They had polled the issue in a handful of key races and come to a clear conclusion: If Obama circumvented Congress and acted alone this summer on immigration, conservative and independent voters would finally have an issue to rally behind and give the GOP a clear opportunity to nationalize the midterms in states where the president is deeply unpopular.


So Obama’s major reversal Saturday, announcing that he would not act alone on immigration until after the midterms, came as a huge sigh of relief for party operatives and candidates clinging to a tenuous Senate majority.

“We are talking about 2-, 3-point races,” one top Democratic official said Saturday. “And there is no evidence that an executive action could help in these specific states — and a lot of evidence that it could hurt.”

( Also on POLITICO: Obama disappoints, again)

The question, however, is will the delay work? The White House is betting control of the Senate will turn on more local issues and that its strategy of kicking the can down the road on immigration won’t keep its Democratic base at home on Election Day.

But there may have been little choice. Democratic Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Kay Hagan of North Carolina had already publicly broken with the White House and balked at Obama’s warnings that he’d act alone to overhaul his deportation policy of undocumented immigrants. Such a move almost certainly would have hurt other red-state Democrats, like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana and Mark Begich in Alaska. Plus, Democratic hopes of defeating Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky also would have been a much steeper climb, both sides acknowledged privately.

Obama was feeling the pressure from friendlier quarters as well. In recent days, even liberal Democrat Al Franken — whose seat in Minnesota remains a reach for the GOP — came out and asked the White House to hold off. With three Democratic seats already virtually lost — South Dakota, West Virginia and Montana — an electorate angry about immigration and Republicans railing about “amnesty” would have given the GOP a much easier path to pick up the other three seats it would need to take the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his leadership team strongly support Obama moving by executive action, but they did not want him to move before the election — though they declined to take a position publicly on the timing issue for fear of angering immigration advocacy groups. The day after Labor Day, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Reid’s chief of staff, David Krone, discussed the issue, and Krone told the White House that any delay would not be criticized by Senate leadership, sources said.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Obama said Saturday that political considerations over the Senate did not dictate his decision making, arguing his reversal occurred because the flood of unaccompanied children in the Southwest border forced him to recalibrate his tactics. “And you know, the truth of the matter is — that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem,” he said.

( See POLITICO’s full immigration coverage)

The main criticism Saturday came from immigration advocates — and Republicans. After the decision became public, Republicans said that the president’s decision to “conspire” on immigration with his party would only enrage the electorate. Brad Dayspring, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that Democrats would have Obama’s “executive amnesty threats hanging over their campaigns like a storm cloud” until November.

“The president and Senate Democrats are playing a cynical game, hoping that Americans paying attention now won’t be after the election,” Dayspring said. “And it will backfire.”

Even so, Democrats don’t want any polarizing issue to make their path even more difficult. And what has heartened Democrats is that despite an electoral map that runs through states that Obama lost in 2012, their candidates remain within the margin of error in most polls. That means they may pull off a handful of improbable wins and barely keep the Senate majority — if they can prevent a GOP wave from occurring.

“With so many races running neck and neck, delaying the executive action prevents the GOP’s right wing from getting even more revved up, and makes it easier for our candidates to win over the independent voters they need to be successful,” one Democratic aide said Saturday.

A wave could still ultimately occur. A stunning 70 percent of voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, with the GOP holding a 7-point advantage in voter confidence in finding the right solutions to fix the country’s problems, according to George Washington University’s battleground poll last week. But that same poll showed that the biggest reason why voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction is because they have “issues” with Obama — not because of one issue in particular.

That means that 2014 could be much different than the GOP wave of 2010, which occurred as a result of voter outrage over Obamacare, or the Democratic landslide in 2006, when the Iraq War was the prevailing issue. Democrats hope immigration doesn’t become that issue in 2014.

Even though Democrats believe they are on firm ground nationally on immigration during presidential cycles, this year’s elections will turn in states with a small percentage of Hispanic voters — other than Colorado. That means if they can keep immigration from becoming a rallying cry, they can hope that independent voters will be swayed by local issues and candidate gaffes — rather than Obama.

Still, immigration groups said they wouldn’t forget the flip-flop — and Democrats must hope that their progressive base won’t stay home this November.

“To paraphrase the revolutionary writer Thomas Paine, these politicians are simply sunshine opportunists, who expect Latino voters to support them in good times, but when the going gets tough, they abandon Latinos and their issues as fast as you can say piñata,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice.

John Bresnahan contributed to this report.