GOP on course to retain the House and possibly snatch the Senate – but will the outcome really make any difference to Obama?

In a rare moment of calm between crises over Ebola and Islamic State, a group of congressmen gathered on Capitol Hill to discuss something few Americans have had as much cause to contemplate: the outcome of next Tuesday’s midterm elections.



The private meeting of top Republican leaders from the House of Representatives concluded there was a golden opportunity. If opinion polling is to be believed, their party is poised not just to hang on to its majority in the lower chamber, but possibly seize control of the Senate, too, uniting both houses of Congress against a Democratic president for the first time in 20 years.

According to one participant at the meeting, held last month, most of those present urged a cautious response, such as aiming to pass moderate economic and tax reform legislation with bipartisan support and daring the White House to use its veto to oppose the new Republican agenda. Others in the party favour more combative assaults on Barack Obama’s healthcare reform and his environmental concerns over the Keystone oil pipeline, which he is likely to block.

Either way, they argue, the White House loses. “He’ll become the president of no,” another GOP congressman confidently told the Guardian, revelling in the prospect of reversing the insult that dogged House Republicans when they were the ones blocking Democratic legislative efforts.

Such confidence may yet prove premature. The same polling suggests races in the six or so swing states that Republicans must win to take control of the Senate are still very much up for grabs, which could make for a nailbiting finish on Tuesday. Most election modelling suggests it will turn on a handful of races in states such as Colorado and Iowa. The tension could last for weeks if runoff elections are required in Georgia and Louisiana.

But what is more surprising is how little of this drama appears to have yet caught the American public’s attention. Television networks have largely avoided midterm coverage altogether, according to a recent study which found only handful of evening news stories in the closing weeks of the campaign. ABC’s primetime newscast went 137 days without mentioning the elections at all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Senate minority Leader Mitch McConnell campaigns in Kentucky. Can the GOP wrest control of the upper house from the Democrats? Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

In midterm elections that are typically determined by persuading party faithful to turn out rather than converting waverers, like in a presidential race, such apathy could be disastrous for Democrats in Congress and Obama, who warned supporters the country could be sleepwalking towards a Republican Senate during a recent radio interview.

“The truth is that in most of these states and most of these congressional districts, if we have high turnout, we win, and when we have low turnout, we lose,” Obama warned interviewer Al Sharpton last week. “It’s as simple as that.”

Democrats have been anxious since the campaign began about what one strategist described as “playing on Republican turf”, but the party’s sliding poll numbers in once safe seats such as Colorado has spooked even optimists in recent days and suggests efforts to rally the base are not yet working.

Midterms rarely capture the imagination in the way presidential races can, but Obama’s own low approval ratings mean his party has also had to appeal to fear (of a Republican Senate) rather than the message of hope that characterised his election wins.

Another, perhaps more insidious, reason for the lack of political engagement among Democrats may be the consensus that appears to have formed among Washington’s opinion-makers that the midterms don’t matter.

After all, goes the argument, it is not as if Obama was getting much done beforehand. A Republican majority in one chamber of Congress has proved quite enough to stifle much of his second-term policy agenda already: from immigration reform to gun control. And since Republicans are still highly unlikely to ever command the two-thirds majority in both chambers needed to override a White House veto, they won’t be able to impose their own will on him either, so what does it matter who causes the gridlock to continue?

Divided government is also not new, they point out. The so-called “Republican revolution”, which delivered control of Congress to Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole in 1994, lasted most of Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, while an ailing George W Bush lost control during his last midterm election, just as Obama might.

But the perception that Obama is especially unable to reach accommodation with Republicans has injected an extra dose of cynicism into the debate this year.

Chuck Todd, host of the beltway establishment’s favourite political chatshow, Meet the Press, asked Obama outright during his previous television interview in September: “What’s the rationale for this election? What’s the difference between a two-seat Democratic majority and a two-seat Republican majority as far as your agenda is concerned?”

Unfortunately, the answer given by the president, that there is a “sharp difference between the Democratic agenda and the Republican agenda”, was undermined a few days later when Obama decided to postpone executive action on immigration reform – perhaps the sharpest point of differentiation between the parties – for fear of damaging the prospects for vulnerable Democrats.

With less to choose between the parties, particularly in close-fought “purple” states where moderate Democrats have often shied from controversy, voters might be tempted to take the same cynical view of the importance of this year’s midterms as some commentators.

But if anything should rouse the electorate from its slumber, it should be the realisation that the rich and the powerful take a very different view of the importance of controlling Congress, at least judging by where they are spending their money.

Recent analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which scrutinises campaign finance disclosures, projects that total fundraising this cycle will smash all records for a midterm election, reaching nearly $4bn.

Outside interests groups, who don’t have to disclose their donors but are thought to include many conservative business interests, account for $900m of this alone, nearly as much as the 2012 election, which included a presidential race on top.

For wealthy business donors such as the Koch brothers and Washington’s army of lobbyists, control of the Senate brings at the very least the prospect of more sympathetic Republican chairman of key committees such as banking and judiciary, which determine how corporate America is regulated.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Clinton campaigns for Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

More ideologically driven conservatives also see capturing Congress as a vital staging post on the march to retake the White House in the 2016 presidential elections, at which point more radical dismantling of the Obama legacy can take place.

Whether they can do as well in Congress in two years’ time is doubtful, making this the last big chance. The same quirk of the six-year Senate cycle which makes this election particularly tricky for incumbent Democrats will be reversed in 2016 when many vulnerable Republicans will be up for re-election.

And the fact that only one third of Senate seats are contested each cycle means that the battle for overall control can come down to a remarkably small number of races.

While voters might not be getting much coverage from network news bulletins, those unlucky enough to live in the dozen of so battleground states are seeing the impact of that $4bn in a blizzard of campaign advertising – with up to seven negative political ads recorded during just one commercial break in Iowa during the David Letterman show last week.

Similarly fierce battles are taking place for a handful of key state governor races, with both parties acutely aware that devolved federal powers puts candidates such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin on the frontline of the some of biggest political decisions.

Sweeping the US Senate and several key governor races at once would put Republicans firmly back in the driving seat, it seems, even if they don’t manage to persuade Obama to sign all their legislation. The rest of the America might be able to watch David Letterman or the Ebola crisis in peace, but it doesn’t mean the midterms won’t affect them.