The Senate majority Obama leaned on the past six years is gone. How the Democrats lost the Senate

At a late October lunch, President Barack Obama looked across the table at Sen. Chuck Schumer. Wasn’t there anywhere else he could go to campaign?

Obama and his aides had felt for months that he wasn’t being used enough in the closely contested Senate races that would determine control of the chamber and the shape of his last two years in office.


Schumer didn’t jump at the president’s offer. According to a source familiar with the matter, the New York senator told Obama to ask the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The DSCC had already suggested Obama do a barrage of robocalls and radio interviews to help turn out black voters. But no visits to battleground states. Obama would have to watch from the White House.

( Full 2014 election results)

Now, the Senate majority Obama leaned on the past six years is gone.

Tuesday provided a stunning end to a campaign that saw Democrats unable to cope with both problems they’d long planned for and to capitalize on opportunities when they arose. They knew the 2014 map was horrible — Obama called it “the worst possible group of states for Democrats since Dwight Eisenhower.” They faced the “six-year itch” of Obama’s second term, when the president’s party traditionally gets pummeled.

State by state, the Democrats couldn’t get it together. There was the bitter feud between Democratic leaders over their candidate in South Dakota. A fumbled Democratic recruitment in Montana. A flawed Democratic candidate in Iowa who required multiple interventions. The surprising resiliency of Rep. Cory Gardner, who easily knocked off incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall in Colorado. An opponent to Sen. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky who never became the distracting challenge Democrats needed. And a failure to capitalize on a weak Republican in Georgia whose campaign couldn’t keep him from proudly embracing outsourcing.

( Also on POLITICO: GOP takes control of Senate in midterm rout)

It could have been worse, Washington Democrats say, if not for investments in field operations, bringing digital and research operations in-house, hiring key Obama campaign hands, as well as some luck with GOP candidate struggles in Michigan and Oregon.

Senate Republicans say they watched a lot of very careful preparations pay off in their Election Day romp — including the deliberate, don’t-mess-with-incumbents message they sent out of Mississippi and Wyoming. GOP opposition research hit pay dirt in a big way too as the National Republican Senatorial Committee uncovered plagiarism allegations against Democratic Sen. John Walsh in Montana.

Republicans also had a simple message: A vote for us is a vote against Obama. And Democrats were never able to escape it.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama to address midterm election results at White House)

Senate Democrats were furious after the Obamacare website debacle last fall swiftly wiped out all of the GOP brand destruction that happened during the government shutdown. That kicked off a year of bad news for Obama and his administration, including a scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs; the rise of ISIL in the Middle East, which led to U.S. soldiers heading back to Iraq and bombing attacks in Syria; the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the bungled administration response to concerns the deadly disease might spread to this country; a tidal wave of unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border; and the crisis over Russia’s actions in Ukraine raising the specter of a new Cold War.

All of these episodes kept Obama front and center in the news, exactly where Democrats on Capitol Hill didn’t want him.

( PHOTOS: Election Day 2014)

“On individual issues and tactics, we’ve done a really good job of responding,” said Guy Cecil, the DSCC’s executive director. “The challenge is that each of those individual issues put the president back in the center of the conversation and nationalized the election.”

At the White House, officials have their own gripes. Senate Democrats blundered time and again by being too frightened to do anything, mishandling their relationship with Obama, aides say, while candidates foolishly ran from a president they were going to be tied to anyway.

“These candidates tried to walk a tightrope between getting some distance from the president and trying to turn out his base,” said one senior aide the day before the election.

Obama’s “general view is: we as a party are better when we’re making an argument,” the aide continued. “For an array of reasons — some of which he’d agree with, some of which he wouldn’t — he was prevented from making that argument.”

( Also on POLITICO: Democratic govs look to hold on in Connecticut, Colorado)

Prominent Democrats outside the West Wing say this is an out-of-touch fantasy.

Yes, Obama did every political thing Democrats asked. But that’s because they didn’t ask for much; the White House political office was more of a scheduling and email text clearinghouse than a strategy center, and for all the West Wing’s insistence about misspent potential, most didn’t want Obama to do anything — except stop causing them problems.

They’re grateful for the fundraising Obama did for Senate Democrats — White House estimates put the total number at $100 million when counting everything the president and first lady did for all the committees and individual candidates. The DSCC pegs the share it got at just $25 million, barely enough to cover the budget for Colorado and Iowa alone.

They would have also been grateful had someone at the White House checked in about that early October speech at Northwestern University when Obama said the policies he was pushing for were on the ballot. Over at the White House, they still argue he was making the opposite point than the one that came across.

This account draws from multiple interviews with key Democratic and Republican officials involved in the decision-making that helped Republicans return to the Senate majority for the first time in eight years. They told the same story in the closing days of the races: This midterm cycle was run largely out of Washington, and was defined by missed opportunities.

REPUBLICANS PLAY HARDBALL

The NRSC wasn’t going to let itself drown under unprepared candidates again.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to turn that around. McConnell, along with the NRSC Chairman Jerry Moran, brought on board Rob Collins, an ex-aide to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) with extensive political experience, in January 2013 to run the committee. Collins, in turn, hired Brad Dayspring and Ward Baker as his communications and political directors, respectively.

For the NRSC, anything short of winning the majority would be a failure.

It wasn’t going to be easy. Republican pollsters were traumatized. Donors were spooked. The GOP senators themselves didn’t want to be teased with more promises of taking control.

But that’s what NRSC staff told them the plan was when they brought senators in for a closed-door meeting at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida in February 2013.

Hands went up. One of the first questions: How are you going to deal with incumbency? Aggressive defense or hands off?

Moran and Collins promised to play hardball.

Senate GOP leaders showed they were serious that summer in Wyoming, when Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, announced she was challenging incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi. Liz Cheney had done her time with the Republicans. There wasn’t anyone on the ground there, or back in Washington who didn’t know her father. Enzi wasn’t exactly a GOP superstar. And no matter what happened in the primary, the seat was safely Republican.

The NRSC unleashed a barrage of criticism and opposition research on Liz Cheney, going so hard after her that Dick Cheney started calling senators to complain. Liz Cheney eventually withdrew from the race, citing a family health issue.

This wasn’t lost on either the incumbents the NRSC was persuading to recommit and recruits they were trying to land.

Next up: Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi. The veteran lawmaker hadn’t committed to running again, and he faced a strong tea party challenger. Conservative outside groups had pounded Cochran with TV ads for weeks, aiming to boost Chris McDaniel, and the polls didn’t look good.

But building on its Wyoming experience, the NRSC and party establishment came in hard for Cochran.

“It put us on a path where we end up in Mississippi,” Collins said. “People would ask, ‘How did you get to that spot?’ We said, ‘We’re going to back incumbents to the hilt, and we’re not going to pull punches.’”

Behind the scenes, McConnell pressed K Street to pony up to Cochran. He sent an email to top donors and bundlers to let them know he was watching whether they were contributing to Cochran, campaign officials said. Between the primary and the runoff, the NRSC had its largest fundraiser ever at its headquarters, pulling in $820,000.

In an interview, McConnell said the Mississippi race was a “a critical point” in the battle for the Senate, saying he sent the message to his party that it needed to do everything it could to save Cochran. “I was quite vocal about it,” said the Kentucky senator.

McConnell said he had heard from a “lot of members” complaining about the “passivity” from the national party in dealing with primaries. Outside conservative groups trying to prop up their preferred candidates weren’t choosing the right horses.

“These were all well-meaning people, but they aren’t good at picking candidates,” McConnell said of the outside conservative groups. “In 2010, we just weren’t able to take advantage of a wonderful [environment] like we should have.”

NO TODD AKINS

Democrats toyed with the idea that they’d be able to make a race against McDaniel competitive, but what sparked McConnell’s fears most was that if the tea party candidate prevailed, he’d commit a gaffe in the general election that would haunt Republicans nationally.

“Imagine what kind of albatross that would have been for everybody around the country had that come out differently,” McConnell said.

There wasn’t going to be another Todd Akin moment, the NRSC insisted. There was going to be boot camp. And it was going to be rough.

NRSC trackers waited for the candidates at the airports. Training sessions were scheduled to start the next morning, but the ambushes started as soon as they poked their heads through the security doors.

Over the next two days, for eight hours a day, the candidates had to watch each other stumble, stammer, run from the cameras. They were drilled on policy, then had the cameras turned on them. They were briefed on common media mistakes, then had the camera turned on them. They were shown footage of Akin and Richard Mourdock making fools of themselves two years ago, then had the camera turned on them again.

All the major candidates were invited, including those in contested primaries. Deciding not to come: Greg Brannon in North Carolina, Reps. Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun in Georgia and Milton Wolf in Kansas. The only one who made it to November that skipped was Mike Rounds, the former governor of South Dakota, who repeatedly frustrated Republicans in Washington by rejecting advice to aggressively target his opponents.

Jon Kraushar, who does much of the on-camera training for Fox News, was there. Mitt Romney’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, briefed them on policy issues. CNN’s S.E. Cupp conducted mock interviews to help prepare them for the grilling they’d get from the media. Brett O’Donnell started with the debate prep he’d do for candidates throughout the cycle.

Every candidate had to watch all the other painful performances. NRSC-paid for opposition research was thrown at them. Then practice questions: Did you smoke pot in college? How much pot did you smoke? Were you ever arrested? To the moderate candidates: Sarah Palin just endorsed you — what do you have to say? To the conservatives: Sarah Palin just endorsed your opponent — what’s your response?

Mess up a question on abortion or on women, they were warned, and you won’t just sink yourself.

“We showed them all the footage, and then put a camera on them, and you’d be surprised how many people still blew it,” Collins said.

OBAMA VS. SENATE DEMOCRATS

Officials were mad at the White House that first Sunday in October, when David Axelrod said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Obama had made a mistake by saying his policies were on the ballot. That’s not what Obama was trying to say when they put the line in the script for the economic speech at Northwestern, and they’re sure their own old message guru knew it.

They rationalized: Joe Scarborough had just taken a shot at Axelrod for being the most partisan guy in Washington. So Axelrod took a swipe at the president to prove Scarborough wrong.

Go back and look at the speech, White House aides say. It says “these policies,” not “my policies.”

Schumer and Reid, Obama’s aides say, had been the ones pressing the president to give that speech in the first place. Nothing about the economic recovery was breaking through. Obama, who’d spent the past few months bouncing reactively from crisis to crisis, was supposed to help Democrats frame the election a little better, try to lift his own numbers at least a little.

White House aides say this was just the latest example of Senate Democrats misusing the president, whom their own polling puts up to 5 points higher than public numbers, thanks, they say, to their better sampling. That’s far, far off from the DSCC numbers, which show that all the way back in June, Obama’s favorable-unfavorable numbers were a very lopsided 28-61, and that by October his unfavorable were 9 points higher among suburban woman and 7 points higher among independents compared to October 2010.

Flying back from Chicago on Air Force One after Obama’s reelection victory speech in Chicago two years ago, White House senior aides David Plouffe and Dan Pfeiffer were already comparing vote totals from the night before with the 2014 map. The only surprises from then to now, aides say, were Colorado and Iowa.

Those are also the two states where they’re confident that Obama could have been a boost, if Udall and Bruce Braley hadn’t been so determined to run away from them. And those weren’t the only ones — Obama, who was keeping up with local election news on his iPad late at night, was still asking about what he’d be able to do on the ground to help pump voter turnout in the final weeks.

The numbers the campaigns were seeing on Obama left no question in their minds, or the DSCC’s that he should stay away from everywhere, including Colorado and Iowa.

As much as the White House says it deferred to individual field operations, they finished the midterms confused by some of the decisions those operations made.

They’re even more confused by Senate Democrats’ strategy, they say.

After the Obamacare website failure, they gave the Senate Democrats what they called a “permission structure” to stick it to the White House: pass whatever they wanted for whatever political points it would score for the incumbents, just make sure there were enough votes there to sustain Obama’s inevitable veto. The reason it didn’t happen, Obama aides say, is because Senate Democrats couldn’t get their candidates to agree on what to do — a vote that Mary Landrieu or Mark Begich, say, wanted to be able to boast about, wasn’t one Udall wanted to be on record for either way.

“If they had had those votes, it would have given a lot of the members who are in trouble, a distinguishing vote,” said one White House aide.

Democratic operatives say there’s no question the political benefits of avoiding bad votes far outweighed whatever flak they took for not passing anything. The White House believes this was a strategic mistake, and one that came out of deference to Cecil at the DSCC.

“We switched to a prevent defense — and we were already behind,” another White House aide complained.

But it was the immigration reform executive action debacle that has them really livid.

They blame Schumer for locking them into the end of a summer timeline, and Reid and Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) for piling on in a way that forced Obama into the Rose Garden to make the promise White House aides say now they didn’t think then that the president could keep. They didn’t want to be locked into the timeline, but once they were, they wanted leadership to keep its own 2014 members from jumping ship even as they got nervous around the border crisis over the summer.

“It’s fair to say leadership wanted it both ways,” a White House aide said.

It wasn’t until Sen. Angus King called White House chief of staff Denis McDonough that the White House went into crisis mode. If an independent from Maine couldn’t support the executive actions, they knew they had to make some changes. David Simas, the White House political director, asked Cecil for polling. Cecil gave him Iowa and Arkansas, showing how huge the gulf was between people who wanted immigration reform and people who didn’t want Obama marching forward on his own.

Senate Democratic operatives ridicule the White House’s claim that they changed course because of the Senate Democrats. But politically, they said, the decision was the right one — it would have had an impact on every one of the races within 3 points. Republicans go further: if Obama had signed the orders, the GOP would have picked up 12 seats.

DAKOTA DISASTER

South Dakota was a disaster for Democrats, particularly since former GOP Gov. Mike Rounds provided them with an opening in the race.

Rounds initially had seemed like an attractive candidate. Republicans started clearing the field for him in a primary, including signaling to Rep. Kristi Noem to stay away. John Thune, the popular Republican senator who defeated Tom Daschle in 2004, had a three-decade friendship with the former governor (the two even cut a deal in 2002 that allowed Rounds to run for governor and Thune to run for the Senate instead).

Everyone from McConnell to John Hoeven to Bob Corker made the pitch for Rounds to run, and he eventually got into the race.

But then Republicans heard from Rounds, too, as he repeatedly told them that he knew better than they did on how to run a Senate race.

Republican operatives in Washington say he ran a shoddy campaign and didn’t raise enough cash and failed to contrast his record with Democrat Rick Weiland and independent Larry Pressler. Rounds didn’t push back fast enough on a burgeoning controversy about his role in the state’s EB-5 immigration program, they believed. And Republicans in Washington thought his ad firm, Lawrence & Schiller, was ineffective.

In a series of tense confrontations, Rounds told the NRSC the money wasn’t coming in fast because donors long thought the race was a lock. He argued that South Dakotans didn’t like to see negative ads and that he knew what he was doing given his two gubernatorial victories.

“It’s like he was born on third base but thinks he’s hit a triple,” said one top Republican.

Thune, who communicated constantly with Rounds through the course of the campaign, credited Rounds with trying to be positive in his message. But he urged him to be “more aggressive,” and even dispatched key aides to help stabilize the ship as the race tightened in mid-October.

“He needed to get on offense,” Thune said. “They’ve been defining him for a long time and he was taking a lot of incoming fire and he started to return the fire.”

Eventually, he did take a sharper tone on the airwaves attacking Pressler and Weiland as Obama allies, bolstered by late NRSC cash to help stabilize the race. Rounds, in an interview, defended his approach.

“There is a real sensitivity on advertising that crosses the line,” Rounds said. “Negative ads do not work in South Dakota.”

Democrats had long before flubbed their chance to make the race competitive.

The problems on the Republican side seemed to make Democrats only more upset about their missed opportunity there. Democrats had botched their attempt to woo former Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin into the race. Last May, Reid and the DSCC were putting on a full-court press to recruit her, but she had a new baby and seemed hesitant about another bruising bid.

Reid reached out to Daschle, who said he’d help. Instead, within days, Weiland announced, with no heads-up to the DSCC.

When Weiland reached out to Daschle for advice, the former Senate Democratic leader encouraged his one-time aide and state director to run, saying, “I think you’d be great.”

Weiland’s announcement, and the process, kept Herseth Sandlin out of the race. And it ignited a sense of bitter betrayal from Reid, who blamed Daschle for going behind his back and costing Democrats the seat by supporting a weak candidate.

In an email, Daschle said he was always close to Weiland.

“I consider Stephanie a good friend,” Daschle said. “My support for Rick was based on our long-standing relationship. He is almost like a member of the family. I was not interested in blocking her candidacy.”

Yet other Democrats complained that they should have made a stronger push for Brendan Johnson, son of retiring Sen. Tim Johnson and a U.S. attorney in the state.

As the race began to heat up, Weiland was boosted with a $1 million ad reservation from the DSCC. But the DSCC pulled back from the state once polls showed that Weiland couldn’t win.

Weiland said “absolutely” the DSCC and the national party should have put resources in the state earlier, which could have made all the difference in an inexpensive media market. “I wish they would have been in a year ago,” Weiland said.

Asked how different the race would be if Herseth Sandlin had run against Rounds, one top Republican said in late October: “He’d be down by 15.”

Rounds ended up winning by 20 points.

DEMOCRATIC DUDS

After Max Baucus abruptly announced plans to retire, Democrats had a relatively thin bench in the state to choose from. One person on their shortlist was the gregarious former governor, Brian Schweitzer, a colorful and polarizing figure in the state. He had a frosty relationship with national Democrats, like Baucus and Sen. Jon Tester, but he had won two statewide races.

In June 2013, Schweitzer told Cecil that he was going to jump into the race. Schweitzer said he’d raised $1.5 million for governor’s races in the past and he knew full well what to do.

All he needed from national Democrats, Schweitzer said, were “three fundraising bitches” that could help him raise money.

But Schweitzer never jumped in, Republicans argue, because their opposition research scared off the former governor. While some of it came out, Democrats in Washington say, there was more.

Schweitzer did not return a call seeking comment.

Democrats knew Montana was always going to be tough, but having appointed Walsh would have at least forced the two parties to spend money there. The revelation that he plagiarized his master’s thesis—stumbled upon by NRSC researchers and leaked to The New York Times — sealed Walsh’s fate and took Montana off the map.

Slowly, that ate away at the Democratic strategy.

“The theory of the case was: We’ve got to keep a lot in play,” said Cecil. “It does not benefit us to take races off the map, and the key is keeping them close enough.”

In Iowa, a state Barack Obama won twice where the Democrats knew they had to hold on, Bruce Braley quickly proved he wasn’t going to make it easy.

Braley was so flawed a candidate that Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) flew in to Iowa on an emergency mission to work rooms with him, make small speeches, just to show him, step-by-step, how to actually do it. The DSCC forced a shake-up of his campaign. Reid did several interventions of his own.

Joni Ernst wasn’t the NRSC’s original choice for the Iowa race. The top staffers there come out from Eric Cantor’s world, and Mark Jacobs’ money and CEO background made him their kind of candidate.

Ernst, though, impressed the NRSC early. She was the only candidate who showed up twice for the candidate training. They noted too, with some admiration, that the America Rising tape of Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley griping privately about Sen. Chuck Grassley not being a lawyer — a definitive moment in the race, virtually everyone agrees — popped the same day that her hog castration commercial went live.

Braley eventually started using Democratic lines on women’s issues and the Koch brothers, and benefited from both. Going into the last week, he was telling an awkward joke about having lunch with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), also in town to help his campaign, and happening to get a can of Coca-Cola that said “Share a Coke with Amy”—all for the long wind-up to: “I would rather share a Coke with Amy than share the Koch brothers with Joni.”

Over in the White House, they were convinced through the end that Obama still had enough goodwill back in the state that launched him into the presidency that he could have done more—even with all the flack that the first lady took for repeatedly calling him “Bruce Bailey” at one of the two rallies she did for him.

Obama spent the last few weeks calling candidates, offering more help. Braley was on the list. He didn’t take Obama up on the offer, White House aides say.

Saturday night, Obama was triumphant in Detroit, pumping the crowd for Rep. Gary Peters, one of the party’s few bright spots in Michigan. He helped that night, along with radio ads and other targeted get-out-the-vote efforts, Peters and his staff felt.

But to the suggestion that Obama might have been able to show up more even there, the feeling among Peters staff was clear: Let’s not get carried away.

Standing in a corner of the Wayne State University gym before Obama arrived, Peters tried to be diplomatic.

“The president comes once,” he said, “that’s good.”