With just hours left before polls began closing Tuesday, Democratic and Republican candidates across the country were waging a fierce, state-by-state battle to turn out support from voters angry and frustrated over the dysfunction in Washington.
After spending months locked in loud and often bitter contests about the direction of the country under President Obama's leadership, national strategists for both parties conceded that the outcomes in a handful of razor-close Senate races would be determined by the composition of an electorate that pollsters have struggled to accurately predict. Republicans need to gain six seats to win control of the chamber.
'It's all over but the shouting,' Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said Tuesday morning in an interview from Florida. 'What matters now is who gets their people to the polls. We are kicking it into overdrive today. I think we're going to surprise a lot of pundits.'
Polling places began to fill up early, as voters arrived to cast their ballots in elections that will shape the balance of Mr. Obama's term and serve as the opening bell for another presidential campaign over the next two years.
As voters left the ballot box Tuesday, many said they had voted in the hopes of seeing something change in Washington. Others complained about gridlock in the capital, faulting Mr. Obama or Republicans for refusing to compromise.
'I think the Democratic policies are failing,' said Juan Neyra, 69, a retired security guard in Denver, who said he used to vote Democratic but this year voted for Senator Mark Udall's Republican opponent, Cory Gardner. 'Obama has not accomplished what he promised to the community. And Udall supports Obama.'
In Georgia, William Burke, 66, a retired lawyer, said he had voted for David Perdue, the Republican senatorial candidate. He said Michelle Nunn, the Democratic candidate, was simply running away from her true nature as a liberal.
'I don't object to her supporting Barack Obama,' Mr. Burke said. 'But she needs to stop pretending that she isn't.'
Nancy Prominski, 56, an independent voter in Salem, Mass., said she went to the polls on Tuesday with Mr. Obama's health care law at the front of her mind, and voted for Scott Brown, the Republican who is trying to unseat Senator Jeanne Shaheen.
'Nothing against Jeanne Shaheen, but if you both vote the status quo, it's not working,' Ms. Prominski said. 'Obama is not working and I don't support where he has the country headed. We're not a better country now. We're worse off.'
Referring to Mr. Obama, Ms. Prominski said, 'He's off base with the general population, and we need change. We're gridlocked, we can't do anything.'
In Connecticut, some polling places reported having to turn away early risers because the voting rolls had not arrived, but it was unclear how extensive the problem was. A spokesman for the campaign of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said it was requesting that the courts extend voting hours.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, cast his ballot in Louisville, Ky., as he looked toward the possibility that his Republican party would gain control of the Senate and make him the majority leader. Other candidates also began arriving at their polling places after last-minute handshaking at street corners.
In Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate for governor in, sent out a Twitter message declaring, 'Found 2 votes at our last house, now headed to Worcester!'
The two parties also arrived Tuesday at the end of long campaigns for House seats and governorships. The outcomes of several bitterly fought statehouse races in Florida, Wisconsin, Georgia and Texas promised to offer some insight into the frustrated mood of voters in some key battleground states ahead of the presidential contest in 2016.
For Republicans, the anticipation of victory Tuesday morning was clear, with the party's leaders openly betting that the election's results would offer a salve to them for Mr. Obama's back-to-back presidential wins.
'Victory is in the air,' Mr. McConnell said at a rally Monday.
Faced with many grim predictions of deep losses, Democrats entered the final day of Campaign 2014 hoping to somehow block a Republican takeover of the Senate and head off the prospect of two years of congressional investigations and presidential vetoes to block a conservative agenda.
The two parties faced the voters on Election Day against a backdrop of a steadily improving economy but also heightened anxiety among Americans about how the world's crises - Ebola, terrorists in the Mideast, economic uncertainty abroad - will affect them. But while polls have for months documented the public's dissatisfaction with Mr. Obama, there remained substantial questions about which politicians voters would punish for failing to make them feel more secure.
Desperately hoping to preserve its control of the Senate for the president's final two years in office, the Democratic Party focused its final, urgent push in Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina and several other states where their candidates must rely on a strong showing from women, minorities and young voters who twice helped to elect Mr. Obama.
In Denver and four other cities in Colorado, labor groups planned 10 hours of door-knocking in an effort to round up enough voters to send Senator Udall back to Washington for a second term. Across the country, the Democratic National Committee and other party groups prepared to deploy urgent voting reminders by telephone and text message. The committee employed paid staff in two dozen states in an effort to make sure that its supporters were not denied the right to vote Tuesday, officials said.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz said she had confidence in her party's extensive ability to identify its supporters, much the way Mr. Obama's campaign relentlessly targeted voters in 2008 and 2012.
'We're chasing absentee ballots, making phone calls, knocking on the doors and making sure that we use our sophisticated digital advantage to identify voters who haven't cast a ballot yet,' she said.
Republican activists and operatives pressed what analysts said was the party's strong advantage heading into Tuesday's voting by employing election-day tactics similar to those perfected by Mr. Obama's presidential campaigns. In 26 states, volunteers prepared for a final day of knocking on doors and placing last-minute calls to supporters who the Republican National Committee and other groups identified as unlikely to bother to vote.
'We've been very successful since changing our strategy to turning out low propensity voters before Election Day, and we expect a very good day,' said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the committee.
With several states apparently out of reach for Democrats, Republican activists focused their final-day push in places like Louisiana, Georgia, Alaska, Iowa and Colorado - states where winning was likely to put the party closer to full control of Capitol Hill. In Washington, Republican National Committee officials said they would monitor the efforts from a war room at the party's headquarters near the Capitol building.
Mr. Obama cleared his public schedule on Tuesday and prepared to hunker down at the White House after using the election's final weekend to campaign for the only Democratic candidates who wanted him: those in states that he easily carried in his two presidential campaigns. By contrast, Mr. Obama did not campaign over the weekend for his party's most endangered incumbents, who have sought to distance themselves from the president and his policies.
In North Carolina, however, Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, did start airing a radio ad on Monday featuring Mr. Obama in the hopes of motivating African-American voters. In the ad, the president says: 'Voting is easy, so stand with me, President Obama, and take responsibility in moving North Carolina forward by voting for Kay Hagan on Nov. 4.'
The president's aides predicted a blizzard of speculation after Tuesday's election about what message angry and frustrated voters were trying to send to Mr. Obama. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, on Monday explained that because many of the closest Senate races are taking place in conservative states that Mr. Obama lost in 2012, the outcomes of those contests will not say much about what the broader public thinks of Mr. Obama's policies.
'It would not be wise to draw as broad a conclusion about the outcome of the election as you would from a national presidential election,' Mr. Earnest told the reporters.
But the results of Tuesday's contests are likely to affect Mr. Obama's last two years in office, no matter how they turn out. The president is almost certain to face both a Senate and a House with greater numbers of Republicans. Observers in both parties said they expect the House speaker, John A. Boehner, to increase his majority slightly.
The political math in Washington could force Mr. Obama to seek compromises with Republicans on areas like trade, infrastructure spending and a corporate tax overhaul, as some advisers have suggested. Or it could deepen the gridlock in Washington as both sides turn their attention to the presidential campaigns.
Correction: November 4, 2014
from Google News http://#
via IFTTT
0 Response to "McConnell Victory Kicks Off an Election Night With High Republican Hopes"
Posting Komentar