The 2014 midterm elections were a referendum on Barack Obama’s performance as president. He has done a bad job, and most Americans know it. Accordingly, the American people used the only means they had of making good their disapproval: They elected Republicans.
The president’s standing in the states with major Senate battles was uniformly terrible. The media conducted exit polls for 10 of the 11 Senate races where the GOP won or nearly won Democratic-held seats. Obama’s job approval ranged from 23 percent in West Virginia to 43 percent in New Hampshire, with an average of just 37 percent. Republicans won on average 72 percent of the anti-Obama vote, and in most states 80 percent.
It helped that Republicans challenging Democratic Senate incumbents made few gaffes, unlike several candidates in 2010 and 2012 whose blunders ceded winnable seats to Democrats. The only place where candidate quality seems to have damaged a Republican challenger was New Hampshire, where 52 percent of voters said Scott Brown, from neighboring Massachusetts, had not lived in the state long enough. Those voters went for Jeanne Shaheen by 89-10 percent. As for Virginia, Ed Gillespie displayed no obvious weaknesses and took bold policy positions on health care. But he was enormously outspent, and the national party failed to see the potential for a pickup before it was too late.
At this writing, ballots are still being counted in Alaska, and Louisiana will hold a runoff in December. But it appears the Republicans, when all is said and done, will have picked up 9 Senate seats, giving them a majority of 54-45.
This Senate majority will be as large as the one seated in 1995, but much more conservative. That year, the Republican caucus included many nominal, moderate, or otherwise unreliable Republicans, notably John Chafee of Rhode Island, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, and Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas. Some such Republicans remain—Frank Murkowski was succeeded by Lisa Murkowski—but their numbers have shrunk. My informal count has them declining from about 15 in 1994 to less than half a dozen today. The group of solid conservatives, meanwhile, has grown. The Senate already had many such members, like Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Tim Scott. But now they are set to be joined by Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, and Joni Ernst. My back of the envelope calculations suggest that the number of solid conservative senators has risen from about a dozen in 1995 to 20 or so today.
As for the House, ballots are still being counted, but Republicans should exceed their high-water mark there since the Great Depression. According to exit polls, they will have done so by winning about the same share of the vote they carried in 2010. The reality for Democrats in the House is that a majority is probably foreclosed to them until 2019 at the earliest. Neither party’s presidential nominee has had much in the way of coattails when running for a third consecutive term. So even if the Democrat wins the White House in two years, the GOP is strongly favored to keep the House through the 2016 elections.
The races for governors’ mansions provided some real drama. Surprising Republican pickups in Illinois and Maryland and surprising holds in Florida, Kansas, and Maine gave Republicans a slight edge. But in state legislatures, Democrats were eviscerated. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that Democrats will hold fewer state legislative seats than at any time in nearly a century. Among GOP highlights: Republicans picked up the state house in West Virginia and tied the state senate; they won both chambers of the Nevada legislature; they won the New Hampshire and Minnesota houses; and they reclaimed the New York senate.
What do these results tell us about 2016? Pundits note that a midterm blowout for the out party often fails to yield a big victory two years later (the Democratic sweep of 1986, for instance, was followed by the Republican triumph of 1988). Similarly, a good showing by the incumbent party in a midterm is no guarantee the party will hold the White House in 24 months (thus, Democrats held the line in 1978, two years before Jimmy Carter was ridden out on a rail; George W. Bush defeated Al Gore just two years after Democrats defied historical norms to pick up House seats in 1998).
Moreover, Democrats rightly note that the electorate will be different in 2016. It will be younger and less white. Can Republicans win it? The answer is yes, but they have to improve their performance with key voting blocs.
Democrats invariably overstate historical trends when they argue that midterm elections favor Republicans. Hardly true—look no further than 2006 or 1998. And this points to the anxiety that Democrats should have moving forward. Since Obama emerged on the national scene, the Democrats have largely given up trying to reclaim white, working-class voters, especially in the Border South and Midwest, leaving them for Republicans to poach. Obama has emphasized turnout and mobilization of new nonwhite voters—rather than persuasion of voters the Democrats have lost.
The problem for Democrats is that so far only Barack Obama has proved able to make this coalition a winner. Indeed, the exit polls show that the 2014 electorate was less white than any midterm electorate in history. Yet Republicans roughly matched their 2010 share of the nationwide vote for the House. They did slightly better among nonwhite voters than in 2010 and substantially better than in 2008 or 2012. According to exit polls, House Republicans won a little more than 26 percent of nonwhite voters, up from 18 percent in 2008 and 2012. Combine that with 60 percent of whites, and you get the GOP’s comfortable -victory of 2014. If they hold, these shares will probably yield victory, though a narrower victory, in the 2016 general election.
Nationwide, House Republicans took half the Asian vote, a marked improvement from the last several cycles. Moreover, they won 36 percent of Latino voters, an 8-point improvement over Mitt Romney’s performance (but still trailing George W. Bush’s haul in 2004). Unfortunately, the exit polls in Colorado do not break down the nonwhite vote, but it looks as though Republican Cory Gardner did about as well with Latinos as House Republicans did nationwide. Ditto Rick Scott in Florida. In Texas, Greg Abbott won 44 percent of Latino voters, and even a narrow majority of Latino men. There was no exit poll in Nevada, but Governor Brian Sandoval (the first Hispanic elected statewide in Nevada when he won the attorney general’s office in 2002) took 70 percent of the total vote, which implies an extremely strong showing among Latinos.
What about African Americans? Nationwide, the black vote reverted roughly to the pre-Obama mean. Turnout among African Americans was about the same as in 2010 (12 percent), and Republicans won an estimated 10 percent of their vote. Squaring off against Obama, John McCain and Romney managed only 4 percent and 6 percent, respectively.
Still, Republicans have a lot of work to do with nonwhite voters. Opponents of the “Emerging Democratic Majority” thesis, like me, have never disputed that the demographics of the electorate are shifting. Quite the contrary: The demographics of America have always been shifting—since the first new immigrant group, the Scots-Irish, began arriving on our shores decades before the revolution was fought. But as demographics shift, so do political coalitions. This gives Republicans openings to make inroads with new voting groups. Moreover, we are still having the same fight about government—bigger or smaller?—that we have been having since the 1790s. The changing composition of the electorate has not altered that one whit.
Though demography need not be destiny, it is up to strong, smart Republican candidates and strategists to “defy” it. They have much work to do, not just with Latino voters but also with African-American voters, who are often overlooked in Republican conversations about the American political balance.
Unfortunately, there was only one Republican standout on the African-American vote this cycle: John Kasich, Republican governor of Ohio, carried 26 percent of the black vote on his way to a landslide reelection. In some of the most contested races—the Georgia and North Carolina Senate battles, for instance—Republicans won an even smaller share of the black vote than House Republicans nationwide. In the Tar Heel State, Republican Thom Tillis carried just 4 percent of African Americans. These are terrible numbers for Republicans, and they should be flashing “Red Alert” signs
in the halls of Congress and the offices of the Republican National Committee.
The black vote is not part of the demographic shift that is altering the Democratic party. The African-American share of the U.S. population has remained relatively constant, around 13 percent. Its power in recent electoral cycles has come from enhanced turnout for Barack Obama (from about 11 percent of the electorate in 2004 to 13 percent in 2008 and 2012) and especially the shrinking of the share won by Republicans (from 11 percent for George W. Bush to about 5 percent for subsequent GOP presidential candidates).
The shift in the black vote is often overlooked in the story of Obama’s success, but this is a mistake. The parties are so closely matched in the battleground states—Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia—that even modest movement in their black electorates can be decisive. Even if the black vote returns to its slightly more GOP-friendly historical trend line when Obama is no longer on the ballot, Republicans need to understand that the old status quo is still terrible for them.
Conservatives sometimes respond that they are disinclined to cater to blacks as a group because they prefer to construct policies for the whole country. This claim does not withstand scrutiny. Republicans boost all sorts of groups or interests—farmers, small businesses, families with children, students, seniors, and so on. Republican leaders often propose and adopt programs with particular groups in mind. Why not African Americans? The black experience in the United States is unique, and uniquely difficult. Take one example: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment-population ratio among whites is 60 percent; among African Americans it is 55 percent. And black employment at its recent peak in the late 1990s was only as high as white employment has been during the present prolonged jobs recession. So among African Americans, the jobs recession is decades old.
If Republicans are sweating their margins in presidential elections in those critical swing states—and they should be—it is past time for them to think seriously about the challenges facing black America, craft a salable agenda to address those unique problems, and—most important—invest political capital in enacting it. Republicans haven’t committed fully to this since the 1950s, when Dwight Eisenhower took a strong and politically risky stand for blacks in Arkansas in 1957 and signed civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960. Not coincidentally, Ike was the last Republican president to perform reasonably well with African Americans. The time for GOP lip service to black voters is over.
The good news is that the election results vindicate a slew of Republican governors who have been smart innovators and might be able to think creatively about this issue should they run for president. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and John Kasich in Ohio all won solid reelection victories Tuesday night. Add to them Rick Perry in Texas, Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, and Mike Pence in Indiana, and it is undeniable that the GOP has a slate of seasoned executives who could produce a fantastic presidential nominee capable of fresh thinking. Moreover, the Senate Republicans are increasingly distinguished, and several conservatives among them could make formidable presidential contenders.
The Democratic bench, by contrast, was further depleted in the midterms. Hillary Clinton stands as a potentially strong nominee, but apart from her the Democratic roster looks thin—both for the time being and in the foreseeable future. Democrats will have only 17 governors, a grim number (though results are not final in two states at this writing). Governorships are the minor leagues for presidential candidates. The best of the best hone their skills there before making a run for the pennant.
Two years in politics is a lifetime. A new recession could sweep out the last vestiges of the once supposedly “enduring” Democratic majority. Or an economic boom could give the president’s party a new lease on life. Either way, there is more work for the GOP to do. Fortunately, the leadership class in the party is stronger than it has been in decades, and there are good reasons to believe it is up to the challenge.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
