Campaign 2014's final hours
- Written by Editor
- Published in News Feeds
Democratic and Republican leaders made their final pleas for votes Monday as the 2014 midterm elections hurtled to a close with enormous swaths of the political battleground still up for grabs.
Public polling showed a huge number of competitive races – for the Senate, House and various governorships – remain in the toss-up category with little more than 24 hours left in the campaign season.
Continue Reading
Republicans, however, remain strongly confident of their prospects for expanding their majority in the House of Representatives and taking control of the Senate. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s Republican leader, declared that “victory is in the air” and vowed that the rollback of President Barack Obama’s agenda begins on Tuesday.
(POLITICO's polling center: Current polls)
“These people need to be stopped and it starts tomorrow night,” McConnell said in a Louisville airplane hangar.
In Bridgeport, Conn., Sunday evening, the president rallied support for Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy, who has only barely opened up a lead over Republican Tom Foley in his traditionally Democratic-leaning state.
While Republicans have fired up conservative voters and courted restive independents with a pledge to punish the White House for its policy transgressions, Democrats continue to hope that a populist-tinged economic message, combined with aggressive positioning on social issues such as abortion and contraception access, will drag their candidates across the line tomorrow.
“If you believe working families need more tax breaks, not millionaires – you’ve got to vote for it,” Obama said Sunday. “If you think we should be investing in our kids’ schools and in early childhood education and making college more affordable – you got to vote for it.”
(Also on POLITICO: Barack Obama: ‘Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.’)
Republicans must net half a dozen Senate seats in order to make McConnell the Senate majority leader and achieve total control of Capitol Hill. Once viewed as an uphill climb for the GOP, that goal has looked increasingly achievable in recent weeks as a handful of red-state Senate races have moved in their direction and a pair of swing-state races in Iowa and Colorado has moved well within reach.
Democrats dispute some of the public polling in those races, particularly in Colorado, where they insist first-term Sen. Mark Udall is in better-than-advertised shape against Republican challenger Cory Gardner. For all the GOP’s optimism, Democrats contend that they have a realistic path to keeping control of the Senate.
The two parties share a set of overlapping anxieties heading into Election Day: In the Senate battle, Republicans and Democrats alike dread the prospect of drawn-out runoff races in Louisiana and Georgia, states that require a candidate to win more than 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday in order to avert a second round of voting.
As a result, there is a realistic chance that Washington will wake up on Wednesday without either party having yet taken the number of Senate seats required to declare victory.
Weighing perhaps more heavily on party leaders is the sheer number of important elections that could realistically break either way at the last second. Since the start of the weekend, public polling company have released surveys showing too-close-to-call races in Senate targets such as Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina and Kansas, and in gubernatorial races including Illinois, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Strategists fear that means a last-minute jolt in favor of one party or the other could have disproportionate consequences across the electoral map.
Amid their darkening prospects on the federal level, Democrats have redoubled their attention to governors in the last days of the 2014 campaign. Party officials have declared on television that they expect to see more Republican governors defeated than Democratic senators – an asymmetrical comparison that underscores the Democrats’ relatively upbeat sense of their odds on the state level.
Obama has campaigned for a series of Democratic gubernatorial nominees over the last few weeks, including Malloy; embattled Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown and Wisconsin gubernatorial nominee Mary Burke. He has insistently exhorted Democrats to get to the polls, an effort to counteract the usual midterm-election apathy among powerhouse constituencies such as black voters and the young.
“If you want something better,” Obama told his audience, “you’ve got to vote for it.”
Manu Raju contributed to this report....