Believe the respected Rothenberg political report, and the Democrats are heading for a “historic bloodbath” on Tuesday – at least in the House. The Republicans need to pick up just 39 seats to win a majority, and there isn’t a poll around that doesn’t suggest they’ll win at least 50 – if not dozens more.
As for the Senate, it looks likely that the Democrats will at least avoid a wipeout there – the GOP isn’t heading for the neccessary ten-seat win.
And while Obama has been appealing to supporters to knock on 20,000 doors this weekend, even the wildly successful Rally to Restore Sanity hasn’t given the Dems the last-minute boost they were hoping for.
Sure, most of the 250,000 people who crowded into the National Mall were liberals through and through (and you couldn’t help but think back to that freezing day back in January ’09, when the entire city was a sea of Obama flags and faces shiny with hope), but Jon Stewart’s shtick deliberately avoided any kind of partisan appeal.
“Some of you may have seen today as a clarion call for action,” he told the crowd. “Clearly some of you who just wanted to see the Air and Space Museum got royally screwed.”
And when he did get political, Stewart let rip against extremists on both sides. The media, especially the likes of Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck, got most of the flak. “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” he said.
But beneath this cacophony of extremities, there’s no getting away from the fact that President Obama is about to be dealt a huge rebuke.
“Part of it is a profound unhappiness with the way Washington is working,” says Matt Bennett from the Third Way think tank, describing people’s deep frustration that their lives aren’t getting any better and no one in charge really seems to care.
The recession is overshadowing everything – almost all Americans think the economy is in bad shape, and hardly anyone can see things getting better soon.
Curse of the ‘burbs
It is even more profound in the suburbs, where 53 per cent of people describe their own financial situation as “bad”. Most people, according to Princeton Survey Research, have either lost their job or know someone who has, while 40 per cent have lost their home, or know someone in that situation.
That’s a lot of discontent, and, says the survey, the suburbs hold the key to this year’s Republican success. Especially when the president is so city-centric: years ago, he told AP he just wasn’t interested in the suburbs – “they bore me”.
But what is really noticeable right now is how polarised the debate is: as the saying goes, it’s a lot easier to rant than to rave. If part of the national disappointment is over what’s seen as Washington’s obduracy, many voters are also disillusioned by a president who promised unity, but has ended up presiding over a country more divided than ever before.
So much for “No red states, no blue states – but the United States of America”. Instead, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has been proclaiming that “the single most important thing we want to achieve for President Obama is to be a one-term president”, while Obama himself urged Latino voters to “punish our enemies” on Tuesday, warning Republicans, “You can ride with us if you want, but you gotta sit in the back seat.”
And partisanship is flourishing within the parties as well. The Republican establishment must surely be worrying about the prospect of all those unruly Tea Partiers causing trouble for them – as well as the Democrats – in Congress. And the “professional left” is still causing trouble for the president.
Last night, as Obama made his final pitch for votes on a four-state blitz, one small section of the crowd in Connecticut suddenly started heckling him about funding for Aids research, before the rest of the audience drowned them out.
The president – looking noticeably annoyed – told them curtly to turn their anger against the Republicans instead, warning that his entire agenda could be rolled back if the GOP prevailed.
He did get a better rap back in his old Senate seat of Illinois – where a 35,000-strong crowd whooped it up for him, 2008-style. But it says a lot about the state of the country that, three days before election day, he’s having to focus on getting his own key supporters to turn up at the polls.
Felicity Spector is chief writer and US politics expert for Channel 4 News.
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