The end of the Obama era

And the midterm elections, while narrowly predictable, may have reshaped the political landscape in subtler and more interesting ways than a simple binary transfer of power from one party to another. In other words, what we witnessed in 2014 wasn’t just a swing of the ol’ pendulum; it was the end of the Obama era in American politics.

One major hallmark of the Obama era was the rise of the Tea Party, a far-right faction driven to conspiratorial derangement by literally anything Obama proposed. But in 2014, its power began to wane. In 2010 and 2012, it had hamstrung Republicans by toppling incumbents and establishment-backed candidates in primaries and by preventing the party from articulating a positive agenda beyond obstruction and Obama-bashing. In 2014, however, the GOP got its act together. No Senate incumbent lost a primary (though Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, was toppled in a stunning and unexpected upset), and virtually all the party’s nominees were either handpicked by, or palatable to, the party establishment. Party operatives put their candidates through intensive trainings to prevent another gaffe-prone contender like Todd Akin from dominating the airwaves and making the whole party seem crazy; fresh faces like Joni Ernst, in Iowa, and Cory Gardner, in Colorado, helped resuscitate the party’s image in blue states—aided by unimpressive Democratic campaigns.

Democrats had proved extremely skilled in recent years at exploiting Republican divisions and tying GOP candidates to the worst tendencies of the party fringe. But these tactics ran aground when confronted with these upbeat, sanitized Republican opponents. In this way, 2014 may have marked the year when the Obama-campaign playbook—both in message and tactical terms—stopped working.