Nov. 04--In the first wave of national election results, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell swept Tuesday to an easy victory -- but a long night remained before it would be clear whether he would rise to become majority leader in the U.S. Senate.
McConnell, a powerful five-term lawmaker, defeated Democratic hopeful Alison Lundergan Grimes in a fiercely fought battle that brought in millions of dollars in outside money.
Voters across the country were expressing frustration and a distinctly angry antigovernment mood at the midterm ballot box as early returns began sweeping in.
Many casting ballots acknowledged that they had little interest in showing up at the polls this year. Six years after the financial crash, large numbers of Americans say they are still not feeling the effect of the economic recovery. And the voters who mustered themselves to cast ballots Tuesday were a largely unhappy lot.
Exit poll interviews found just 1 in 5 voters said they had much faith in government. Most voters were displeased with the Obama administration, but they also held Republican congressional leaders in similarly low regard.
Only 4 in 10 Americans said they've given "quite a lot" or even "some" thought to the midterm election, according to a recent Gallup survey. That was the smallest share the organization has found in any of the last six midterm elections.
Moreover, the percentage of people who said they were certain to vote, 58%, was tied with 1998 for the lowest Gallup has found. In 2010, when Republicans scored major gains, 68% of Americans said they were certain to vote.
Still Tuesday's election -- followed by months of fierce political infighting -- could dramatically alter the Washington firmament.
Republicans were favored to win enough seats to become the majority party in the Senate, though polls showed that a number of races were very close. The GOP was expected to win a few House seats, extending its control. But the party could lose some of the 36 gubernatorial contests across the county.
Voting problems were reported early in Connecticut and Georgia where there were tight races. The difficulties seemed to be particularly severe in Connecticut, where voting in all 26 polling places in Hartford was delayed because the poll workers didn't have lists of registered voters.
"Because of delays and other problems at Hartford polling locations, we are filing a complaint in Hartford Superior Court asking that voting hours be extended to accommodate voters who were unable to vote or were discouraged from voting this morning," said Mark Bergman, campaign spokesman for Gov. Dannell Malloy.
Candidates and their ideological backers, untethered from campaign spending limits, poured nearly $4 billion into the election and flooded voters with more than 2 million television advertisements, most of them negative. In some states, commercial breaks were filled in the final campaign days with back-to back political advertisements.
But the fundamentals of this election season appeared tilted in the Republicans' favor. The party out of power in the White House almost invariably wins congressional seats in a midterm election, when the contest becomes a referendum on the president and his policies.
After nearly six tumultuous years -- marked by recession, scandal, foreign crises, unceasing political warfare over healthcare, and a string of natural and man-made disasters -- President Obama's sagging popularity weighed heavily on fellow Democrats, to the point he was scarcely seen on the campaign trail.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest sought to distance the president from the results, which will shape the remainder of his term and legacy on crucial domestic issues such as immigration and tax reform.
"Ultimately, you know, it's the quality of these candidates that's going to be the driver of their success in this election," Earnest told reporters.
Four years ago, Obama took responsibility for what he called a "shellacking" of his party in the 2010 midterm election.
Obama on Tuesday had no scheduled public events. He will be watching the election results in the White House, Earnest said.
"He'll be gathering information that's not publicly available" from his political advisors, Earnest said.
Further benefiting the GOP on Tuesday were the electoral math and the political map.
Democrats started the year defending far more Senate seats than Republicans, and most of the hardest-fought contests were in states that Obama lost in 2012, several by double-digits.
Even before the polls closed, Democrats in effect ceded the Republicans seats in conservative-leaning West Virginia, Montana and South Dakota, putting the GOP halfway to the six needed to retake the Senate for the first time since 2006, when they lost the chamber in a midterm election under President George W. Bush.
Democrats fought hard in several uphill Senate races, including Arkansas, Alaska and North Carolina. They aimed at McConnell in Kentucky and also sought to pick up a seat in Georgia.
But Democrats found themselves unexpectedly on the defensive in the blue states of Iowa, an open-seat race, and Colorado: Republicans recruited a pair of strong challengers in state Sen. Joni Ernst and Rep. Cory Gardner.
In contrast to 2010, when the GOP squandered a chance at retaking the Senate by nominating several gaffe-prone candidates seen as too extreme, their candidates this election year managed to avoid fatal misstatements and, for the most part, pigeonholing on the far right, even if several were just as conservative in the beliefs.
In House races across the country, the only question Tuesday was whether Republicans would pad their substantial majority. Most of the 435 contests on the ballot were devoid of competition, thanks to the artful drawing of congressional boundaries that protected most incumbents from competition.
There were exceptions, however, including contests in the Democratic strongholds of California and a race in Las Vegas, where the deteriorating national climate put the party's incumbents at serious risk.
A more mixed pattern emerged in the 36 gubernatorial elections. Races in several of the most populous states -- California, New York and Texas -- were mostly sleepy affairs. In Texas, Republican Greg Abbott was expected to easily beat Democrat Wendy Davis, who became an overnight celebrity after filibustering antiabortion legislation.
In other states, governors were battling a strong anti-incumbent tide aimed at members of both parties: Democrats in Illinois, Connecticut and Colorado, and Republicans in Georgia, Florida and Alaska, among other states. In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker faced a stiff reelection fight; a victory was expected to launch him on a 2016 bid for president.
Following tradition, candidates made sure the media were present when they went to polls, hoping for one last shot on television to influence last-minute voters.
In Kentucky, McConnell, the Senate's Republican leader -- who hails from a blue city in a deeply red state -- cast his own ballot Tuesday morning in a precinct where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1.
As he voted, photographers captured another voter two booths behind him signaling his disapproval of the Republican with a thumbs-down gesture. One of the shots was quickly circulated by the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Grimes.
Earlier, McConnell's hometown newspaper, the Courier Journal -- which he dismissively refers to as the "Curious Journal" -- had wrapped around its front page a final advertisement for Grimes, which excerpted the paper's endorsement of the Democrat in large, bold letters. It appeared just below a picture of a smiling McConnell the day before on the regular front page.
McConnell, though, seemed unfazed by it all as he navigated through a media scrum to cast his vote, largely dodging shouting questions other than to say he was "feeling good" and had slept "very well" the night before.
"The suspense is about to end," he said.
Asked later whom he'd voted for, McConnell laughed.
"I think we're going to have a good day here in Kentucky and hopefully around the country," he said.
With Obama dealing with issues in the White House, Vice President Joe Biden again was the upbeat political warrior, predicting that Democrats would lose seats but keep their majority. And the vice president, who could run for the top job in 2016, created a small furor by predicting that Greg Orman, an avowed independent, would defeat Republican Sen. Pat Roberts in Kansas and caucus with the Democrats.
In an earlier appearance, Orman, again resisted defining his future political allegiance, insisting he is a true independent rather than a Democrat in disguise as Republicans in the deeply red state have insisted.
In Colorado, where Republicans were hoping that Rep. Cory Gardner will defeat Sen. Mark Udall, the last-minute campaigning was feverish.
Udall, a Democrat seeking a second term, visited three university campuses, delivering speeches in a last-minute effort to court young voters. Gardner made a pair of appearances, no speeches for him, with Republicans conducting morning honk-and-waves in the Denver suburbs.
Gardner, who gave up a safe GOP House seat in eastern Colorado to challenge Udall, has led narrowly in a series of recent polls as he looks to help turn the tide for Colorado Republicans, who have not won a Senate race in more than a decade.
This is the first major election in which a ballot was mailed to every Colorado voter; it must be turned in by 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Reston and Barabak reported from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Kurtis Lee in Colorado, Michael A. Memoli in Kentucky and Michael Muskal in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
UPDATE
4:29 p.m.: This post was updated with results of the Kentucky Senate race
This story was originally posted at 4:16 p.m.
