US President Barack Obama spent Monday holed up at the White House, bracing himself for what polls suggest will be the worst Democratic election results for a generation, a shift that could leave Washington gridlocked.
Obama opted against a final day on the campaign trail, canceled all public engagements and held private meetings with senior White House advisers. Top of their agenda was drawing up a strategy for how to cope with a post-election landscape in which Republicans are predicted to control at least one chamber of the bicameral US Congress.
“There are only two outcomes: a substantial Republican wave or an enormous Republican wave,” said Larry Sabato, director of University of Virginia’s center for politics and one of the most respected analysts in the US.
Democratic and Republican organizers and activists spent Monday in a last frantic effort to squeeze out as many voters as possible, as a Gallup poll put the Republicans on 55 percent to the Democrats’ 40 percent, a margin not seen since the 1970s.
Voters, more than 13 million of whom have already taken advantage of early polling, were to yesterday decide the fate of all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 37 in the 100-member Senate and 37 state governorships.
Obama’s retreat into the White House comes at the end of a lackluster campaign in which he has appeared tired and his speeches have lacked the fire of the 2008 White House run. Fifty-two percent of the public do not believe Obama will win re-election in 2012, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published yesterday. Only 35 percent said he would win.
The same poll, surveying likely voters, gave the Republicans a smaller lead than Gallup — 50 percent to 44 percent — but that would still give the Republicans 52 gains in the House and a 27-seat majority.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president’s schedule of closed meetings on Monday included taping radio interviews for use on election day throughout the country, and he planned to spend part of the evening trying to boost the morale of party organizers in key battleground states.
Republicans admit publicly that while the Democrats are likely to be punished across the US, it would be a mistake to see victory as an endorsement for the Republicans.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, interviewed on ABC, said: “I think there is a degree of truth to that. I think the American people right now are much more skeptical of the direction the president and Mrs Pelosi [Democratic US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and Mr Reid [Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] are taking the country, but they also have some concerns about the direction that Republicans will then lead when we take control of the Congress in 2011.”
The Republicans will have to decide whether to compromise with Obama in getting some legislation through or opt for all-out combat. A large corps of Republicans backed by the grassroots Tea Party movement are expected to win seats in the House and Senate and will push for non-cooperation with the White House.
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