US President Barack Obama’s Democrats braced Monday for an elections rout, as a wave of 11th-hour polls showed Republicans on course for big gains in Congress amid deep voter anger at the sour economy.
Mr Obama, fearing a ballot-box repudiation just two years into his campaign for change, planned a wave of radio interviews and telephone calls to Democratic volunteers key to boosting party turnout today, the White House said.
Feeding Democratic worries, the respected Gallup polling organization’s final pre-vote survey of likely voters nationwide found Republicans held the most commanding mid-term lead either US party has held in a generation.
Republicans led Democrats by a 55-40 per cent margin, the widest such gap since the 1974 contest, when Democrats romped to victory amid public outrage at the Watergate scandal that forced disgraced president Richard Nixon from office.
The poll lent weight to analyst predictions that Republicans would retake the House of Representatives and slice deep into the Democratic’ Senate majority, though experts forecast the upper chamber would not change hands.
The election for 37 Senate slots, 37 governorships and all 435 House seats, came as the euphoric hope Mr Obama stirred in the 2008 White House race seemed an age away and with America’s trademark brash optimism drained by a narrative of national decline.
Republicans, electrified by the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement, vowed to reverse Mr Obama’s sweeping health care reforms and promise a budget crunch and tax cuts they said would reduce the deficit, ignite growth, and reduce nearly ten percent unemployment.
“We just can’t afford another two years like the past two,” Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, who would all but certainly replace Democrat Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, said in an op-ed in USA Today yesterday.
In a sign of Democratic angst, party chairman Tim Kaine told ABC television that Obama would set about making “some adjustments and corrections” over the next few weeks in the face of a reenergised Republican opposition.
Top Republicans, however, have vowed “no compromise” with the White House on key issues and the party’s leader in the Senate candidly declared last week that their number one goal would be to defeat Mr Obama in 2012.
Obama has pleaded with voters to recall that Republican George W. Bush was in the driver’s seat in 2008 when the US economy hurtled into a “ditch”, and said his own polices staved off a second Great Depression and have put the United States back on course to prosperity.