The midterm elections were bad for President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party. Very bad. Virtually every Democratic incumbent in key battleground Senate races lost.
Mary Landrieu in Louisiana still could survive if she wins a runoff election in December. It won't matter. Republicans have got the net gain they needed to win control and had won at least seven with Alaska and Virginia still too close to call Wednesday morning.
So what does it mean? There will be many attempts to answer that question today. Good luck to all who try, as there are multiple plausible responses.
Mr. Obama's legacy is toast, right? Maybe, unless Republicans judge it is in their interest to start compiling evidence that they are capable of doing more than frustrating an unpopular President. The unofficial campaign for the White House will begin immediately. The Republican hopefuls will have an incentive to show voters they are proven policy makers. Governors such as Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin will be able to make that claim. Republican senators such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, who have little to show in the way of legislative accomplishments, may need Mr. Obama more than they are willing to let on.
Republicans could bring forward proposals to overhaul the tax code, an issue that has bipartisan support, including in the White House. A compromise on lowering the U.S. corporate rate, currently the highest in the developed world, would allow Mr. Obama to retire from politics as the man who helped make America's taxes competitive again. Combine that with Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial regulation and the recovery from the financial crisis, and Mr. Obama would leave the White House early in 2017 with a solid legacy intact.
But surely the Republicans now will be in a position to tear down Obamacare? Only if they first change the Constitution and take away the President's veto power. They may come to their senses and propose minor changes that please their constituents while respecting the fact the the Affordable Care Act is here to stay. Mr. Obama has said repeatedly that he is open to tweaks. He already has done several by executive order.
And the Keystone XL pipeline? A Republican victory surely implies that approval finally is imminent. Mr. Obama now is under no pressure to placate the big-money donors in the green wing of his party. But what if the President no longer feels beholden to anyone but himself and his conscience? The shale boom has changed the economics of oil in the United States. The country doesn't necessarily need Canada's oil now like it did when it was a net importer. Rather than allow House Speaker John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the likely senate majority leader, determine his legacy, Mr. Obama could decide to take matters into his own hands and go into the history books as the greenest president of all time.
The day after an election is almost always the worst time to assess its implications. The way ahead will depend on how Washington reads the election results. For his part, Mr. Obama only can be humbled. When he received a similar "shellacking" in the 2010 midterms, he opted to compromise on some Republican budget priorities. He could choose to do the same now, which is why tax reform will live as an intriguing possibility, at least until someone says definitively that it isn't going to happen.
Republicans, too, likely will see that their trouncing of the Democratic Party on Tuesday has as much to do with good luck as it does with the broad endorsement of the their policies. The bulk of the voting went on in Republican states. Voters were angry. The economy is growing, but wages aren't. They took their anger out on the party in charge.
Even as Americans handed the Senate to the Republicans and increased the party's majority in the House, they voted to increase the minimum wage in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. That isn't a Republican issue. It's the President who is the biggest champion of higher wages. That drives home the fact that what Americans really want is solutions. Republicans have an incentive to come up with some.
Of course, one could have made the same arguments in 2012 after Mr. Obama won his second term. After an early compromise on tax increases, the Republicans went ahead and shut down the government a year later.
Kevin Carmichael is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
Special to the Globe and Mail