Democratic Losses Grow as More Midterm Results Come In

By MICHAEL D. SHEARNOV. 5, 2014

Supporters of Senator Mitch McConnell celebrated his victory on Tuesday. Republican gains in the Senate left him poised to take over as majority leader. CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

The full magnitude of the Republican Party’s success in reshaping the national political landscape at President Obama’s expense became clearer Wednesday morning as the party seemed headed toward an even longer list of electoral victories in Senate and governor races that had been too close to call before dawn.

White House officials, waking to far deeper losses than they had expected in races across the country, announced that Mr. Obama would hold a news conference at 2:50 p.m. Eastern time to address the Republicans’ campaign victories and preview his response to the electorate’s punishing message.

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In Alaska, the winner of the Senate race remained uncertain Wednesday morning, though the Republican candidate, Dan Sullivan, moved into a small lead in the vote count and appeared poised to oust Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat. A victory by Mr. Sullivan would further whittle away Mr. Obama’s support in a Senate that has for years served as the president’s bulwark in Congress against the Republican-controlled House.

If Mr. Sullivan wins and Republicans succeed in ousting Senator Mary L. Landrieu in Louisiana in a runoff election next month, Republicans would command a 54-vote majority in the Senate, a gain of nine seats and an almost complete turnaround from the current chamber, where Democrats control 55 seats.

In Virginia, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, was slightly ahead in the vote count in his bid for re-election, but his Republican challenger, Ed Gillespie, a former lobbyist and Republican political adviser, was within less than a percentage point and could request a recount in that state.

Republican candidates for governor in Maryland, Maine and Massachusetts also claimed overnight victories over Democratic opponents in states that by all accounts should have been bright spots for the president and his allies in an otherwise dismal election season. In Connecticut and Colorado, the races for governor remained too close to call.

“Governors get things done. That’s what the country wants,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said on the “Today” show on NBC on Wednesday. Mr. Christie dodged questions about his own presidential ambitions, saying that “today is a day to celebrate what my fellow governors have done.”

In the House, Democratic losses mounted overnight, too, as Republicans approached their largest majority since the 1940s. Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon and the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, called the results a “referendum on the president’s policies” but said he hoped the two parties could find a way to work together.

“There’s a big basket of ideas to make America better that we need to work through,” Mr. Walden said on CNN. “America wants us to go in a different direction. But they do want us to do our jobs.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former House speaker who lost her gavel to Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio in 2010, issued a terse and grim statement at 10 minutes before 2 a.m. conceding the obvious but vowing to keep pushing a Democratic agenda.

Ms. Pelosi said that it was “a difficult night for Democrats” but that her members would “continue to fight for middle-class families, who are the backbone of our democracy.”

A few moments later, a top aide to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democrat who will soon lose his position as majority leader, said on Twitter that he took some solace from the fact that Scott Brown, the Republican former senator from Massachusetts, lost his bid to make an unlikely comeback in neighboring New Hampshire. “The fact that we got our butts kicked up and down the block only makes it *more* hilarious that Scott Brown lost,” Adam Jentleson, Mr. Reid’s spokesman, said in a post at 1:59 a.m.

The Democratic losses were even larger than top White House aides had feared they might be, and appeared likely to require a rethinking by the president of how he governs during the final two years of a second term that has already been marked by discord and gridlock with the Republican Party.

The results are an immediate blow to the administration’s hopes to further broaden the president’s health care law by expanding Medicaid in additional states. Some of those states will now be controlled by Republican governors who are unlikely to agree to an expansion of the health care law.

White House aides are bracing for calls from both parties for Mr. Obama to cancel or postpone plans to announce executive actions that would reshape the nation’s immigration laws and provide the legal authority for millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. Mr. Obama promised to unveil his plans soon after the congressional elections, and aides signaled that he was unlikely to back down from that promise.

White House officials said the president placed a call Tuesday night to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is poised to take over as majority leader in the Senate, but the two men did not connect. Aides to Mr. Obama said he had left a message and would try again Wednesday.

At his news conference, the president is likely to argue that the electoral map favored his rivals, with many of the most hotly contested races taking place in deeply conservative states that Mr. Obama lost in 2012. The president made that argument before the votes were counted on Tuesday, saying in a radio interview that his party faced “probably the worst possible group of states for Democrats since Dwight Eisenhower.”

But the scope of his party’s losses may force Mr. Obama to offer a new vision for governing in an environment where he now has fewer legislative allies. Less certain is whether he will consider an overhaul of his White House staff, replacing longtime aides with a fresh set of political and policy advisers.