Analysis: States united by the sweep of Republican success

As the results came in from east to west, there was triumph on a historic scale for the Republicans and disappointment for Democrats

Of all the moments of humiliation and squandered opportunity that hounded the Democrats towards defeat in the American mid-term elections, this was perhaps the most galling.

The time was around 10.30 yesterday morning, the place a hotel in St Paul, Minnesota. Walter Mondale, the former vice-president the Democrats had turned to following the death of Senator Paul Wellstone in a plane crash 12 days ago, had been up all night waiting to find out if he had rediscovered the old magic that once made him a hero of the liberal left.

He had not. Worse still, he had thrown away a race that was all his for the taking. For all the sympathy that Mr Wellstone's death generated, for all the name recognition that he enjoyed, Mr Mondale had watched helplessly as an eight-point advantage in the opinion polls vanished. He had imagined himself graciously accepting the chance at a political swansong, but instead here he was conceding to his Republican rival, Norm Coleman.

It was, he told his campaign supporters, "one of the most unbelievable moments in Minnesota history". It will also go down as the signature moment on a night when the Republican Party took definitive control of the reins of the government and the Democrats, for an accumulation of reasons driven largely by poor judgment and plain bad luck, were left reeling.

The disappointments hounded the party across the country from east to west: the failure to unseat Jeb Bush, the president's brother, as governor of Florida; the failure to seize the advantage in the Carolinas, where two old-time Republican Senators, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, were both retiring; the humiliating defeat for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in the Maryland governor's race, leaving the statehouse in Republican hands for the first time since the dog-days of segregation; the loss of a key Senate seat in Missouri, where two years ago another plane crash victim, Mel Carnahan, managed a posthumous upset over the Republican incumbent John Ashcroft; the failure to oust a vulnerable Senate Republican in Colorado, and on and on.

The one consolation was in Bill Clinton's home state of Arkansas, where the Democrat challenger, Mark Pryor, successfully unseated the Republican Senator Tim Hutchinson, who had been troubled by scandal over a divorce and remarriage to a Senate staff member. It was not consolation enough, not by a long chalk.

On the Republican side, much of the momentum began with the president himself, who personally raised more than $140m (£90m) for his party's candidates and travelled to 15 states in the final week of campaigning to get out the vote. It would be wrong to think the whole country responded to his call – for the most part, Mr Bush was targeting the party faithful and made sure they got to the polling stations on the day. In some states, turn-out was as low as 30-35 per cent, so victory meant focusing on barely more than one-sixth of eligible voters.

The results were nevertheless historic in sweep. No president has managed such gains for his party in mid-term elections since Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. No president has been able to look forward to a lock on both chambers of Congress since Eisenhower in the early 1950s.

These mid-term elections were not originally supposed to change much. Congress was essentially deadlocked, most of the races were deemed to be foregone conclusions favouring the incumbents and voter interest seemed tepid at best. Only the most optimistic conservative dreamers saw it as a chance for the Republicans to sweep the board.

With hindsight, though, it is a little easier to see where it all started going wrong for the Democrats. One could go back to 11 September last year, the cataclysm that left the party floundering around for an appropriate language of opposition to the Bush administration, or even further to the murky presidential election of two years ago which brought George Bush to power.

In many ways, though, the seminal moment came with Mr Wellstone's sudden death. Senator Wellstone, like half a dozen of his colleagues, was locked in a tight re-election race but was creeping forward in the polls and felt good about his chances. The Democrats did not have much hope of retaking control of the House of Representatives, but they stood every chance of holding on to their slim advantage in the Senate and possibly even extending it slightly.

The plane crash set a very different electoral endgame in motion. The grieving Minnesota Democrats, thinking only tangentially of the election, chose to stage a very public mourning for Senator Wellstone, which turned into a foot-stomping partisan rally on behalf of the Democrats that was televised across the state. Trent Lott, the Republican leader in the Senate, was loudly booed; Mr Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, did not come at all after it was made clear he would not be welcome.

Suddenly, where grief had seemed to obliterate the possibility of campaigning, the Republicans saw an opening. They questioned the tastefulness of the memorial ceremony and whether Mr Mondale, at 74, was really in touch with modern political realities. Voters were tacitly reminded that Mr Mondale's liberal agenda had caused the biggest presidential election defeat of modern times – his humiliation at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1984 when he lost 49 states out of 50.

Suddenly, the tide of public opinion changed, and it affected the mood across the country. Not only did Mr Mondale see his poll numbers plummet in the brief week of campaigning left to him; in Missouri, Mel Carnahan's widow Jean, who has occupied his Senate seat for the past two years, saw the knock-on sympathy factor that had been working for her go up in a puff of smoke.

Suddenly, she was regarded – as she has been, on and off, during her tenure -- as a perfectly nice lady who had no business being in politics, and the advantage swung definitively back to her Republican challenger, Jim Talent.

In her concession speech, Mrs Carnahan could look only in one direction for some sort of solace, and that was to the rhetorical future. "As always, others will come to lift the fallen torch," she said. "The fire will not go out."

Even in key races where Democrats came out on top, they seemed to be scraping through rather than cruising. In New Jersey, the returning former Senator Frank Lautenberg won convincingly over his challenger, Douglas Forrester, but he was himself an emergency replacement for Robert Torricelli, the scandal-ridden incumbent who bowed out when it became clear he was headed for defeat.

In South Dakota – a symbolically important state because it is home to the Democratic leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle – the incumbent Tim Johnson was leading over Republican John Thume by just 500 votes, raising the possibility of a recount in a race that attracted some rare passion and an exceptional turnout of well over 70 per cent. In Louisiana, the Democrat Mary Landrieu came out on top of an unusual primary-style race against three Republican challengers, but now faces a run-off on 7 December because she failed to win 50 per cent of the overall vote.

The shock of defeat was still too fresh yesterday for the post-mortems to have begun, but the Democrats will no doubt have to ask themselves where they went wrong, both in their style of opposition to the Bush administration and in their campaign tactics. Poor campaigning was almost certainly a factor in Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's defeat in the Maryland governor's race – an election that should have been hers for the taking after the recent sniper serial killings badly exposed her opponent's apologetic stance towards gun manufacturers. The outgoing governor, Parris Glendening, described her performance as "one of the worst-run campaigns in the country".