A sign of the Democrats faint hopes for this election can be seen in the stirrings of a blamegame between the White House the field of candidates.

Bloomberg reports:

As prospects for Democrats holding onto the US Senate dimmed, the White House sought to distance President Barack Obama from Democrats getting voted out of office in today's midterm elections.

"Ultimately, you know, it's the quality of these candidates that's going to be the driver of their success in this election," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said today when asked about Democratic gubernatorial races that were the focus of the president's campaigning.

That the White House is leaning away from taking blame if Democrats suffer losses is a change in tone from four years ago, when Obama took responsibility for what he called a "shellacking" of his party in the 2010 midterm elections.

The Bloomberg report notes that Obama has no public events scheduled for election day and he is keeping a low profile as Americans vote.

One potential upset in the senate races.

Scott Brown, the Republican who upset Massachusetts Democrats in 2010 by winning the senate seat left open by the death of Edward Kennedy, may be on course for another upset - in another state - this time against Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

Brown, once as famous for his barechested photos as prime minister Tony Abbott and Russian president Vladimir Putin, made headlines in 2010 not just for his politics but an early side career in male modeling that helped pay his way through law school.

According to Reuters:

Polls show a dead heat between Shaheen, a first-term senator and former governor, and Brown, who had been a little-known state legislator before his surprise 2010 victory.

Turnout was unusually high for a midterm election, officials said, with Secretary of State Bill Gardner estimating it could top 50 percent, which would be a record for a non-presidential year.

Brown lost his first re-election bid to Elizabeth Warren in 2012 and moved to New Hampshire early this year. He has sought to tie Shaheen closely to President Barack Obama, who is unpopular in this state, while Shaheen has depicted her rival as out of touch on women's issues.

Fairfax media's US correspondent Nick O'Malley explains why pundits believe the Republicans will do better in the midterm elections...

Republicans enjoy significant advantages in the Senate race.

Firstly, without the drama of presidential elections, midterms generally attract older, wealthier and whiter voters to the polls, all demographics that suit Republicans.

Secondly, midterm elections in second presidential terms naturally become a referendum on the president even though the president is not in the race.

In the sixth year of their incumbency presidents are normally not polling well by this stage. This is particularly true of Barack Obama, who has an average approval rating of just 41.9 per cent according to the Real Clear Politics poll average.

Map favours Republicans

Nick O'Malley explains why many expect the Republicans to regain control of the senate in this election.

The electoral map favours Republicans, who need to take six seats from Democrats to win a majority in the Senate.

Republicans are defending just 15 seats compared with 21 for Democrats, and many of the battleground seats are in states that Republicans won handily in 2012, such as Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota and West Virginia.
 
As one of America’s best-known political analysts, Charlie Cook, put it in a last minute briefing, the Republican Party does not need a wave of support to win the Senate, it just needs Republicans to turn out in Republican seats and vote Republican.
 
While most believe the GOP will take the Senate, it is possible the result could take some time. Two battleground states have provisions for run-off elections should no candidate reach 50 per cent, one of which would not be held until January.

President Obama concedes defeat

The New York Times reports that US president Barack Obama has already lowered expectations for the Democrats in the elections.

“This is probably the worst possible group of states for Democrats since Dwight Eisenhower,” Mr Obama said, in a call into a radio show in Connecticut.

“There are a lot of states that are being contested where they just tend to tilt Republican, and Democrats are competitive, but they tend to tilt that way,” he said, voicing in public a view commonly expressed behind the scenes in the weeks before the election.

Castrating hogs like dealing with politicians?

From Nick O'Malley

Almost $US4 billion buys a lot of advertising, and Americans have been deluged with political advertising for months. Much of the advertising has been populist and negative, not only towards incumbents, but towards Washington, DC itself.

Some ads have already become classics of the genre, such as this spot by Joni Ernst, who reassures voters that she grew up “castrating hogs on an Iowa farm” so is well suited to dealing with politicians in Congress. She is already flagged as a rising star should she win.

Tea Party economics on trial

While many have dubbed these midterms the "Seinfeld election" -- campaigns about nothing, there are two very notable exceptions to that. In Kansas and Wisconsin, ferocious battles over the future of hard-right Republican economics are at stake as incumbent Republican governors swept into power by the Tea Party wave of 2010 are struggling to win re-election.

In Kansas, Sam Brownback won the governor's mansion with 63 per cent of the vote, not a shocking number for a Republican running in 2010 in one of the most conservative states in the union. Currently, however, Brownback is polling 20 points lower and in danger of losing to his Democratic challenger Paul Davis, a veteran state legislator.

Kathleen Sebelius, former two-term Democratic governor of Kansas once admitted "Democrats, we don't win elections in Kansas​, ​Republicans lose elections."
​ ​
If that's true, Brownback may well lose this election because he lost his own party by pursuing a radical agenda of tax cuts that resulted not in the surging economic growth he promised, but in huge budget deficits requiring unpopular cuts to education and transportation.

As one normally-loyal Republican voter told the New York Times: “He’s leading Kansas down​. ​We’re going to be bankrupt in two or three years if we keep going his way.”

Credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s has downgraded Kansas’ bond rating, but Brownback is promising even more tax cutting if re-elected.

In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker’s tax cuts have led to huge budget deficits, resulting in sharp cuts to education and state worker salaries. Meanwhile, Walker’s ideological refusal to allow Wisconsin to take part in “Obamacare” is costing his state $US500 million over three-and-a-half years.

Pennsylvania Republican Governor Tom Corbett, trailing badly in every poll, cut state education funding by $US335 million in 2011 so he could reduce taxes on business. Victory for his challenger, Democrat Tom Wolf, is considered all but certain.

CNN is calling Kentucky for Republican Senator Mitch McConnell in a defeat for Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes.

More on Kentucky race from O'Malley:

Just seconds after the polls closed CNN projected that Republican Senator Mitch McConnell has emphatically held his seat.
 
Should Republicans win control of the Senate as expected he will become the new Republican Senate Majority Leader – and in effect new GOP leader along with House Speaker John Boehner.
 
Despite his control of the party in that state and his big DC presence, McConnell is not liked by populists in the party, to the point that some in other states based their own campaigns against him as emblematic of politics-as-usual in the capital. (See this ad from an angry Texan.)
 
McConnell’s re-election campaign was weakened in primaries by a Tea Party challenger called Matt Bevin whose attack cost him a fortune in advertising.
 
Since he won the primary, though, he has pulled away from his Democratic challenger, Alison Lundegran Grimes, who embarrassed herself during a TV interview by refusing to admit that she had voted for Barack Obama.

Obamacare backlash fades

Late last year many Republicans had expected to base the campaign on Obamacare, but while the healthcare reforms remain unpopular, they are working better than many expected and heat has gone out of the opposition to them.
 
Democrats in many states believed this election would focus on the broad support for immigration reform, but earlier this year there was an unprecedented surge of undocumented children across the southern border, making the issue too politically dangerous to focus on.
 
Instead Republicans have sought to Democratic candidates to their unpopular president, and the president to growing unease about America’s place in the world and threats from the Islamic State and even fears about the spread of Ebola.
 
Meanwhile Democratic candidates distanced themselves from Obama, focusing on local politics, or in some areas on popular liberal issues such as increasing the minimum wage.
 
Such is the growing concern about the influence of wealthy donors in American politics that some Democratic candidates have effectively run against Republican donors like the libertarian billionaire industrialists Koch brothers, as much as they have against Republican candidates.

A sign at Mitch McConnell's campaign headquarters captures the triumphant mood.

Room getting much fuller at #McConnell HQ now. This guy has coolest sign if night so far. #KYSEN pic.twitter.com/g8LnkBCZyM — BrakktonBookerNPR (@brakktonbooker) November 5, 2014

Race not an issue in South?

In one of the last minute confected outrages of the midterm campaign the Democratic incumbent senator Mary Landrieu in the conservative southern state of Louisiana dared suggest that, well, race can matter in America's South.

On Thursday in an interview with Chuck Todd of NBC News she suggested that President Obama's lack of popularity in the state -- currently about 40 per cent in most polls -- is due, in part, to racism.
 
“I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans," she said. "It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”
 
Though she added that his ban on offshore drilling was another factor, Republican outrage was immediate.
 
Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican and likely 2016 presidential candidate, told Fox News: “She’s basically calling the people of Louisiana, she’s calling all of us in the South racist. Here in Louisiana and across the South, we don’t think in terms of black and white, in terms of racial colours — the only colours that matter down here are red, white and blue and … purple and gold as we cheer our LSU Tigers onto victory in college football. It’s not about race.”
 
Many described Landrieu’s comment in the key race as a gaffe, but the next day she refused to back down. Hard to imagine then that she was not considering how her comments might resonate among African-American voters who still overwhelming back Democrats.

Another soon-to-be legendary political ad

Bob Quast, a candidate for Iowa's senate seat, rails against his opponent’s “elite law degree.” He also promises to shoot perverts in the “balls” with his Glock pistol.

One of the images going viral around the election.

US senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky gets photobombed as he votes.

The race between McConnell and Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes is one of the most closely watched in the election. If the Republicans retake the senate, McConnell will become majority leader.

'If we lose North Carolina then we lose the Senate'

From Reuters...

Republicans gained their first Senate seat from Democrats when Shelley Moore Capito easily defeated Natalie Tennant in West Virginia to claim the spot left open by retiring Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller.

Republicans are expected to pick up seats in the Senate, but polls ahead of the voting showed eight to 10 races are still toss-ups. They need to gain six seats to control the 100-member chamber for the first time since the 2006 election.

A key barometer for Democrats was whether they would be able to hold North Carolina, where incumbent Democratic Senator Kay Hagan was in a tough fight against Republican challenger Thom Tillis.

Obama, whose 40 per cent approval rating made him unwelcome on the campaign trail for many fellow Democrats, cast the race as critical in a radio interview with a Charlotte, North Carolina station.

"If we lose North Carolina then we lose the Senate. And if we lose the Senate en the Republicans are setting the agenda," Mr Obama said.

Mitch McConnell, who has just won his Kentucky senate race and is expected to become the new Republican senate majority reader has just accepted his victory, telling cheering that the campaign was never about himself, nor even his opponent, but the Obama administration.

“It was about a government that people no longer trust to carry out its most basic duties. To keep them safe, to protect the border, to provide dignified and quality care for our veterans.”

“It can’t be trusted to do the basic things because it’s too busy focusing on things it shouldn’t be focused on at all,” he said, with eyes apparently on the 2016 election.

Speaking to the same audience earlier his colleague, the junior senator for Kentucky and expected presidential candidate Rand Paul said he wanted to see a complete repeal of Obamacare.

Arkansas hasn't had two Republican Senators since 1879, during the height of Reconstruction after the Civil War. That streak of 135 years is about to end, as Republican challenger Tom Cotton has handily defeated incumbent Mark Pryor, a moderate Democrat first elected to the Senate in 2002.

As recently as 2006 Arkansas, where former President Bill Clinton served as governor for more than a decade, was virtually a one-party Democratic state. However, in the last eight years Arkansas has followed the rest of the South by marching to the right and electing one Republican after another. The GOP captured one Senate seat during the Tea Party wave of 2010 that delivered control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans. Now, four years later, Cotton has completed his party's domination of the state. Every seat in the state's House delegation is Republican for the first time since 1873.