More likely than not, after Tuesday night, the Republicans will take the Senate. They also will control the House, most Governorships, most state houses, and SCOTUS. The Democrats will still have the White House and the Federal Reserve (thanks to Obama). Still, with most Democrats still hesitant to attach themselves to him, Obama will be pretty lonely with his 41% approval rating. So where did he go wrong?
First of all, I feel that he failed by not trying hard enough to reach out to the GOP and achieve bipartisan compromises, such as a "grand bargain" on deficit reduction; failing to approve the Keystone pipeline, and threatening to take unilateral action on immigration. Whether the Republicans would ever have agreed to work with him is not the point; the main thing is that he should have looked willing to work with them, rather than as a man who has given up on Washington.
There was never going to be a grand bargain. The best that President Obama could do was to make offers to a phantom GOP, moderates who no longer exist. When he had majorities in both Houses of Congress (but for only two years) he could govern much like FDR, his model for dealing with an economic catastrophe.
What the Republicans wanted was someone to accede to rescuing Big Business from its own foibles quickly -- only to turn on him at the first opportunity because they would have the resources for buying the political process.
The Republicans will, in their audacity (which may succeed or fail) bring it back. They will support the most repressive regulation of sexuality outside of the Islamic world, perhaps even going so far as to attempt to ban contraception. After all, the only possible growth in a stagnant economy is from population growth that forces more real estate construction, highway building, energy consumption, and urban sprawl -- not to mention higher prices and lower wages.
The Republicans will surely tie any military activity to shifting taxes from the rich to the non-rich, eviscerating unions, degrading the environment, outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and who knows what.
We are in for the worst two years of American politics since 1859 and 1860.