REPUBLICANS’ FIRST STEP WAS TO HANDLE EXTREMISTS IN PARTY

[Other factors affected the outcome, of course. The election was unfolding during perhaps the best political climate Republicans had seen since the 1980s. Upheaval on the domestic and international stage — a crash of the health care website, beheadings in the Middle East, a surge of migrant children along the Mexican border and a raging virus in Africa — all helped tip the scales in Republicans’ favor. Democrats battled to keep the most competitive races from slipping away from them until the very last minute, an almost impossible task given President Obama’s low approval ratings and the cascade of bad news that was unimaginable when the party was riding high a year ago, after Republicans stumbled through a government shutdown.]

By Jeremy W. Peters and Carl Hulse

A worker in the election “war room” at the Republican NationalCommittee office in 
Washington on Tuesday. The party focused on avoiding past mistakes. 
Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — It was late spring, and Republican leaders knew that if they wanted to win the Senate, they needed to crush the enemy: not Democrats, but the rebels within their own party.

And Chris McDaniel, a Senate candidate from Mississippi who had a history of making sexist and racially insensitive remarks, was a problem.

Candidates like Scott Brown, running for the Senate in New Hampshire, called the National Republican Senatorial Committee to complain that if Mr. McDaniel was not stopped, he could drag the whole party down. Strategists inside the committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill were envisioning nightmares of Democrats caricaturing all their candidates as “mini-McDaniels.”

The committee’s executive director, Rob Collins, dragged complacent donors into the effort, playing recordings for them of some of Mr. McDaniel’s most incendiary remarks and persuading them to underwrite a massive get-out-the-vote effort to defeat him.

In June, the party establishment — just barely — vanquished Mr. McDaniel, reaching a turning point in their dogged campaign to purge the party of extremists and regain power in the Senate.

Republicans’ impressive showing Tuesday night — marking the first time the party will have a majority in both the House and Senate since 2006 — was the result of methodical plotting, careful candidate vetting and abundant preparation to ensure that the party’s candidates would avoid repeating the same devastating mistakes that cost them dearly in 2010 and 2012.

“You get your best players on the field in November, avoid doing something that makes us look like we are not adult enough to govern, and hope the wave is big,” said Senator Mitch McConnell in an interview in March, not long after Republicans scored a major coup by getting Cory Gardner, a congressman from Colorado and one of the party’s strongest candidates this election, into the race.

In interviews, more than two dozen lawmakers and strategists described the meticulous efforts.

Little was left to chance: Republican operatives sent fake campaign trackers — interns and staff members brandishing video cameras to record every utterance and move — to trail their own candidates. In media training sessions, candidates were forced to sit through a reel of the most self-destructive moments of 2012, when Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock’s comments on rape and pregnancy helped sink the party.

Other factors affected the outcome, of course. The election was unfolding during perhaps the best political climate Republicans had seen since the 1980s. Upheaval on the domestic and international stage — a crash of the health care website, beheadings in the Middle East, a surge of migrant children along the Mexican border and a raging virus in Africa — all helped tip the scales in Republicans’ favor. Democrats battled to keep the most competitive races from slipping away from them until the very last minute, an almost impossible task given President Obama’s low approval ratings and the cascade of bad news that was unimaginable when the party was riding high a year ago, after Republicans stumbled through a government shutdown.

“There wasn’t a moment this cycle where we thought, ‘Oh, we can’t lose,’ ” said Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Conversely, there wasn’t a moment in this cycle where we thought we couldn’t win," he added, insisting that their plan was the right one. “Election outcomes tend to declare everyone either a genius or a failure, but there’s no question in my mind that this was the right strategy.”

Democratic Discontent

Tensions between the Democratic Senate candidates and the president kept bubbling up throughout the campaign. It did not help that the Democrats defending their seats felt that Mr. Obama had refused to come to terms with how damaged his political brand had become in their states, and how perilous his embrace was.

When he delivered a speech last month at Northwestern University and declared that his policies were “on the ballot” alongside the candidates who were trying desperately to distance themselves from him, it infuriated Democrats. The White House had shared the general outline of that speech with Senate Democrats beforehand, but never mentioned that line despite its obvious political consequences. (By the end of the campaign, the quote of the president saying his policies were on the ballot had appeared in television ads in nearly every competitive Senate race, from North Carolina to Arkansas to Colorado.)

Every week seemed to get worse. By the end, Democrats had watched the president’s favorable ratings tumble, especially among white voters in the Southern states they needed to win. In Georgia, for example, their internal numbers showed the president’s favorability among whites at 21 percent. 

Further marring the relationship between the White House and Senate Democrats was the issue of fund-raising. Obama administration officials resisted getting too involved in helping the “super PAC” that former aides to Harry Reid, the majority leader, had set up to try to defend the party’s Senate seats. (Mr. Obama’s aides say he dislikes the work of PACs on principle.) In a tense meeting between supporters of Mr. Reid’s and White House staff over the summer, Mr. Reid’s allies sardonically reminded the president’s staff that they were not so reticent about working on behalf of the super PAC supporting Mr. Obama in 2012.

Mr. Obama even balked at dipping into the Democratic National Committee’s coffers to help Senate Democrats. Mr. Reid was so exasperated by what he saw as the president’s foot-dragging that during a phone call with Mr. Obama to discuss unrelated issues, he ended the conversation by saying, “Thank you very much Mr. President, but all we want is our money,” two people familiar with the conversation recalled.

There were policy conflicts as well. Democrats were incensed that the administration was so openly discussing taking unilateral action to pardon many undocumented immigrants, which they worried would inflame the issue and drive independent voters away. After hearing personally from several Democratic senators who were upset, the White House asked the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in late summer for its polling data.

What they turned over was alarming. In Iowa, a state that was slipping out of Democrats’ grasp, only 39 percent of people backed the president’s plan. By September, when Mr. Obama decided to delay his executive action until after the elections, the damage had already been done. With problems in the Middle East boiling over and the Ebola virus reaching the United States, voters’ confidence in the president’s leadership had plummeted.

Republican Revival

Even though the geography and historic trends favored Republicans this year, it was hard to find optimism among party loyalists and donors as 2014 began, given how badly 2010 and 2012 had gone.

“Most Republican activists were discouraged by lack of success in past election cycles,” acknowledged Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “The number of people you had to talk to who needed to be convinced that it made any sense to support the cause was huge. We started with a very challenging environment in which people were just disillusioned.”

But after a string a Democratic retirements — among them, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa — and the recruitment of strong candidates like Mr. Gardner in Colorado and Mr. Brown in New Hampshire, the party began to rebuild credibility.

Party leaders managed to elbow aside insurgents like Mr. McDaniel and Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who planned to challenge Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming on the grounds that he was insufficiently conservative.

Of course, the aggressive effort of the party’s establishment set off resentment. Republican senators recalled how an angry Mr. Cheney would call them to complain when someone disparaged his daughter.

And there were moments when Republicans’ gains felt like they could be slipping away. Mr. McConnell was rattled late last month when the Democrats went into Kentucky with a surprise last-minute ad buy against him. He took the threat so seriously, one adviser said, that as he rode around the state in the back of a campaign S.U.V. he started scouring his own Federal Election Commission reports in search of donors who had not yet given the maximum legal amount.

But in the end, the disciplined approach worked: no Republican imploded with the kind of fatal campaign gaffe that crushed the party’s hopes in the last two elections. Every establish candidate prevailed in the primaries. Republicans credited this to their rigorous training program. The fake trackers would even surprise candidates at the curb outside the airport when they flew into Washington to meet with National Republican Senatorial Committee officials, who then forced candidates to sit down and watch themselves on film.

“We don’t teach them what to believe,” said Mr. Collins, the committee’s executive director. “We just teach them how to talk, how to say things once the camera is on them.”

Mr. Collins found it hard to persuade members of his party that this campaign could lead not only to them winning some seats, but to retaking the majority.

There was the time he gave an upbeat address to a room full of Republican senators at Palm Beach’s majestic Breakers resort in February 2013, right after President Obama took the oath of office for a second time and Democrats were basking in their comfortable majority. But the senators, like Rob Portman of Ohio and Mr. Moran of Kansas, both of whom would become deeply involved in Republicans’ 2014 campaign, told Mr. Collins afterward that he might want to tone it down.

“Our general approach had been to underpromise and overperform,” Mr. Portman said in an interview a few days before Election Day.

Then there was a meeting of Republican leadership in the Capitol a few weeks later where Mr. Collins heard the same reticence. What he did not tell them at the time was that he had just printed 10,000 copies of a glossy magazine-size pamphlet that said on its crimson cover “Majority.”

He had the period added for emphasis.

@ The New York Times