They've lost on the issue of wealth inequality.
They've lost on the issue of human caused climate change
They've lost on the issue of voter fraud.
They've lost on the issue of the effectiveness of tax cuts for the wealthy and trickle down economics as a whole.
They've lost on the issue of gay marriage
Last but not least, congressional republicans have the worst approval ratings behind not only Obama, but congressional democrats as well.
The thought of them taking the senate is not only awful, it is downright bewildering. You want the truth? Average joe Americans are idiots.
Starting in the 70s the Republican Party began building a vast institutional structure to attract lower and middle class voters. (Many of these voters were part of Nixon's Silent Majority - folks alienated by the Democratic Party's move away from traditional working class issues toward gender/racial and lifestyle politics)
The new Republican structure (called "Movement Conservatism") was comprised of think tanks and various media assets - talk radio & Fox News being the most well known variants. This structure mainly
used conservatism (which boiled down to a curious admixture of religion, patriotism, tradition & the culture war) to get poor and uneducated people to join the cause, which cause was really a front for lowering the taxes and regulatory burden of the wealthiest Americans, as well as increasing the control those Americans had over the nation's political machinery. This institutional structure convinced poor and uneducated Americans that all information sources outside of the conservative media (
including things like science) were part of a conspiracy to destroy the country. This is very much like the Dark Ages when powerful forces were able to drive science underground and destroy freedom by taking advantage of stupid people.
[Movement Conservatism very much depends on ignorance and fear; meaning: it requires a certain kind of voter who is extremely paranoid and uninformed - someone who doesn't know the difference between Marx or Keynes, Bin Laden or Hussein, someone for whom all the worlds bad guys exist in this undifferentiated duck soup called "evil doers". Rather than understanding actual policies or history or other nations or oil geopolitics, this person subsists wholly upon cliches "Freedom is on the march". This is the kind of person who makes generalizations about entire civilizations, cultures or religions. In other words, they hold passionate beliefs about Muslims, yet they have
never directly studied Muslims in a rigorous context with diverse information sources. They are powerless to describe the difference between Sunnis and Shias. Ask them about regional sects in the Middle East like the Kurds and you will get a blank stare. Ask them about the failure of the Maliki government to incorporate the Kurds into the region's balance of power and again - blank stare. Ask them who Isis is and what they want ... (blank stare). Ask them about Reagan's unconstitutional alliance with Iran or the mujahideen in Afghanistan...(blank stare). Ask them about the US relationship with Hussein going back to Eisenhower. . . (blank stare). Such is the brain that depends on Rush Limbaugh for thought. And they vote.]
[Ask them about the secular Ba'athism of Hussein versus the Islamic radicalism of Bin Laden . . . (blank stare). They don't know anything about the region save what they've been told by people with a very narrow political agenda. God help us . . . because . . . they vote]
Needless to say, the Conservative movement was extremely successful and managed to get enough Americans to join the republican party (where they would vote against their own interests without knowing it). And yes, this group of well meaning but terribly duped Americans is not the numerical majority. In fact, with each passing year, the nation shifts away from their values and largely submerged racial beliefs. Demographic trends are not on their side. But this doesn't matter. Not only have they captured Washington because of their alignment with corporate wealth, but they also have Big Media (which is owned by a handful of mega-corporations who have scorn and contempt for the Left's tax and regulatory policies). Point is: the reason that the Republican Party survives despite diminishing consensus for their views is because they successfully captured enough political and media machinery to insulate themselves from the democratic process. This is what all successful movements and coups do.
The game is over. People don't get it. They organized and they won. The left still doesn't know what hit them.