Obama's final frontier.

• Author: Zoller, Martha
• Position: POLITICAL LANDSCAPE - Barack Obama's last term

I'F YOU ARE on any e-mail list, you could get a missive saying Pres. Barack Obama is going to repeal the 22nd Amendment and run for a third term. In fairness, these e-mails also were circulated at the end of the Clinton and Bush administrations. It will not be happening.

The President is involved in one final campaign, though---to take back the House of Representatives. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, thinks it unlikely that the Democrats will take back the House. Every scenario he has run so far on his Crystal Ball website has Republicans picking up from two to 19 seats. In the sixth year of a president's term, it is unlikely his party will gain ground in Congress. However, this has not been a usual presidency. No president in modern times has been reelected with the kind of bad economic numbers Pres. Obama had (and still has)--except for Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the other hand, it is very difficult to beat an incumbent president.

The president outcampaigned the Republicans, all of them. I spent some time last fall campaigning in North Carolina and Virginia. North Carolina was better organized and ultimately flipped its state to the Republicans with hard work, but they were not as technologically advanced as the Obama campaign arm, Organizing for America, but they were able to target neighborhoods, house by house, with swing voters and get them out to vote for Mitt Romney.

In Virginia, it was a little more like the "Dark Ages." It was clipboards and lists and lots of printed paper. It felt like the technology of the 1990s. With the recent flip of Gov. Bob McDonnell on the state exchanges related to ObamaCare, there is the reality that Obama won in Virginia and, while the governor is term-limited, McDonnell does not want to be the guy who ushers in the next Democratic governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The great loss of 2012 for Republicans was not the presidency. That was a long shot at best. The big loss was dropping those two seats in the Senate. By all statistical models, Republicans should have taken back control of the Senate in 2010 and added to their majority in 2012, but that did not happen. Republicans have one more shot in 2014, with more Democrats up for reelection than Republicans. However, beginning in 2016, and for the next few cycles, the combination of more Republicans up for reelection and changing demographics in Red States will make it hard for Republicans to gain...