Obama coalition falls short

Zoe Buck, 14 months, has eyes only for her mother, Julie Buck, as she votes at the Alaska Zoo polling place in Anchorage. Photo / AP

US midterm turnout low among young and Hispanics — key Democratic voting blocks

The coalition of young and minority voters that handed President Barack Obama both of his election victories failed to show up for the Democrats in the US midterms as Republicans celebrated their first black female member of Congress.

Exit polls showed that turnout was low among young people and Hispanics - two pillars of Obama's political base - leaving Democrats short of the votes they needed to protect vulnerable Senate seats.

Republicans cheered the success of Mia Love, a Haitian-American convert to Mormonism, who will be their first black woman in Congress after winning her contest in Utah.

Party leaders hope her victory will help them appeal to black voters, who overwhelmingly support the Democrats.

Love's victory means the number of black Republicans in Congress rises to three. Tim Scott, the first black Republican senator elected in the South in more than a century, won in South Carolina, while voters in Texas also elected an African-American Republican to Congress.

The Democrats, by contrast, have about 40 black members of Congress.

Even as Republicans celebrated their growing diversity in Congress, however, exit polls indicated they had made little progress in winning over the minority voters they will need to capture the White House in 2016.

Republicans won 35 per cent of the vote among Hispanics, America's fastest growing demographic and a group with increasing electoral clout. Mitt Romney's defeat by Obama in 2012 was partly attributed to his failure to win Hispanics. They also made little progress among young people, winning just 43 per cent of voters under the age of 29. Instead, they succeeded in mobilising their traditional base of older white voters.

"A victory is a victory and Republicans should celebrate," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics. "But they shouldn't mistake [it] as proof they are on course for success in 2016. They still have loads of repair work to do."

Part of that will include trying to appeal to African-American voters, 89 per cent of whom supported the Democrats on Wednesday. Sabato said the election of Love, a mother of three, was "solid gold" for a party trying to repair its image with black voters and women.

Love, who was elected in one of the whitest states in America, said her ethnicity and sex had nothing to do with her success.

"This had nothing to do with race," she said after her win at the polls. "Utahans have made a statement that they're not interested in dividing Americans based on race or gender."

Her path to Utah - and now to Washington - is unlikely. She was born in New York to Catholic parents who had arrived from Haiti two years earlier. After university, Love converted to Mormonism and worked as a flight attendant before moving to Utah. There she met Jason Love, a white Mormon man. Their first date was at a gun range and three months later they married.

She spent six years on the city council of Saratoga Springs before being elected its mayor in 2009. She ran for Congress in 2012 but lost to an incumbent Democrat.

The exit polls will also worry Hillary Clinton and the Democrats as they look to the 2016 election. They will question whether young and minority voters will continue to turn up when Obama's name is no longer on the ballot.