The dullness comes from this election’s lack of a compelling macro-theme. Yes, there are national refrains: Democrats in state after state call their Republican opponents heartless misogynists; Republicans call their Democratic opponents Obama clones. But there’s no big national issue on which voters feel that they can change the country’s course. It’s not that candidates today are more cynical or homogenized than in midterms past. It’s that the subjects they’re discussing cynically and homogenously don’t matter as much.
There’s a Good Reason These Midterm Elections Seem So Boring - The Atlantic. I have a different explanation for our indifference towards midterm elections: the determination, shared by all our news media, to teach us that the POTUS is the only political figure who matters at all. When Bush 2 was president, the liberal media blamed every bad thing in the world on Bush; since Obama came to the office, the conservative media (especially Fox News) blames every bad thing in the world on him. The great majority of us get our news from sources which act on the assumption that America is functionally an absolute monarchy. So why should anyone care about a non-presidential election?