Republicans had an excellent night Tuesday. But they didn’t roar through the gates like they did in 2010. The argument that the 2014 Senate midterms, clustered heavily in the south and plains states, are a grand repudiation of a presidency that, while extremely productive, has been in check for four years, rings hollow.

So Obama isn’t facing the paradox of presidential democracy that confronted him in 2011. Moreover, he’s a lame duck now. A wistful and restless period probably awaits him. But he has no reason to concern himself with whether conciliation or combat is a wiser re-election strategy. His twinned political responsibilities now are cementing his own legacy, and shoring up his political base, so he can hand it off to the next leader of the Democratic Party. He can’t do that by undermining his own achievements and sidestepping the issues his core supporters care about.

And this is where Congressional Democrats’ reflexive tendency to recoil from Obama when he’s down will come into tension with their own best interests. Running away from Obama might—might—make sense for Southern Democrats running in a midterm. But in 2016, the Democratic nominee, and the Democrats riding her coattails, won’t have that luxury. Obama’s base is still vast and loyal, and won’t necessarily vote with the same enthusiasm for a Democratic Party that tries to pretend he and his presidency aren’t particularly relevant.

They will do best not to fracture on the assumption that the public just gave the hushed Republican policy agenda a vote of confidence, but to oppose it with confidence that when it’s laid against the Democratic agenda two year from now, the public will reject it. That means standing pat if and when Republicans try to slash taxes, weaken environmental regulations, damage Obamacare, and maximize the deportation of low-priority offenders. It means not voting in politically expedient ways and hiding behind Obama’s veto, but borrowing from Majority Leader-designate Mitch McConnell, who famously boasted that during Obama’s first term, Republicans “worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off [Democratic] proposals, because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.”

That the new Democratic minority will be more liberal than the outgoing majority will make this task easier, as will the fact that the next Senate election will be nearly as daunting for Republicans as this one was for Democrats. Citing administration officials, Politico reports that “Obama’s political and policy teams are planning a big counterattack if the Republicans win the Senate—introducing a slate of legislative proposals and executive actions on immigration, infrastructure and early childhood education that are popular with the Democratic base and that he will dare the GOP to oppose.”