WASHINGTON (AP) — The morning after Democrats' thrashing in the midterm elections, President Barack Obama unexpectedly dropped by his senior staff's daily meeting to buck up his exhausted and defeated team.

Rather than bemoan his party's loss of control in the Senate, Obama made an impassioned case for what he saw as the opportunities ahead and argued that his team still ran the most powerful institution in the world. He would echo those sentiments hours later in a post-election news conference, displaying a sunny outlook that ran counter to the electorate's gloomy mood.

White House officials say Obama's optimism reflects a president who feels liberated by even the limited prospects for striking deals with a Republican Congress and relieved about shedding the narrow Democratic majority that would have guaranteed Washington stayed locked in a stalemate.

Aides also have concluded that the political landscape leaves Obama with little ability to help Democrats regain Senate control in 2016, freeing the president to concentrate on finding areas of compromise with the GOP rather than on stacking his agenda with items his party can run on in the next election.

Some Democrats expect heightened tensions between the president and his party, which doesn't want to give Republicans any veneer of competency or effectiveness as the next election cycle lurches forward.

"To the extent that the president wants to cooperate, depending on the issue, that's likely to tick off a good portion of the Democratic caucus," said Patrick Griffin, a Democratic lobbyist who handled legislative affairs in President Bill Clinton's White House.

Whether Obama and Republicans can actually find common ground is deeply uncertain. Both sides have talked about their desire to work on issues like tax reform, infrastructure and trade. But Republicans have warned that it may be impossible to start talks on those matters if the president proceeds with plans to issue immigration executive orders before the end the year, a pledge Obama insists he intends to keep.

"I don't know why he would want to sabotage his last two years as president by doing something this provocative," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Friday following a White House meeting between the president and lawmakers.

Immigration aside, even where both sides share policy goals they still would have to work through significant differences. Obama says his governing failures stem less from a lack of compromise and more from an inability to be a good enough salesman for his ideas. It's a view that Republicans flatly reject but that Obama reiterated in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"One thing that I do need to constantly remind myself and my team of," he said, "is it's not enough just to build a better mousetrap. We've got to sell it. We've got to reach out to the other side and, where possible, persuade."

White House officials cast any growing chasm between Obama and fellow Democrats as simply part of the life-cycle of a presidency, particularly when the sitting president's party is in the congressional minority heading into the next campaign. Officials say they're also well aware that Democrats are starting to look for a new leader to rally around and expect potential Democratic presidential candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton to break with Obama at times as they try to build the party's next chapter.

"The fact of the matter is this is the time in any president's tenure where their congressional allies on the Hill and their interests begin to diverge more than ever," said Jim Manley, a former top adviser to current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is soon to be relegated to minority status.

Yet the midterm election season underscored that there already were fissures in the relationship between the president and Democrats. Wary of the president's paltry approval ratings, nearly all Democratic candidates in tough races tried to distance themselves from him and refused to be seen with Obama on the campaign trail. In turn, some Obama advisers quietly questioned that strategy, arguing that the president still had the ability to turn out his supporters — many of whom ultimately stayed home on Election Day.

And in a stunning break with Washington decorum, Reid's chief of staff used an interview with The Washington Post to sharply criticize the president as a drag on the party. One congressional official described the comments from Reid aide David Krone as a "venting" that reflected frustration that had been building up since the White House's botched rollout of the enrollment website for Obama's health care law.

White House officials were furious, calling Krone's behavior "unprofessional."

To some Democrats, the notion that the president may now use his final two years in office seeking legacy-building compromises with Republicans rather than helping the party position itself for 2016 comes as little surprise and fits with their long-held belief that Obama is a political figure who operates in isolation.

But White House officials argue that Democrats would also benefit from successful compromise legislation. The officials, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the administration's thinking following the election, say Obama has no plans to fold to every Republican demand or compromise his principles to reach a deal. If that positioning results in agreements on issues like tax reform and infrastructure investments, they say Democrats could — and should — be able to run on those victories two years from now.