WASHINGTON — Tuesday’s elections brought sweeping victory for Republicans, who solidified their grip on the U.S. House of Representatives and took control of the U.S. Senate.

The president’s tone after the Republican takeover of the Senate boiled down to this: He shares the blame for Democrats’ sweeping losses and will consider Republican ideas but will not reflexively accept them if they do not fit his own priorities.

The president, however, accepted that voters are frustrated. “I hear you,” he said in a post-election press conference.

In contrast to his soul-searching performance after Democratic losses in Congress in 2010, Obama was relatively unbowed on Wednesday at a post-election news conference hours after the political landscape was altered irrevocably for his last two years in office.

“There are times when you’re a politician and you’re disappointed with election results. But maybe I’m just getting older. I don’t know. It doesn’t make me mopey. It energizes me because it means that this democracy is working,” he said.

There was no talk of a “shellacking”, the word he used to describe Democratic losses in 2010, and he made no pledges for a dramatic course correction or in the staff members who surround him at the White House.

“Republicans had a good night,” said Obama, who before the elections had noted that most of them were taking place in states that he lost in 2012.

He audibly sighed at a question on whether he now feels he should have developed better relations with Republicans in Congress.

From Obama’s standpoint, he’s tried that already. There was an early 2013 charm offensive that failed to bridge the partisan divide over taxes and spending.

However, he said he is open to listen to Republican demands.

“What I’d like to do is to hear from the Republicans, to find out what it is that they would like to see happen,” Obama said. “And what I’m committing to is making sure that I am open to working with them on the issues where they think that there’s going to be cooperation.”

While Obama has played golf with House Speaker John Boehner to get to know him better, he has found little in common with Mitch McConnell, the 72-year-old Kentuckian who will become Senate majority leader.

McConnell infuriated the White House when he said in 2010 that Republicans’ “single most important” goal was preventing the president from winning a second term. In the runup to this election, McConnell sought to turn the campaign into a referendum on Obama’s job performance.

The word traveling in Democratic circles since McConnell became majority-leader-in-waiting was that he and Obama are so different that they will need consecutive translation when they talk to each other.