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Aug. 14, 2006 – Page 2224 Blue State Special
As every weatherman knows, it’s hard to make an accurate forecast
more than a couple of days out. To say what’s coming your way three
months down the road is well nigh impossible. Electoral politics is no different. If the 2006 midterm election
were held today, tomorrow or even next week, it would be safe to say
that Republicans would hold on — barely, but with just enough room to
spare — to their majorities in both the House and Senate. They retain
all the advantages of incumbency, fundraising and redistricting, and
the Democrats would still need a net gain of at least 15 seats to take
over the House and a net of six to retake the Senate. Those are not
impossible numbers to achieve, to be sure, and the minority has picked
up that many seats, and more, in midterms past. But not often, and
certainly not in recent years. But the elections to fill all 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats
are still a dozen weeks away. So many things can happen between now and
then to turn one race, or several, in a different direction. It would
be a fool’s errand to say with any degree of confidence that the
forecast for today will hold beyond tomorrow. All you can do, really, is figure out which way the wind is blowing.
And the wind that’s blowing today has the GOP running, not walking, for
protective cover. All current indicators suggest that the Big One —
hurricane, tidal wave, tsunami or tornado; pick your own catastrophic
metaphor — is gathering in the middle distance. U.S. forces continue to confront sectarian violence in Iraq and,
according to generals there, the increasing possibility of civil war.
Israel is battling the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon while Iran builds
its nuclear capabilities. The thwarted airline bombing plot in Britain
spurs Republicans to take credit for being tougher in the War on
Terror, and Democrats to blame the party in power for failing to
interdict the world’s terrorist masterminds in the five years since the
Sept. 11 attacks. At home, Congress continues to wrangle with immigration, taxes, the
minimum wage, rising gas prices and lobbying scandals with unending
gridlock — within the GOP itself. The House and Senate plan to be in
recess between the end of September and the middle of November —
meaning the Republican majorities will probably go home to face the
voters with few newly minted legislative trophies to brag about. As a result, Republicans find themselves particularly vulnerable in
the Midwest and Northeast, and they even have cause for worry in their
geographic strongholds of the South and West. The only thing the GOP
appears to have going for it right now is the fact that most voters
have yet to tune in to the details of their upcoming electoral choices.
So if the Republicans can just keep their heads down, they might avert
a fatal storm. “There’s just no doubt it’s going to be a Democratic year,” said
Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and one of the nation’s most veteran observers of
congressional politics. “The difficulty we have in making any
predictions is, we’re trying to gauge the strength of the wind.” But change is definitely in the air, said Thomas Mann, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution and author, with Ornstein, of “The
Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back
on Track.” “This appears to be one of those midterm elections that
happens once a decade. Strong negative feelings in the public toward
the party in power leads to substantial swing — and with it a
substantial swing of seats away from the party.” Great political shifts can arise and culminate over a very short
period of time. Hardly anyone saw the “GOP Revolution” coming before
October in 1994, and then most political professionals discounted the
notion that 40 years of Democratic hegemony in the House was about to
come to an end. A similar sea change occurred almost without warning in
the last two elections of the 1960s, when the Vietnam War, the Cold War
with the Soviet Union and racial tensions in the cities contributed an
atmosphere of political turmoil and ultimately cost the Democrats the
presidency and a combined 51 seats in the House and eight seats in the
Senate. But megatrends are rarely seen from 40,000 feet. More often they are
foretold in the parochial storylines of individual contests. Last
week’s primary in Connecticut, where Just three months ago — roughly the amount of time between now and
Election Day — Lamont was a virtual unknown; only 9 percent of
respondents to a Quinnipiac University poll in May knew enough about
him to state any opinion, and the respected survey organization
reported that Lieberman’s support for President Bush’s conduct of the
war was no threat to his re-election. By early June, Lamont had taken a big step forward, to 40 percent
support in the polls, but most political analysts assumed that
Lieberman would survive merely by reminding voters why they had liked
him in the first place. But by late July, with Lamont investing heavily
in his campaign and liberal activists maintaining a drumbeat of
criticism against Lieberman, the challenger had edged ahead. Lamont’s victory has sparked debate over what it means for the
party’s bid for control of Congress — especially if Lieberman, the
party’s nominee for vice president just six years ago, continues to run
as an independent — and beyond that for its 2008 presidential
nomination contest. Republicans and even some centrist Democrats see it
as evidence that the party is in thrall to its most liberal elements.
Many Democrats see it as liberating the party from fear of speaking out
against the war. But the Connecticut primary is a political allegory that has to give
pause to incumbents in both parties, given the unstable political
climate — perhaps mostly to Republicans, who have so much running
against them this year. “As the Lieberman race shows, a growing number of voters are looking
for ways to send signals to the president and for representatives who
are willing to check executive power,” said Bruce E. Cain, a University
of California political scientist who runs the school’s operation in
Washington. Forecasting the outcome Nov. 7 is made enormously difficult by the
fact that so much is happening, on so many fronts, that could move the
national mood or at least sway undecideds in bellwether races. Consider just a few of the unanticipated events that have made
headlines in the past month. There was the raid on Israel by Hezbollah
forces, precipitating a Middle East crisis. There was the testimony
before the Senate Armed Services Committee by top generals, who
previously had been generally optimistic, warning that an outright
sectarian civil war is getting closer in Iraq. There was the Senate’s
rejection of the get-out-for-the-summer legislative deal promoted by
the GOP leadership, which married an increase of the minimum wage —
popular with Democrats and GOP moderates — to a cut in the estate tax
that’s popular with Republicans and some Democratic moderates. Then, last week, Republican Republicans were in a defensive crouch before these recent developments, none of which gave them inarguable reason for further optimism. The realists among them are bracing for the worst. “I think we’re in for the toughest election we’ve had since we’ve
been in the majority. So I expect this to be hard-fought, intense and
close,” said Rep. So far this year, the trend lines have gone almost exclusively in
favor of the Democrats, and as a consequence the party’s candidates
have become more competitive in seats across the country in recent
months. As a result, the Republicans are currently on course to win only 220
House seats in the 110th Congress — and that’s if they take every one
of the races that CQ currently rates as safe, favored or leaning in
their favor. That total, of course, is just two seats more than the
number required to claim a majority in the House. There are also 13 contests — 12 for seats held by Republicans and
one by a Democrat — rated as too close to call. The campaigns for these
tossup seats, by definition, can as readily go to the Republicans as to
the Democrats. So if the GOP picks up half of them, it can expect to go
into 2007 with no more than 227 seats — or the smallest majority the
party has had since 2001, when it held 221 seats and counted on one
GOP-voting independent. But the bulk of the tossups could slip away from the Republicans if
the trends continue to blow strongly against them this fall. In the big
swing years of the recent past, including the Republican upsurge in the
1994 “Contract With America” election and the Democrats’ rout in 1974
just after Watergate forced President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation,
nearly all of the most hotly contested races broke in favor of the
victorious party. Just as worrisome for Republicans, they hardly have a lock on the
220 races now tilted in their favor. In 20 of them, the Republican has
only a slight edge because of incumbency, fundraising advantages or
political demographics. And so the Democrats could win any or all of
them if their candidates’ strengths gain a bit of traction — or if the
voters’ mood shifts much more against the GOP, or against incumbents in
general. Only 10 seats now held by Democrats, by contrast, are that closely competitive. Beyond these races that are tossups or “leaning” to one party or the
other is a third category: contests in which the front-running
candidate has serious advantages that make election likely, but where
other factors make an upset plausible. And here is where the partisan
imbalance is greatest of all: There are 25 seats where Republicans are
favored — pretty solid, but not quite safe — but only eight seats where
Democrats are similarly vulnerable to an upset. Beyond that, almost all the races that have become more competitive
in recent weeks have tilted toward the Democrats. Since CQ Weekly’s
last overview of the campaign, on April 24, the political staff’s
ratings of 26 House races and six Senate races have changed — in favor
of the Democrats in 25 of the House races and four of the Senate races.
Most have been Republican-held seats that appear increasingly
vulnerable to Democratic takeovers; the others have mainly been
Democratic-held seats where the threat of a Republican challenge has
faded. Add all that up and it’s clear why Republicans have so much to fear.
Of the year’s most closely contested House races, 32 are in
Republican-held districts, compared with 11 in Democratic-held
districts. When you include the long-shot challenges, a total of 57 GOP
seats — one-quarter of the seats they now hold — are currently in play,
to just 19, or 10 percent, for the Democrats. Those 76 competitive and still-kicking races give the Democrats a
surprising advantage for November when you consider what they take with
them going in: Democrats hold 184 safe seats, which they are virtually
guaranteed to keep. To reach the magic number of 218, they need to win
only 34 of the 76 competitive contests, or fewer than half. The math is considerably more favorable for the Republicans in their
bid to keep hold of the Senate, where they occupy 55 of the 100 seats
today. They will still have 52 next year if you start with the 40 GOP
senators whose seats aren’t on the ballot this year and add the dozen
contests in which the Republicans are favored or the races are at least
leaning their way. But in the past month, the number of races in which Republicans are
favored has dropped by two, and in both cases the campaigns have become
too close to call. One is in Montana, where Republican Democrats are the incumbent party in just one state where the Senate seat is now a tossup: Minnesota, where Only one Senate seat currently is more at risk of partisan turnover
than the three tossups — in the bellwether state of Pennsylvania, where
conservative two-term Republican Still, the competitive balance in the national Senate campaign is
closer than in the House campaign: Nine Democratic seats and eight
Republican seats are at least moderately competitive. So to win the
majority, Senate Democrats will have to win a higher share of the close
ones than their House counterparts. But recent Senate election history suggests a burgeoning trend that
has to be worrisome for Republicans: One party ends up dominating the
closest contests. In 2000, the Democrats gained four seats to pull into
a 50-50 tie with the GOP by triumphing in five of the seven contests
decided by margins of 5 percentage points or less. Two years later,
Republicans won back control by taking five of the seven closest races,
and they expanded their majority in 2004 by winning five of the six
closest campaigns. Still, retaking the Senate should prove difficult for the Democrats,
who will be operating with little margin for error. Because of their
success six years ago, they are defending more seats now: 18 to the
Republicans’ 15. For the six-seat net gain they need to grab control,
Democrats must win 40 percent of all GOP seats that are up this year,
and that’s only if the Democrats manage to hold all of their own seats.
Losing any of those would move the Democrats’ chance of a takeover to
an implausible level. The quest is even more problematic because the Senate campaign is
being staged mainly on territory that is difficult for the Democrats.
Only three of the Republican seats are in states that The remaining top-tier Democratic targets are all in states that
voted twice for Bush, and where the current Republican lean may yet
prove sufficient to counter formidable Democratic challengers:
Tennessee, where Bob Corker, a former Chattanooga mayor, won the GOP
primary this month to oppose Democratic Rep. For a true shot at the majority, the Democrats may have to boost
their chances significantly in two states where their candidates are
currently long shots: Arizona, where developer Jim Pederson is
challenging two-term incumbent The Republicans’ national campaign effort is undergirded by a
well-honed organization, engineered by master strategist Karl Rove and
his protégé Ken Mehlman, now chairman of the Republican National
Committee. This political machine proved its talent for turning out
sympathetic voters during the 2002 election, which gave Republicans the
Senate majority, and the 2004 election, when Bush won re-election. “Republicans have put together a superior ground organization that
will allow them to get their record to their past supporters while
continuing to woo new recruits,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political
scientist at the University of Minnesota. “Republicans are quite
effective at micro-targeting its slices of the electorate.” Republicans, in fact, are staking their fortune on a focus on issues
specific to their own states and districts — and their arguments about
why their particular candidates are best suited to address those issues
— to thwart the Democrats’ efforts to turn this midterm into a national
referendum on Bush and unified GOP control in Washington. “The prospects of holding the majority are excellent,” said Republican Or as Rep. In pursuing this strategy, however, Republicans are counting on one
of the oldest truisms about American politics staying true: Voters may
hate Congress, but they like their own senators and representatives
well enough. Recent polling reflects that. Public approval of Congress has
languished below 30 percent in some surveys, a level that for the GOP
majority is uncomfortably close to the mark given the
Democratic-controlled Congress of 1994. And a Washington Post/ABC News
poll published Aug. 8 found 55 percent approving of their own House
members’ job performance, but a 36 percent approval for Congress as a
whole. Those same numbers come with yet another worrisome caveat for the
GOP. The 55 percent approval rating for incumbents was the lowest since
the eve of the 1994 election. These numbers only mirror voter discontent that has been emerging throughout the year: • Bush’s job approval sank as low as 31 percent this spring. Even
with an uptick to as high as 40 percent in some recent surveys, his
standing is worse than President Bill Clinton’s prior to his party’s
congressional drubbing a dozen years ago. • Generic polls, which ask respondents to express a preference for
the parties without mentioning any candidates, are of limited utility
in determining the outcomes of individual elections. Still, they have
consistently shown a substantial preference for the Democrats, as have
polls asking respondents which party they would prefer controlling
Congress. • Nearly all polls on specific domestic issues, including such
kitchen-table topics as the overall economy, jobs and health care, show
that public opinion now favors the Democrats — and the party is even
challenging the Republicans’ traditionally solid advantages on
security-related issues such as national defense and preventing
terrorism. In the end, the decision for many voters on whom to elect to the
110th Congress may come down to their views on the stewardship provided
by the Republican majority in the 109th. And Democrats aren’t waiting
to provide their epitaph until Congress goes home to campaign. Although
the GOP has already promised a lame-duck session after the election, no
matter what the outcome, the party out of power has started branding
this as a “do-nothing” Congress. In their view, the Republican majority is culpable for policy
failures across a broad spectrum of issues, including lack of oversight
of the Bush administration’s handling of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and its foreign policy in general; a long-stalled
investigation into intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq
conflict; a tepid response to revelations that Bush has invoked
presumed presidential powers to greatly expand domestic surveillance in
the name of fighting terrorism; the failed effort to tie a minimum wage
increase to yet another “tax break for the rich”; a lack of relief for
the short-term pain of rising energy prices; and failing to override
the first veto of the Bush presidency, by which he stopped a bill that
would have loosened restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem
cell research. In the Republican view, the criticism is a histrionic effort to
obscure their considerable top-tier accomplishments of the past two
years, which they describe as laws that limit class-action lawsuits,
crack down on consumers seeking to slough off personal debts by heading
to bankruptcy court, update federal highway and mass transit programs
and overhaul energy policy; and most recently the bill Bush has
promised to sign aimed at shoring up the nation’s decaying pension
system. This is, to be sure, a rather modest record when compared with the
standards the Republican majority set for itself. With Bush declaring
that he’d won a mandate along with his re-election two years ago, the
Republican leadership signaled their willingness to move on his top
domestic priorities at the time: reconfiguring the Social Security
program to include personal savings accounts and extending indefinitely
the tax cuts he won in his first term. Both have failed emphatically. And the marquee domestic initiative the president added to the
legislative agenda this year — reducing illegal immigration and
offering millions of people already here illegally a path to
citizenship — is mired in discord that is most noticeable within the
GOP majority’s ranks. All told, it would be accurate to say that, by historical standards,
the record of the 109th Congress is middling — and that, politically,
few of the laws enacted have the sort of broad popular appeal that
would permit incumbents to brag about them effectively on the campaign
trail. Republican leaders have sought to address that by at least arranging
votes on several items loudly championed by the party’s conservative
base, including one constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the
American flag and another to prohibit marriages of same-sex couples.
None were passed, but many Republicans will brandish their support as
proof of continued allegiance to conservative values. “The average voter doesn’t appreciate how high the bar is on passage
of anything,” said Michael Franc, vice president of government
relations for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The Republicans’
challenge is to show that any reason why their ideas aren’t going
through is because of the obstructionism and the ‘just say no’
characteristic of the Democratic leadership in Congress.” But Franc noted that it may not be as easy as in the recent past for
the GOP to get its allies to the voting booth this November. Polls have
shown a growing restiveness among the Republican base — though in most
cases, it’s not because they view this Congress as too conservative,
but rather as not conservative enough. A sizable segment of the base has chastised the party’s leaders for
failing to reduce the deficit further and for buying into the culture
of “earmarking,” or dedicating millions in appropriations to parochial
projects. There is even a small but growing chorus on the right
expressing concern that the United States is now engaged in an overly
long and too costly nation-building exercise in Iraq. Whatever voters’ impression of Congress is now, when the Capitol is
as empty as it ever gets, Republican leaders contend that they have an
excellent chance to improve their standing once they return after Labor
Day. But given that they have at most 18 workdays before their
scheduled pre-election departure, the potential for any further major
accomplishments for Republicans to tout looks slim.
Gregory L. Giroux, Marie Horrigan, Rachel Kapochunas, Sarah
Abruzzese, Joanna Anderson, Laura Blinkhorn, Adam Bloedorn, Nathan
Levinson, Victoria McGrane, Lauren Phillips, Marc Rehmann, Brendan
Spiegel, Jesse Stanchak and Michael Teitelbaum contributed reporting
for this story and the charts on the following pages.
Ney, p. CQ Weekly August 11, 2006 |
