By Morton Kondracke
Published November 6th 2006 in Pasadena Star-News
THIS looks to be a classic six-year-itch election - bad for the party holding the White House - tempered by some Republican structural advantages.
Since 1946, the average net loss for the president's party in his sixth year in office is 31.5 House seats and six Senate seats, double the 15 seats Democrats need to take the House and just what they'd need for control of the Senate.
That level of loss for the GOP this year is by no means out of the question. In fact, some analysts think Democrats could pick up 40 seats, though they add that smaller numbers are possible. I think GOP losses will be on the smaller end of the range.
The pattern of sixth-year elections is that mistakes pile up - often, bad mistakes - damaging the president's popularity and driving the public into a mood for change.
So in 1946, with President Harry Truman's approval at 33 percent, Democrats lost 45 House seats and 12 in the Senate. In the recession year 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower's popularity sunk to 52 percent - for him, that was low - and the GOP lost 48 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate.
In 1966, Vietnam War weariness sent President Lyndon Johnson's approval rating down to 44 percent and the Democrats lost 47 House seats and four in the Senate. After Watergate in 1974, President Gerald Ford was at 47 percent approval and the GOP lost 49 seats in the House and four in the Senate.
The past two sixth-year midterms were anomalies. President Ronald Reagan's approval still was in the 60s (though a month after the elections, the Iran-Contra scandal brought it down to 47 percent) and the GOP lost eight Senate seats, though just five in the House.
In 1998, GOP threats to impeach President Bill Clinton kept his approval rating at 66 percent. Democrats ended up gaining five House seats and held even in the Senate.
This year, of course, the Iraq disaster is at least as much a liability to President Bush as Vietnam or a recession was in the past, and possibly as much as Watergate.
But on top of that, House Republicans have proved the adage that power corrupts, and they've been running things for only 12 years, not 40.
Bush's approval rating is below 40 percent - RealClearPolitics.com's average of the latest polls is 38.5 percent - and the generic Congressional ballot shows that the public favors Democratic candidates for Congress by a margin of 53.5 percent to 38.5 percent.
The average of late-campaign generic polls is historically a highly accurate predictor of the national vote for House candidates. In 1994, Republicans won 54 percent of this vote and picked up 52 House seats.
The latest Pew Research Center poll offers yet more evidence that a big wave is about to crash on the GOP. All kinds of swing voters who helped Republicans win the 2002 elections have defected in droves to the Democrats.
They include working moms, who split evenly in 2002 and who now favor Democrats, 52 percent to 34 percent, as well as independents, seniors and Midwesterners, all of whom tilted slightly Republican in 2002 and who now favor Democrats by 16 points.
Moreover, once-solid Republican groups are much less solid now. Men favored the GOP by 12 points in 2002, but only 4 points now. Mothers with children have gone from 23 percent pro-GOP to 3 percent pro-Democratic. Southerners, suburbanites, people with incomes more than $100,000 and rural residents all are drifting away from the GOP, too.
And yet, if a wave is crashing, Republicans do have some structural bulwarks to weaken its force. The key one is terrain; others are money, the GOP voter-turnout machine and the virtual absence of a positive Democratic message.
As the nonpartisan reform group FairVote has reported, there are far fewer competitive seats -- especially open seats -- in these elections than there were in 1994, meaning that a 54-point Democratic advantage should net far fewer House seats.
The 1994 elections featured 52 open seats, 37 on what basically was Republican turf, while in 2006 there are 30 open seats and only 11 of them in Democratic-leaning districts.
Republicans won 22 open seats in 1994; FairVote figures it will be hard for Democrats to capture more than eight or nine this year.
And in the current Congress, Republicans have only three incumbents representing districts that tilt heavily Democratic and only 17 in districts that tilt even slightly Democratic, whereas in 1994, the GOP ousted 34 Democratic incumbents, 27 in GOP-leaning districts.
The Senate terrain also favors Republicans. Democrats should win two GOP seats in states that Kerry carried in 2004 - Rhode Island and Pennsylvania - and another seat in a state that he barely lost, Ohio. But Bush won in the four states where Democrats need to pick up three seats to take over -- Missouri, which Bush won 53 percent to 46 percent; Montana, where he won 59 percent to 39 percent; Virginia, where he won 54 percent to 45 percent; and Tennessee, where he won 57 percent to 43 percent.
Meanwhile, the GOP candidates and committees have been able to rely on $46 million more than Democrats and its vaunted "72-hour program" to get out the vote, which outstripped Democrats' efforts in 2004.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) told me that he'd match his GOTV operation against anything the GOP could mount.
Bottom line, I figure that Democrats will pick up 25 House seats and five Senate seats. It'll be a wave, but not a tsunami.
Since 1946, the average net loss for the president's party in his sixth year in office is 31.5 House seats and six Senate seats, double the 15 seats Democrats need to take the House and just what they'd need for control of the Senate.
That level of loss for the GOP this year is by no means out of the question. In fact, some analysts think Democrats could pick up 40 seats, though they add that smaller numbers are possible. I think GOP losses will be on the smaller end of the range.
The pattern of sixth-year elections is that mistakes pile up - often, bad mistakes - damaging the president's popularity and driving the public into a mood for change.
So in 1946, with President Harry Truman's approval at 33 percent, Democrats lost 45 House seats and 12 in the Senate. In the recession year 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower's popularity sunk to 52 percent - for him, that was low - and the GOP lost 48 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate.
In 1966, Vietnam War weariness sent President Lyndon Johnson's approval rating down to 44 percent and the Democrats lost 47 House seats and four in the Senate. After Watergate in 1974, President Gerald Ford was at 47 percent approval and the GOP lost 49 seats in the House and four in the Senate.
The past two sixth-year midterms were anomalies. President Ronald Reagan's approval still was in the 60s (though a month after the elections, the Iran-Contra scandal brought it down to 47 percent) and the GOP lost eight Senate seats, though just five in the House.
In 1998, GOP threats to impeach President Bill Clinton kept his approval rating at 66 percent. Democrats ended up gaining five House seats and held even in the Senate.
This year, of course, the Iraq disaster is at least as much a liability to President Bush as Vietnam or a recession was in the past, and possibly as much as Watergate.
But on top of that, House Republicans have proved the adage that power corrupts, and they've been running things for only 12 years, not 40.
Bush's approval rating is below 40 percent - RealClearPolitics.com's average of the latest polls is 38.5 percent - and the generic Congressional ballot shows that the public favors Democratic candidates for Congress by a margin of 53.5 percent to 38.5 percent.
The average of late-campaign generic polls is historically a highly accurate predictor of the national vote for House candidates. In 1994, Republicans won 54 percent of this vote and picked up 52 House seats.
The latest Pew Research Center poll offers yet more evidence that a big wave is about to crash on the GOP. All kinds of swing voters who helped Republicans win the 2002 elections have defected in droves to the Democrats.
They include working moms, who split evenly in 2002 and who now favor Democrats, 52 percent to 34 percent, as well as independents, seniors and Midwesterners, all of whom tilted slightly Republican in 2002 and who now favor Democrats by 16 points.
Moreover, once-solid Republican groups are much less solid now. Men favored the GOP by 12 points in 2002, but only 4 points now. Mothers with children have gone from 23 percent pro-GOP to 3 percent pro-Democratic. Southerners, suburbanites, people with incomes more than $100,000 and rural residents all are drifting away from the GOP, too.
And yet, if a wave is crashing, Republicans do have some structural bulwarks to weaken its force. The key one is terrain; others are money, the GOP voter-turnout machine and the virtual absence of a positive Democratic message.
As the nonpartisan reform group FairVote has reported, there are far fewer competitive seats -- especially open seats -- in these elections than there were in 1994, meaning that a 54-point Democratic advantage should net far fewer House seats.
The 1994 elections featured 52 open seats, 37 on what basically was Republican turf, while in 2006 there are 30 open seats and only 11 of them in Democratic-leaning districts.
Republicans won 22 open seats in 1994; FairVote figures it will be hard for Democrats to capture more than eight or nine this year.
And in the current Congress, Republicans have only three incumbents representing districts that tilt heavily Democratic and only 17 in districts that tilt even slightly Democratic, whereas in 1994, the GOP ousted 34 Democratic incumbents, 27 in GOP-leaning districts.
The Senate terrain also favors Republicans. Democrats should win two GOP seats in states that Kerry carried in 2004 - Rhode Island and Pennsylvania - and another seat in a state that he barely lost, Ohio. But Bush won in the four states where Democrats need to pick up three seats to take over -- Missouri, which Bush won 53 percent to 46 percent; Montana, where he won 59 percent to 39 percent; Virginia, where he won 54 percent to 45 percent; and Tennessee, where he won 57 percent to 43 percent.
Meanwhile, the GOP candidates and committees have been able to rely on $46 million more than Democrats and its vaunted "72-hour program" to get out the vote, which outstripped Democrats' efforts in 2004.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) told me that he'd match his GOTV operation against anything the GOP could mount.
Bottom line, I figure that Democrats will pick up 25 House seats and five Senate seats. It'll be a wave, but not a tsunami.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.
Election Day '09 was a roller-coaster for election reformers. Instant runoff voting had a great night in Minnesota, where St. Paul voters chose to implement IRV for its city elections, and Minneapolis voters used IRV for the first time—with local media touting it as a big success. As the Star-Tribune noted in endorsing IRV for St. Paul, Tuesday’s elections give the Twin Cities a chance to show the whole state of Minnesota the benefits of adopting IRV. There were disappointments in Lowell and Pierce County too, but high-profile multi-candidate races in New Jersey and New York keep policymakers focused on ways to reform elections; the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald were among many newspapers publishing commentary from FairVote board member and former presidential candidate John Anderson on how IRV can mitigate the problems of plurality elections.