Is the GOP headed for a watershed defeat in Tuesday’s election — one that’ll elicit references to 1964 (Republican debacle), 1974 (Republican losses) and 1994 (Democratic debacle)?
Yes, some of the polls show a narrowing of the Democrat/GOP gap. And
no one will know until the final votes are counted — or, perhaps more accurately, until the final voting lawsuit is litigated.
But one thing is clear: the pre-election conventional wisdom (putting aside the lockstep ideological talk shows) is now rapidly solidifying and it is suggesting that the Republicans seem poised to face a painful — perhaps historical — electoral verdict on Tuesday.
Could the conventional wisdom be wrong? Yes. It has been wrong before. But it is unquestionably solidifying now.
One report suggests that the frenzied campaigning over the past week, the raging controversy of Senator John Kerry’s bout of political foot-and-mouth-disease while delivering The Bungled Joke, and President George Bush’s relentless ongoing political SWAT action to shore up a purportedly hesitant Republican base has done no good: the publication’s poll finds Republicans are still losing ground.
Yet another suggests that the Democrats are a hair away from a historic political comeback where they will take not only the House but possibly even the Senate.
An article in Newsweek suggests the GOP would have been better off coasting on its non-lead and not having campaigned anymore:
As President George W. Bush jets across Red State America this weekend, Republican candidates are falling further behind Democratic rivals, according to the new NEWSWEEK poll. While the GOP has lagged behind Democrats throughout the campaign season, the trend in the past month—when NEWSWEEK conducted four polls in five weeks—had suggested the Republicans were building momentum in the homestretch.
No more. The new poll finds support for Republicans (and for President Bush) receding. For example, 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win enough seats to take control of one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections on Tuesday. Those results are close to early October levels, while less than a third of Americans (32 percent) want Republicans to retain control. If the elections were held today, 54 percent of likely voters say they would support the Democratic candidate in their district versus 38 percent who would vote for the Republican-a 16-point edge for the Democrats.
Despite round-the-clock coverage of John Kerry’s Iraq gaffe this week and non-stop rallies in which the President paints Democrats as weak-on-terror tax lovers, the political momentum has returned to the Democrats. Maybe that’s because nearly a third of registered voters (32 percent) now say Iraq is the most important issue in deciding their vote. The economy comes in second at 19 percent. And just 12 percent say terrorism, the Republican trump card in the last three elections, is their most important issue. In fact, as millions of Americans fill in their employers’ health-care selection forms for next year, terrorism is statistically tied with health care at 11 percent.
Meanwhile, the President’s approval has fallen back to 35 percent, after a slow but steady rise from 33 percent at the beginning of October to 37 percent in the NEWSWEEK poll last week.
Newsweek also touches on a key theme mentioned repeatedly on this site: Watch the INDEPENDENT voters, who helped the GOP win some past elections:
The good news for Republicans is that their voters are coming home; 90 percent of likely Republican voters say they would vote for the GOP’s candidate if the elections were held today, not far behind the 95 percent of Democrats who back their party’s nominee. But independents say they would vote for the Democrat over the Republican in their district nearly 2 to 1 (26 percent versus 51 percent.)
Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and David S. Broder have a stark warning for the GOP: the Senate is now within the Democrats’ grasp:
Two days before a bitterly fought midterm election, Democrats have moved into position to recapture the House and have laid siege to the Senate, setting the stage for a dramatic recasting of the power structure in Washington for President Bush’s final two years in office, according to a Washington Post analysis of competitive races across the country.
In the battle for the House, Democrats appear almost certain to pick up more than the 15 seats needed to regain the majority. Republicans virtually concede 10 seats, and a split of the 30 tossup races would add an additional 15 to the Democratic column.
The Senate poses a tougher challenge for Democrats, who need to gain six seats to take control of that chamber. A three-seat gain is almost assured, but they would have to find the other three seats from four states considered tossup races — Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri and Montana.
In governors’ races, Democrats are likely to emerge with the majority for the first time in 12 years. Five states are almost certain to switch parties, including the key battlegrounds of New York, Massachusetts and Ohio. Four races are too close to call, but only one — in Wisconsin — is held by a Democrat.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows some narrowing in the Democratic advantage in House races. The survey gives the Democrats a six percentage point lead nationally among likely voters asked which party they prefer for Congress. It was 14 points two weeks ago, but this remains a larger advantage than they have had in recent midterm elections.
The Post notes that the party in power “always loses ground in the sixth year of a two-term presidency” but that GOPers had hope they had some structural advantages in place such as gerrymandering.
Even so, the Post hedges the story a bit (as bloggers would be wise to do as well) by noting that it isn’t over until it’s over, and a key Democrat says as much:
Rep. Rahm Emamuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, stopped short of predicting that Democrats will take the House, but said: “I’m playing defense in one or two districts and offense in 46. I like those odds. I’d rather be us than them.”
The New York Times doesn’t paint a cheery portrait for the GOP, either:
Democrats and Republicans said the battle over the Senate had grown fluid going into the final hours before the elections Tuesday. Democrats said they thought they were almost certain to gain four or five seats and still had a shot at the six they need to take control.
Republicans were pouring money into Senate races in Michigan and Maryland this weekend to take advantage of what they described as last-minute opportunities, however slight, in states currently held by Democrats. And a new poll Saturday showed that Senator Conrad Burns, the Montana Republican, was tied with his challenger after a visit there by President Bush.
Party strategists on both sides, speaking in interviews after they had finished conducting their last polls and making their final purchases of television time, said they were running advertisements in more than 50 Congressional districts this weekend, far more than anyone thought would be in play at this stage.
Nearly all of those seats are held by Republicans, underscoring the degree to which President Bush and his party have been forced onto the defensive two years after he claimed that his re-election had given him the political capital to carry out an ambitious domestic and foreign agenda.
“It’s the worst political environment for Republican candidates since Watergate,� said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster working in many of the top races this year.
Indeed, there almost seems to be a curse hanging over Republican candidates these days.
For instance, Illinois Republican Peter Roskam thought it was just great that he got the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ endorsement over his Democratic opponent in his race for Congress. But now that has seemingly backfired amid a controversy: his opponent Democratic congressional candidate Tammy Duckworth lost both of her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq and Roskam never served. So a plum endorsement became a political sour apple as reporters pressed the VFW to explain why the group rejected endorsing a veteran who sacrificed both limbs for her country for a non-veteran (Read the link: some VFW members also wonder why and details are now tickling out…etc.)
The Scotsman:
If Democrats do win control of Congress then the rules of engagement in Washington will be ripped up and rewritten. Just two years ago President Bush vowed to spend the “political capital” he had earned by winning a second term in office. Bush reigned supreme and possessed a mandate for sweeping change. But the president’s account is now overdrawn and his second term has been frittered away. Despite record levels of federal spending, Bush has few achievements to point to from his second term.
Now he faces the unwelcome prospect of his policies being scrutinised by a Democratic Congress determined to impose Congressional oversight upon the administration. The days of the blank cheque, the free lunch and the rubber stamp are coming to an end.
The Independent’s correspondent has his article with this summary above it: ” Not even Osama bin Laden paraded on the White House lawn would be enough to save the party now. A rout in the polls on Tuesday is likely to leave George Bush a dead duck president” and he writes, in part:
This was always going to be a noxious political year for Republicans. There is the general feeling that they have been around too long, that they have been irredeemably corrupted by power. They have been buffeted by lobbying and sex scandals. They are victims of the abysmal standing of a Congress they control but of which just 25 per cent of Americans approve. But the biggest cross they bear is their own President and his disastrous war in Iraq. This time around, not only has Mr Bush no coat-tails. He barely has a coat. Defeat, to borrow another presidential metaphor, would leave him not so much a lame duck as a dead duck.
To be sure, political obituaries are ALWAYS risky…particularly when written before any votes have been actually counted.
But the press coverage and the operatives quoted underscore one fact: even if the GOP holds onto power it is now holding onto a ton of hubris which will be unlikely to decrease as the party moves towards 2008. If the GOP loses big on Tuesday it could at least start a process of “housecleaning” by changine some of the people who now control the party’s levers of power. And perhaps that could lighten the load….
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan writing on Times Online:
It is difficult to look into the future when you are going through what America is going through. All I can say about the atmosphere in the United States right now is that it feels as if the country is about to vomit. The nausea is there; the vote is imminent; and the purge necessary. And yet it hasn’t happened yet. Americans are still staring at the porcelain. And those who desperately want a change — as I do — have to wait.
But there are some things that this election has already decided. Several national careers have ended; and the presidential race for 2008 — the most open in decades — has been winnowed.
He thinks Arizona Senator John McCain and Virginia Senator George Allen are essentially presidential candidate toast. AND:
If the Republicans somehow manage to defy expectations and retain control of House and Senate, this dangerous denial will be empowered and enhanced. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will be all the more convinced that they are right and all the more determined to pursue their manic dream of remaking the world. They will be like Nixon, the last to realise that their own fantasy has ended — but, unlike Nixon, with a Congress of their own party they will be able to drag the entire country with them. If that happens, the centre in America will not hold. And we will be facing severe strife within America itself — as well as a potential disaster in the Middle East.
That’s one option. But if the Democrats win and win handily, then the political tectonic plates will shift. Bush — for all his bravado — may be forced to fire Rumsfeld and face reality.
Sullivan also notes that a Democratic victory would force the Democrats to make some hard choices. He ends with this:
With a Democratic victory, we may — finally — have a serious debate about how to do triage in the ravaged country of Iraq, how to grapple with America’s dangerously growing debt, and how to defang the growing menace of Iran. Bush may even have to go back to some of his father’s wise men again, hire a new defence secretary and listen to a military leadership that wants a decent outcome in Iraq.
We may get, in other words, sane conservatism back again. And it may require a big Democratic victory to do it. Given the level of denial in the White House, this is not really an election. It’s more like an intervention. To save Republicanism from Bush, to save Bush from himself, and to save the world from impending crisis.
But this is a democracy. Only the voters will decide. And we must wait.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.