Dear loyal readers,
What a wild ride it’s been! As the midterm madness of 2006 draws to a close, the Crystal Ball is reminded just how quickly the facts of our politics can change.
Just last year, we and many others wrote in awe of the 21st Century structural obstacles Democrats faced in putting a sizeable number of GOP-held seats in play. We even speculated that “an entrenched lack of competition may be all the anti-itch medication the GOP needs” to preserve congressional majorities. These days, of course, everyone is singing a much different tune.
This year’s “sixth year itch” election has had its share of rollercoaster-worthy twists and turns, and overall, Republican fortunes have followed a gradually downward trajectory. Competition has expanded rapidly, even into the eleventh hour. For us, it’s this volatility that has made the 2006 midterm cycle both fun to watch and difficult to gauge.
With one day to go, the situation is still very fluid. This weekend, we had a potentially pro-GOP event, the sentencing of Saddam Hussein, and a potentially pro-Democratic event, the unveiling of Rev. Ted Haggard’s family values hypocrisy. The Crystal Ball’s initial guess was that both news headlines, while attention-grabbing, would have only a marginal impact on the vote (and it’s also worth noting that a record percentage of voters will have voted early this year, softening any impact of the last-minute headlines).
Yet something is happening. Both the Washington Post/ABC News poll and the new Pew survey show a dramatic tightening of the generic ballot vote, with Democrats leading by 4 to 6 percent. If these polls are accurate, this is bad news for Democrats, and they suggest that Democratic gains might be more limited than have been widely expected. Perhaps the Republican vote is finally coming home–much later than usual. President Bush’s campaigning in red territory and the GOP’s smart get-out-the-vote operation may be working at last. We will know tomorrow night….