The Four T’s of the 2006 battle for the House
David Wasserman & Larry J. Sabato of the U.Va. Center for PoliticsJust how perilously close are Republicans to losing their congressional majority in 2006? The way several independent observers and Democrats are talking and acting these days, you might guess the GOP’s demise was all but a done deal.
Only last month, veteran bipartisan polling team Thom Riehle and Lance Tarrance concluded that Republicans were “on the road to losing their majority status” after finding that by a margin of 44 percent to 32 percent, registered voters nationwide preferred the generic Democratic candidate for Congress in their district to the generic Republican. In Texas Hold’em poker terms, Riehle and Tarrance argued then that “Republicans need some great flop cards, a lucky turn card and a killer river card if they have any hopes of avoiding an all-in disaster in November.”
And earlier this month, veteran western Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. John Murtha made a splash by preemptively announcing a bid for House majority leader should his party take the body, only to suspend his campaign next week after acknowledging he had jumped the gun. Murtha, who at age 74 only recently soared to celebrity status in the eyes of rank and file anti-war Democrats across the country thanks to his November 2005 surprise call for troop withdrawal, expressed zero uncertainty in his initial declaration that Democrats would end the GOP’s 12-year congressional reign in 2006.
But a little more than four months out from the election, the Crystal Ball is not yet ready to view the GOP majority as a flimsy house of cards, nor in our estimation should Murtha fast-forward to helping Pelosi hand out committee gavels to the ranking members of his caucus. The Republican margin in the House of Representatives may be more tenuous this year than it has been in any election cycle since its inception in 1994, but a larger wave than currently exists must build in order to completely erode the GOP’s 15-seat edge, and by no means has the party in power already been swept out to sea…