Today is the day when Americans will decide whether to stay the Republican majority party’s course or return to divided government.
But the decision hasn’t been made yet. The votes haven’t been cast yet. The votes haven’t been counted yet.
The lawyers haven’t even litigated the final count yet…
But there are almost as many predictions about what will happen today as there are Democratic and Republican spin masters prepping to go on cable television and explain how well their party has done (even if it doesn’t do well).
There are even some political obituaries, before the votes are counted. For instance, former Clinton political adviser, present Clinton nemesis and Fox News analyst Dick Morris (whose record for accurate predictions is the flip side of the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato’s – Sabato is usually correct) already has published an analysis that assumes the Republicans lost the house.
His piece in the New York Post, written with his wife Eileen McCann, has the screeching headline: A GOP MASSACRE: A BLOODY TUESDAY. And it basically is a analytical wake for the GOP, before any of the votes have been cast:
THE latest polls portend disaster for the Republican Party tomorrow. [today]. The House appears to be gone; the Senate is teetering on the brink.
John Zogby’s polling is tracking 15 swing House districts, and he finds Democratic leads in 13. Since Dems need only 15 to take control – and will doubtless pick up several not on Zogby’s list – it seems we’re in for several years of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In the Senate, only Tennessee seems to be holding for the Republicans. (There’s no justice: Rep. Harold Ford Jr., the Democrat now losing to Republican Bob Corker, is the best of the crop of Democratic challengers).
Morris still seems stung that GWB didn’t totally follow his election advice and create a big enough climate of fear over national security:
Even with those nail-biters too close to call, 2006 will go down in history as one of the worst years for the Republicans.
Why the rout? President Bush let Iraq be the major issue of the election. He could have raised worries about North Korea and homeland security to the same level, but he insisted on focusing on Iraq, making changes in tactics and trying to sell them to a cynical America. Thus, he was left defending a failure rather than trumpeting his key successes.
Plus, the war in Iraq has divided the Republicans – the isolationist Pat Buchanans are abandoning an internationalist president.
But the GOP majority itself has to shoulder a lot of the blame for a session of total inaction on tax reform and Social Security, and just small steps on immigration and Medicare reform. With Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, voters were entitled to expect a whole lot more.
In the end, though, it was corruption that did the GOP in. In the ’90s, Republican legislators were lean, ascetic and ideological – Reagan Republicans. Now they’ve grown self-indulgent and pecuniary.
He saves the most brutal for last:
First the Republicans lost their virtue; now they’ll lose their majority, at least in the House. What’s ahead for the next two years? Not new legislation so much as investigations, subpoenas, hearings etc. Washington will be as effectively paralyzed as it was during President Clinton’s impeachment trial. And, let us remember that it was in that incubator that Osama bin Laden was able to plan the 9/11 attacks.
We needed a president who could act firmly back then, and we’ll need one in the next two years. But we’re not going to have one. President Bush will be dodging document requests, defending his administration’s integrity and battling each day’s sensational headlines supposedly uncovering scandal after scandal.
The Democrats will use their majorities to conduct a two-year campaign for the presidency. Most likely, it will work.
He later told The First Post:
The Senate is in the balance, with Democrats needing six seats to win. “It’s a probable 51-49 margin for Dems in the Senate,” Dick Morris, the political consultant, told The First Post. “But it could be 50-50, in which case Republicans keep control.”
The significance is that up until recently Morris hasn’t sounded quite this pessimistic about Republican prospects.
Today, after several days of see-saw polls, the conventional wisdom has now settled into a kind of the middle ground — somewhere between earlier proclamations that the Democrats would virtually own Congress after the elections to later suggestions that polls showing showing the race tightening meant the GOP might thwart Democratic victory expectations once again.
And one fact now seems undeniable: for all of his ringing speeches, attacks on Democrats and air time showing him out whipping up the faithful more energetically than a character in a Mel Gibson movie, George Bush’s Places-I-Can-Visit list has shrunk notably in this campaign.
One candidate he went to visit shunned him quicker than a Democrat up for re-election getting a call from John Kerry offering to tell a joke at a campaign rally:
The White House flashed its irritation at a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida who chose not to appear Monday with President Bush. But if Bush was angry, he didn’t show it.
“He’s experienced. He’s compassionate,” Bush said about Charlie Crist who was campaigning elsewhere when Bush showed up for a rally in Pensacola.
….Crist’s absence shadowed the event in the Florida Panhandle. Crist said he considered the Pensacola area so firmly in his camp that it made more sense to campaign elsewhere as the race tightened to replace outgoing Gov. Jeb Bush.
White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, the president’s top political strategist, mockingly questioned what kind of alternate rally Crist could put together that would rival the expected 10,000-person crowd that Bush was expected to draw at the Pensacola Civic Center. The total attendance was several thousand less.
“All I know is that yesterday morning, they apparently made a decision that rather than being with the governor and the president and 10,000 people in Pensacola, they made a last-minute decision to go to Palm Beach,” Rove said.
“Let’s see how many people show up in Palm Beach on 24 hours notice versus 8- or 9,000 people in Pensacola.”
The New York Times notes that Democratic hopes have soared so high that a victory that isn’t sweeping could seem like a failure to many Democrats.
In the expectations game, even conservative columnist/reporter Robert Novak is predicting today will be a rotten day for Republicans. All Headline News reports:
In the final Evans-Novak report about the upcoming election, Democrats will gain 19 House seats, two Senate seats, and almost half a dozen governorships in what is predicted to be the possible end of Republican Congressional control.
According to Editor Robert Novak, “It is a sign of Republicans’ sorry state that, at this point, this is actually a very favorable outlook for them.”
“At this point, there will be no new polls, no major news events capable of significantly disrupting the election cycle. We know one thing for sure: Republicans are going to lose ground in both houses of Congress. The White House presents, as its rosiest scenario, a loss of 12 House seats. This is not entirely impossible, but it is too optimistic for the realistic observer. If Democrats fail, it will set off an even worse intra-party bloodbath than came after the 2000 and 2004 elections.”
According to Novak, if the Democrats win, it was because of “an arrogant and politically tin-eared Republican establishment in Washington” and “brilliant candidate recruiting and fundraising on the part of two men – Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) Chairman Chuck Schumer (D-NY). And should it occur, Democratic victory will come in spite of the total incompetence of Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean.”
And if the GOP holds on, Novak writes, it would mean it has a “bulletproof” hold onto power.
The reason: as voters go to the polls today the word you hear and read about more often than not is the word “anger.” The Washington Post:
As the 2006 campaign staggered to an angry close, national security and the Iraq war dominated the final-day debate of midterm elections in which national themes, not simply local choices, have framed the most competitive races. Democrats said that a vote for them would force change in Iraq strategy, while President Bush led the GOP charge in warning that the opposition party cannot be trusted in a time of war.
Dozens of too-close-to-call House and Senate races finished on a surly tone, as the traditional political strategy of shifting to a positive message at the end gave way this year to a calculation that the best chance to tip the balance was through continued attacks over personal character and alleged corruption.
But strategists on both sides said yesterday that national security broadly — and Iraq specifically — are likely to determine control of Congress today. Unlike the 2002 and 2004 elections, when Republicans held a decisive edge on national security, polls over the past year have shown the public losing faith in the war and the GOP, and Democratic candidates nationwide were using their last TV advertising dollars on spots critical of Iraq policy.“I think, frankly, people don’t believe the president anymore” when it comes to the war, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, echoing other party leaders, said in an interview. “We are telling people if they want to stay the course, vote Republican. If you want a change of direction, vote Democrat.”
Bush, however, was betting that the Republican Party’s historic advantage with voters in times when security issues are prominent will pay dividends again. “As you go to the polls, remember we’re at war,” he told thousands of GOP supporters in Pensacola, Fla. “And if you want this country to do everything in its power to protect you and at the same time lay a foundation for peace for generations to come, vote Republican.”
So some key strands become evident today:
- Voters remain worried about the Iraq war. Will they vote for some kind of change or leave the present management in charge with a green-light to create and implement policy as it wishes?
- Bush’s speeches continue the theme that Democrats can’t protect Americans — a theme some analysts have boiled down to mean “Vote Republican or Die.”
- Whichever party doesn’t fare well will face an period of internal finger-pointing and perhaps house-cleaning.
And predictions about the final outcome? They’re all over the place but most forecast at the Democrats retaking the House.
Here are a few recent final or near-final predictions to check out:
Larry Sabato (who has an excellent track record)
Stuart Rothenberg (quite solid: TMV will likely subscribe to his report next month)
Cook Political Report
Richard Armitage (GOP will pay for its “angry face”)
GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman (new polls show the Republicans are going into the elections with momentum)
Kos (a good day for Democrats but notes his predictions have not been stellar in the past)
Tom Watson (Demmies get the House but Senate will be 50-50 [unless tie-breaker Dick Cheney takes a Democrat hunting..])
Polimetrix (50-50 Senate)
The National Review’s Rich Lowrey also reports resignation about a loss of the House.
Powerline sees the Demmies as getting the House by a narrow margin and carving out a 50-50 Senate split.
Hotline notes that the historical odds aren’t in favor of the kind of Democratic sweep that some suggest is in the offing.
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.