By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, May 9, 2005
10:27 AM
The campaign season never really ends. Both parties are busy counting competitive races in the House and Senate, recruiting candidates and raising money for next year's midterms elections.
Democrats are looking to next year's contests to break a streak that has seen them lose ground in the last two congressional elections. Republicans are looking to break a longer historical trend of the president's party almost always losing seats in Congress in the middle of the president's second term.
Bush's popularity is suffering, with an approval rating in the mid-40s, a very low number for a president just 100 days or so into his second term. The GOP-led Congress is less popular, with a 35 percent approval rating, according to a recent CBS News poll. The nation is still very evenly divided politically. Rhodes Cook, the nonpartisan elections analyst, reports on his Web site that Bush's 2.5-percentage point advantage over Kerry in the popular vote last year was the narrowest margin for a re-elected president in the history of the American presidency.
Democrats won't say it publicly, but some boast privately that they have an outside chance of winning back majorities in the House and Senate.
Republicans in Washington argue that the results of the 2002 and 2004 elections suggest a historic political re-alignment. However unhappy the electorate may be with some of the GOP's stands on issues such as Social Security, at least the party has taken a stand, Republicans say, leaving Democrats as nothing more than the party of "no."
Against that backdrop of the national political climate and historical trends, here's a brief look at specific seats that might be in play for next year's election. For this column, I talked to both the Republican and Democratic Senate campaign committees and reviewed recent analyses by three nonpartisan elections analysts -- Charlie Cook, Stuart Rothenberg and the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato.
The Senate
Democrats argue that last year's four-seat Republican gain was an anomaly. Five Democrats from the South -- the GOP's strongest region -- just happened to retire in the same year. Republicans won each of those seats. Without the South, Republicans would have lost a seat to the Democrats.
This year, the playing field is more evenly distributed. And Republicans are at a slight disadvantage, defending 18 seats compared to the 15 that Democrats are defending.
The most competitive seats next year likely will be two currently held by Democrats and two currently held by Republicans.
First-term Democrat Bill Nelson from Florida is seen as vulnerable because his state has trended Republican. In Minnesota, Democrat Mark Dayton is retiring after one term. His seat is considered competitive, with a number of strong candidates from both parties mulling the race.
On the GOP side, incumbent Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania will probably have a tough race against Democratic state Treasurer Robert Casey Jr., a moderate who opposes abortion and advocates the rights of gun-owners. Casey has polled favorably against Santorum.
The three analysts are predicting a close race in Tennessee with Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist retiring, presumably to run for president. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. is thought to be the favorite for the Democratic nomination for Frist's seat, and a host of seemingly evenly matched Republicans are considering the race.
But Republicans say neither Ford nor any other Democrat has a chance in this Southern state.
"No matter who their candidate is, we fully intend to keep that seat," said Brian Nick, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "If you look at the trends from the last election, with South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana -- the five states Republicans picked up last year -- Tennessee fits into the same kind of race right there. [Democrats] will point to the fact that they have a Democrat governor there. But in terms of national issues, the Democrats are so far out of it, they don't have a chance."
His counterpart at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee disagrees. "Recent polling had Ford doing well," said Phil Singer. "There will be a divisive primary. His polling had him running head-to-head with the three candidates on the Republican side who've all run statewide before. They all seem to have shallow support. Ford has new ideas and fresh-faced approach to governing. We're in a very strong position there."
Here are a few other seats that could be competitive, but for which the party holding probably retains the advantage:
On the Democratic side, incumbent Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) and Maria Cantwell (Wash.) could face tough battles. Republicans are also eyeing a few Democratic seats that will be open in 2006. Maryland, where Sen. Paul Sarbanes is retiring, could be particularly attractive for the GOP if Lt. Gov. Michael Steele enters the race.
On the Republican side, incumbent Sens. Conrad Burns (Mont.) and George Allen (Va.) could face tough battles. But Allen's seat may be competitive only if Democratic Gov. Mark Warner decides to challenge him.
Indepedent Sen. James M. Jeffords (Vt.), who was once a Republican but now votes with Democrats, is retiring. Left-leaning independent Rep. Bernard Sanders (Vt.) is among the most prominent of the candidates so far who have announced their intentions to run for the open seat. It's still uncertain how the Republican and Democratic parties will make their play for the seat.
On average, the sitting president's party has lost six Senate seats in the mid-term election of a second term. But Bill Clinton defied that trend as recently as 1998, when Democrats broke even.
"I'm not going to say we're going to win back the Senate but we feel pretty confident about picking up seats," Singer said. "With [House Majority Leader Tom] DeLay's issues, and [lobbyist Jack] Abramoff, and Social Security, there's a general discontent about the way Republicans are running Congress, and we're waiting for a wave to emerge."
Nick refused to offer a prediction, but said that the Democrats were in disarray and that they had moved to the left.
The House
A few weeks ago, conservative columnist Bob Novak wrote that "analysts at the Republican National Committee have sent this warning to the House of Representatives: The party is in danger of losing 25 seats in the 2006 election and, therefore, of losing control of the House for the first time since the 1994 election."
Officials at the RNC and the National Republican Congressional Committee dispute Novak's claim. But they acknowledge historical trends don't work in their favor. Presidents often have difficult second terms, and the public often seems to clamor for change six years into a presidency.
There have been six, sixth-year midterm elections since 1874, said NRCC spokesman Carl Forti, who reeled off the numbers to me recently.
President Ulysses Grant lost 96 House seats, President Woodrow Wilson lost 21, Franklin Roosevelt lost 80, Dwight Eisenhower lost 48, and Ronald Reagan lost 5. Bill Clinton again was the outlier, picking up three seats in 1998.
Forti argues against reading too much into history. For one thing, highly partisan redistricting in recent years has severely diminished the number of competitive districts. He compared the political environment to 1998, when Republicans faced a backlash trying to tie their entire message around the ethical and legal problems of Clinton.
"If you look back at '98, the NRCC tried to run a national message on Bill Clinton on impeachment and the blue dress and all that and we lost seats," Forti said. "That was the first case since 1874 that a president's party picked up seats in a second midterm. House Democrats are now talking about how they're going to make ethics the issue. . . . But Tom DeLay's name ID is less than 50 percent. And I don't know of any congressman who ever lost a seat because of something someone else [in the House] did."
Democrats need to win 15 seats to regain the majority for the first time since 1994.
"It's impossible to know what the playing field will look like just yet, because we don't know all of the retirements," said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Bill Burton. "But we're in great shape. We set a record for first-quarter fundraising -- we raised $12.4 million in this quarter... [and we] feel like we'll be able to make waves in some traditionally competitive seats making the field of play as big as possible."
At this point, probably fewer than 10 percent of the House's 435 seats are considered competitive. Still, there are far too many to mention here.
A few interesting possibilities on both sides:
The big kahuna, of course, is DeLay. Democrats have signaled that they're going to go all out in their effort to unseat the House majority leader, much in the same way Republicans targeted former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (S.D.) last year.
Former four-term Democratic congressman Nick Lampson, who lost last year after Republicans redrew the state's congressional boundaries, announced just days ago that he was going to move into DeLay's district to challenge him.
Ordinarily, such a move might be quixotic. But two recent polls by local news organizations suggest DeLay's popularity is sagging, and Democrats are hopeful. Republicans counter that the big difference between DeLay and Daschle is that Daschle was in a Republican state, while the electorate in DeLay's district is dominant by fellow Republicans.