Midterm Election Leaves Political Landscape Blurry

The electoral map that has emerged from this election shows Republicans in control of the South, Democrats the Northeast. Democrats gained ground in the Midwest, but it remains a vitally important battleground.

Farther west, Rocky Mountain states are becoming the newest areas for competition between the parties. Democrats now control the governors' offices in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, and they have pushed Nevada to the front of their caucus-primary calendar in 2008 in the hope of spurring a shift in their direction there as well.

The Pacific Coast still looks like a Democratic bastion, although California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has shown that a less doctrinaire brand of Republican -- Sen. John McCain or Rudolph W. Giuliani, for example -- could put the nation's most populous state in play.

Republicans reject Democratic claims that Tuesday's results stopped conservatism's rise in its tracks. "This election was a rejection of Republicans," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. "It wasn't an acceptance of Democrats, especially since they provided no recognizable alternative agenda."

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said the party -- as distinct from its core philosophy -- took a beating, but he called it a setback from which the party could emerge much healthier. "Since the ascendancy began, there have been a number of years when we've had setback elections: 1976, 1986, 1992," he said, referring to the rise of conservatism. "We have been stronger in the end because we learned from them."

That was a way of warning Republicans not to dismiss last week's results as an aberration. "If we dismiss this, we give Democrats a huge opportunity," he said. "We need to learn from this and do better."

Simon Rosenberg, who heads the Democratic group NDN, saw the election in fundamentally different terms -- as a marker in which the public rejected conservatism as an alternative governing philosophy to what Democrats had offered in the past. Still, he was not prepared to call it the arrival of a new era of Democratic dominance.

"We're now back at a much more even playing field," he said at a post-election review of the results. "We're entering a whole new period in American history, where neither party or ideology has an advantage."

The midterms will be remembered as a referendum on the Iraq election, and the voters' verdict will push the White House and the Democrats toward agreement on potentially significant changes. Both parties now have an incentive to resolve their differences -- Republicans to remove the single biggest reason for their losses on Tuesday, Democrats to avoid what happened to them during the Vietnam era, when they bore the blame for the unsatisfying way an unpopular war was ended.

The competition for the center of the electorate ultimately will be fought and won in the general election in 2008. But before either party gets to that, they will have to resolve internal differences on Iraq, terrorism, health care, entitlement reform, taxes, trade and a cluster of social issues.

Both the legislative priorities set out by the president and leaders in the 110th Congress and the upcoming presidential primaries will serve as forums for settling some of these questions. That makes the 2008 election more than a contest of big personalities, even though a possible race between Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and McCain (R-Ariz.) already has the cable talk shows in a lather.

Democrats face internal debates over just how populist the party's economic message should be, and on the war in Iraq. Many elected officials favor a reduction in troops but no fixed timeline. But Eli Pariser, who heads the MoveOn.org political action committee, said many Democratic voters want an explicit timeline. "People weren't just vaguely wanting a change on Iraq," he told a post-election conference. "They wanted something specific."

William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, who served as domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said Democrats were brought back to power because of protest against Republicans, and now they must show they can govern. "The American people are prepared to watch and listen," he said. "But I think they will be evaluating the performance of the new Democratic majority very carefully."

Republicans must resolve their own questions: Can they reconstitute conservatism to make it attractive once again beyond the party's base? GOP strategist Mary Matalin said the Reaganite model of low taxes, smaller government and strong defense can again serve the party well, if it is updated. "It needs to put some Britney Spears clothes on it," she said.

Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.) said the party should ignore moderates' calls to spend money to attract new groups of voters. But the GOP has seen erosion among one group that it has spent years wooing -- Hispanics, who defected apparently over the party's tough stand on illegal immigration, which included passage of legislation for a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

"I am concerned about where we stand with Hispanic voters," Mehlman said. "The day we become just the party of the wall, not only won't we secure the borders, but we will substantially limit the growth of the party."

The Democrats' victories last week ended a dozen years of Republican rule in Congress and dealt a significant blow to Bush's presidency. The next two years will answer which party best learned the lessons of what the voters were saying.

Staff writer Jim VandeHei contributed to this report.