HOW THE DEMOCRATS COULD WIN
Poll Vault
by John B. Judis
Senior Editor
The New Republic
Issue date 10.28.02
The Democrats probably don't deserve to do well in November's elections. The party's national leaders have refused to make an issue of President Bush's tax cuts, which will threaten deficits through the decade; and many of them muffled their reservations about war with Iraq in the hope of refocusing on more politically congenial topics like prescription drugs and Social Security. The Bush administration, by contrast, has maneuvered brilliantly over the last six weeks, using the debate over Iraq to solidify the Republicans' standing as the party of national security. "[T]he President and the Republican Party are in a historic and positive position," exulted Matthew Dowd, Republican National Committee pollster and senior adviser, on October 12. On October 10, the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato predicted Republican pickups in the Senate and the House. And last week's cover story in Barron's was headlined, "GOP SWEEP: Republicans look increasingly likely to take the senate and hold onto the house in next month's elections."
Yet, if you look at the polling indicators that usually predict party success in midterm elections--from "right track/wrong track" opinion about the country's direction to views of which party will better handle education and the economy--they favor the Democrats. And if you look at specific races, you see indications that favor the Democrats as well. In spite of the party's timidity and the White House's political skill, the Democrats are actually in pretty good shape. If voters focus on the economy rather than national security in the remaining weeks, the Democrats may well increase their edge in the Senate, recapture the House, and dramatically reverse the Republican advantage in governorships.
Start with the measures that pollsters and political scientists typically use to predict which party is going to come out on top in national elections. When confidence in the economy and the country's overall direction is rising, the party in the White House gets the credit in national elections. When confidence is falling, the opposition gains at the polls. For instance, in November 1986, the percentage of Americans who thought the country was on the "wrong track" exceeded those who thought it was on the "right track" for the first time in four years. That fall, Democrats recaptured the Senate. In the month of August 1994, Democrats remained sanguine about their chances at the polls, but the percentage of voters who thought the country was on the wrong track jumped from 63 percent to 68 percent. That November, Republicans won the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. By contrast, in 1998, when voters believed by 55 to 43 percent that "things are generally going in the right direction," the party in the White House--the Democrats--picked up seats in the House and the Senate.
This year the leading indicators are heading south. In April, a Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans were satisfied, and 37 percent dissatisfied, with "the way things are going in the United States at this time." By September those numbers had collapsed to 47 percent satisfied and 51 percent dissatisfied. The highly regarded Ipsos-Reid surveys found a similar pattern: In April, 54 percent thought that the country was going in the "right direction" compared with 38 percent who thought otherwise. By early this month the numbers were essentially reversed, with 50 percent believing the country was on the wrong track and only 44 percent believing it was on the right track. Confidence in the economy has also plummeted. In May, Gallup found 49 percent of Americans thought the economy was "getting better" and 34 percent thought it was "getting worse." By the end of September, 52 percent thought the economy was declining, and only 33 percent thought it was improving.
Voters' perception of how the country is doing feeds their view of which party's policies they prefer. If they think the country is going in the right direction, they credit the policies of the party in power, and vice versa. Of course, voters already favored the Democrats on key domestic issues such as the environment and Social Security. More significant is what has happened in those areas of domestic policy where Republicans held an advantage. Last May, according to Gallup, voters preferred congressional Republicans to Democrats on taxes 43 percent to 36 percent; by the end of last month they preferred Democrats 50 percent to 38 percent. Last June, voters were almost evenly divided over whether congressional Democrats or Republicans could best improve education; by late September they favored Democrats by an astounding 53 percent to 31 percent. There is now no domestic policy on which voters prefer congressional Republicans to Democrats, and, except on gun control, the margins by which they prefer Democrats are well into the double digits.
The only area in which Republicans retain an advantage is national security, where voters think congressional Republicans would do a better job on foreign affairs by 49 percent to 33 percent. This perception probably depressed Democratic poll numbers during the congressional debate over war with Iraq, when the public and the press were focused on national security. But with the debate resolved, voters are likely in the coming weeks to return to their traditional preoccupation with domestic issues--and to their preference for Democratic approaches.
At first glance the Democrats seem to have done little to merit this growing support for their domestic policies. They don't have a national program for improving education or reviving the economy. Most Democratic campaigns have been narrowly focused and uncreative: They have slammed Republican plans to privatize Social Security, they have called for including prescription-drug coverage for seniors under Medicare, and they have attacked Republicans for condoning corporate corruption.
But this timid agenda may prove surprisingly effective in today's peculiar economic climate. The American economy is not in a traditional recession, as it was during the 1982 election. Most Americans are not worried about losing their jobs right now. But they do worry that a fall in the stock market is depleting their savings and could eventually send the economy into a tailspin that would threaten their jobs. They are anxious about the future rather than the present--and that gives the Democrats' issues a particular resonance that they would not have in a boom (when voters aren't very worried about the future) or a during a deep recession (when they are fixated on immediate relief). Voters are angry about corporate corruption because it has robbed workers and stockholders of their savings. They don't want the government's savings program--Social Security--to be subject to the rise and fall of the Dow Jones index. And they worry about having to pay out their savings for rising drug costs. They prefer the simple, Democratic idea of plugging prescription-drug coverage into Medicare to the more complex--and far less generous--Republican and drug company plan of forcing seniors to pay premiums to private insurance companies for drug coverage.
And if the Democratic proposals are timid, the Republicans alternatives are either irrelevant or nonexistent. Some Republicans have resorted to the formula the party first used successfully in 1978--advocating cuts in taxes and spending while accusing the Democrats of being "tax-and-spenders." In Tennessee, Republican gubernatorial candidate Van Hilleary has attacked his Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, for raising property taxes three times as mayor of Nashville. In Fort Collins, Colorado, Republican congressional candidate Marilyn Musgrave has branded Democrat Stan Matsunaka "Stan the Tax Man" and "Stan Taxsunaka" because, as a state legislator, he opposed a Republican tax-cut plan. But these appeals don't resonate the way they used to. Voters no longer see tax cuts as the key to prosperity--in a poll last spring respondents said by a 72 percent to 23 percent margin that they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who promised to balance the budget than for one who promised to cut taxes. Which may help explain why most of the Republicans who are using this kind of appeal--Hilleary, Georgia Senate candidate Saxby Chambliss, and Iowa gubernatorial candidate Doug Gross to name three prominent examples--are trailing their opponents in the polls.
Most Republican candidates are turning away from traditional conservative economic appeals and instead are running Orwellian ad campaigns in which they claim that they never wanted to privatize Social Security and that they favor the Democrats' prescription-drug programs. They are denying that they ever tried to hamstring the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they are trying to portray themselves as corporate reformers and their opponents as sleazy lobbyists and speculators. For instance, when Jim Talent--the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri--was in Congress, he sponsored legislation to divert 16 percent of Social Security taxes to retirement accounts managed by private managers. Now Talent says he "has not voted and will not vote to fully or partially privatize Social Security." In South Florida, Republican E. Clay Shaw Jr. voted this year for the GOP prescription-drug plan that would have bypassed Medicare in favor of private insurance companies. Now he boasts that he voted for "a comprehensive prescription-drug benefit under Medicare." In Colorado, Republican Senate candidate Wayne Allard--who tried to block accounting reform in 2000 and was initially indifferent to corporate reform--runs ads criticizing corporate executives for "engaging in fraud" and announcing "Wayne Allard said, `Enough.'" But judging from the polls--which show the Democrats' edge on Social Security, prescription drugs, and corporate reform to be as large as ever--this GOP political cross-dressing isn't working.
In the past, Republicans have overcome their disadvantage on economic issues by using social wedge issues, such as guns and abortion. But in this election Republicans are likely to be more hurt than helped by these subjects. Chastened by their failure to win the votes of rural and Southern voters in 2000, Democrats have nominated candidates in those areas who oppose gun control and who are, in some cases, anti-abortion. Democrat Jim Humphreys, running against Shelley Moore Capito in West Virginia, opposes gun control. South Carolina Senate candidate Alex Sanders is a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Rural Pennsylvania Representative Tim Holden is anti-abortion and anti- gun control. By contrast, the GOP, outside the urban Northeast, is still dominated by conservative interest groups that demand adherence to their positions--even if that makes them vulnerable to moderate Democrats. Because of this, Republican candidates closely identified with the religious right or the NRA could lose to moderate Democrats in California, Kansas, Michigan, Illinois, Tennessee, Colorado, Arizona, Maryland, and New Jersey. In Kansas, Republicans chose Treasurer Tim Shallenburger in a gubernatorial primary against more moderate opponents. Shallenburger opposes abortion, supports citizens carrying concealed weapons, and opposes tax increases for any purpose--even to make up cuts in education funding. Although Kansas is a rock-ribbed Republican state, Shallenburger is well behind moderate Democrat Kathleen Sebelius in the polls.
The governors' races offer the best window into how voters' pessimism and their preference for Democratic social and economic policies could affect the November election. In these races the presumptive war with Iraq counts little, if at all. What counts is voters' perception of what the candidates will do about issues such as education and the economy. Republicans currently control 27 governors' mansions, Democrats 21, and Independents two. Thirty-six of those seats are being contested this year. If the current favorites win, Democrats will have gained eight seats--seven at the expense of Republicans--leading to a split of 29 Democrats, 20 Republicans, and one Independent. The last time such a dramatic shift occurred was in 1994-- when Republicans won a net gain of eleven seats. In that year, of course, Republicans also captured the Senate and the House.
The Democrats' likely gubernatorial successes suggest important inroads in what were once Republican or closely contested regions. In the 1990s, the industrial Midwest and the mid-Atlantic region were major battlegrounds between the parties. Up until 1998, Republicans controlled governors' mansions in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. But with this fall's election, Democrats will probably gain control of all these states except Ohio. (Even in Ohio, where Democrats have suffered from an incompetent party organization, a token Democratic gubernatorial candidate is running within ten points of incumbent Republican Robert Taft.) Democrats are also doing well in Sun Belt swing states, such as Arizona, which have been slowly turning their way over the last decade.
The Senate contests are less certain because it is hard to judge how deeply they have been affected by the debate over Iraq. Even here, however, polls look good for the Democrats. According to the most recent opinion polls, Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, one of the Democrats' most vulnerable incumbents, has pulled nine points ahead of challenger Norm Coleman, and Democratic candidates are either tied with or ahead of Republican incumbents in Arkansas, Colorado, and New Hampshire. In Georgia, Louisiana, Montana, and New Jersey, Democratic seats once deemed at risk now appear secure. If the election had been held October 11, the day the Senate voted on Iraq, Democrats would have come out with a 51 to 48 advantage--52 counting Independent Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords. (And that's assuming vulnerable Democratic incumbents lose in Missouri and South Dakota.) In the coming weeks, as war with Iraq recedes as an issue, some of these races should turn further toward the Democrats.
House seats are even more difficult to predict because there are so few nonpartisan polls by which to evaluate candidates' chances. But there are indicators that the Democrats are running even or slightly ahead. In Newsweek's October 10 poll of generic congressional choices, Democrats led by 46 percent to 43 percent among likely voters. Republican pollster Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates has surveyed voters in the 40 most competitive House districts, as defined by The Cook Political Report. In mid-September, Republicans led by 43 percent to 38 percent; at the end of September, Republicans and Democrats were tied at 41 percent. Because twice as many of these contested seats are currently held by Republicans, if the Democrats win a little more than half of them, they will pick up several additional seats--perhaps enough to retake the House.
For the GOP to win back the Senate and retain the House, voters would have to put national security above economic and social concerns. To this end, Republican Senate candidates in Georgia, Minnesota, and South Dakota have run ads insinuating that their Democratic opponents are soft on Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But these attacks don't seem to have made a difference in any of these races--including Minnesota, where Wellstone voted against the administration's Iraq resolution. According to the Zogby poll, Wellstone actually went from a six-point deficit to a nine-point advantage during the time Coleman was attacking his credibility on foreign policy. Wellstone reversed Coleman's advantage among Twin Cities voters, Independent voters, and women--suggesting, perhaps, a backlash against Coleman's attacks or even support for Wellstone's dissent on the war in Iraq.
More to the point, past precedent suggests that by November 5, foreign policy will no longer overshadow domestic concerns. Midterm elections in 1982 (when U.S.-Soviet tensions were at their height) and in 1990 (when Iraq was occupying Kuwait) were both dominated by domestic issues, and the party in power lost ground because of voters' worries about the economy. Republicans like to point to the 1962 midterm elections, conducted only one week after John F. Kennedy successfully faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. In those elections the Democrats lost only four House seats, while picking up three Senate seats. But the circumstances then were quite different. When voters went to the polls in 1962, the air was still thick with tension from the crisis, and Kennedy and the Democrats benefited from the rush in popularity that comes in the immediate aftermath of a dramatic military success. More important, Kennedy and the Democrats didn't have to worry about the economy: During Kennedy's first 22 months the United States had climbed out of a recession, with unemployment falling from 7.1 percent in May 1961 to 5.4 percent in October 1962. While comparable polling measures are not available, the Americans who voted that November probably felt optimistic about where the economy and the country were going. This year pessimism abounds.
The White House itself recognizes that Republicans cannot rely exclusively on war with Iraq as we approach November 5. In these last three weeks, Bush will reportedly shift the campaign debate from foreign policy to the economy. Perhaps that will boost Republican chances. But it is equally possible that it will merely speed the transition from a political terrain where the Republicans have an advantage to one where the Democrats do. If that happens, Republicans will be in trouble. One of the parties might get swept this November, but it is not likely to be the Democrats.
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John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic.
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