Regaining Congress
Democrats face daunting task


With Bush tanking, great hope arises that Democrats can regain control of at least one house of congress. At American Prospect Online, Robert Kuttner gives a dash of reality in A Morbid Interregnum in comparing the Republican take-over in 1994 with current conditions. Below are some of his conclusions:

Can the Democrats to the same to the badly weakened Republicans in 2006? In many respects, the 2006 off-year elections ought to be a referendum on Bush. By voting for a Republican congressman or senator, citizens vote for Republican organization of Congress, and support for Bush policies.

Ordinarily, a big swing in public opinion would translate into a shift in control of Congress. However, in the House two decades of gerrymandering have made large swings much less likely. In the nine House elections between 1968 and 1984, the median partisan shift of House seats was 42. But in elections since 1984, the only time the opposition party gained 26 seats or more was in the Gingrich landslide of 1994.

[. . . . ]

To grasp the partisan structural tilt, consider this. In the three elections since 2000, millions more people voted for Democratic legislators than Republican ones, but Republicans control Congress. Bush won 51 percent of the vote, but 59 percent of congressional districts. Some of this anomaly reflects deliberate recent gerrymandering; some of it reflects the original gerrymandering of the Constitution, which gave small states the same number of Senate seats as large states.

What all this says to me is we have hard work ahead of us and much will have to be done on the local and state level. If you really hate Bush's foreign policy and domestic priorities, I urge you to get busy as soon as possible.