The only question is how bad will things be for the ruling party in November

Waiting to thump the Democrats

The mid-term elections - Waiting to thump the Democrats | United States | The Economist

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THIS is a miserable time to be a Democratic politician in America, especially if you are a member of the House of Representatives. Most non-partisan pollsters and pundits agree that the Democrats can expect a thumping on November 2nd, when all of the 435 seats in the House and 36 of the 100 in the Senate will be up for grabs in the mid-term elections. By general consent the Republicans are unlikely to gain the ten seats they need to capture the Senate from the Democrats. In the House, on the other hand, the Democrats' majority hangs by a whisker. 

 A nice indication of how close a race it is comes from a study by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. He calculated last month that the Republicans are on track to win 42 House seats currently held by Democrats and lose just three of their own seats. That would give them a net gain of 39, which by coincidence is exactly how many they need to gain control. Nancy Pelosi would then have to surrender the speaker's gavel she won in 2006 to the Republicans' John Boehner, who would preside over a majority of 218 to 217—tiny, but enough to make life wretched for the Obama White House.

 Mr Abramowitz's projection is only one of many to suggest that the election is tight. Although the analysis of his Cook Political Report still puts the Democrats' losses between 30 and 40, Charlie Cook, an expert on the horse-race, says his “gut” tells him that the Democrats will lose “a few more than 40”. “Earth to House Democrats,” Bill Galston, a senior fellow in the Democrat-leaning Brookings Institution, wrote recently: “It's time to press the panic button.”

 Comparisons with the wave that saw the Republicans take the House for the first time in 40 years at the 1994 mid-terms are inescapable. Like Bill Clinton then, Barack Obama has seen his approval rating shrivel to under 50%; our YouGov poll has him at just 43%, though the average of all such polls is three points higher. People are once again deeply dissatisfied with both the performance of the Democratic Congress and the direction of the country. Mr Abramowitz notes that fewer of the seats the Democrats are defending this time are in marginal or Republican-leaning districts, and fewer are in seats where the incumbent is not running. This should make the Democrats' majority a bit easier to defend than in 1994, when they lost 54 seats. But they still risk being overwhelmed.

 What has gone wrong for the Democrats? Almost everything. For all the stimulus spending, unemployment remains stubbornly high at 9.5%. On July 2nd gloomy figures showed that the private sector created only a measly 83,000 jobs in June, while the public sector shed jobs as temporary census-workers were laid off. Far from delivering a bounce in the polls, the overhaul of health reform that Mr Obama pushed through in March has incensed many voters. Oil is still bubbling into the Gulf of Mexico. The country is in the sort of unhappy and scratchy mood that voters in mid-terms habitually take out on the president's party.

 The outlook for the Democrats is certainly worse than you would think if you looked only at the “generic” polls that ask which party voters are likelier to vote for. Right now they are more or less level-pegging (see chart 1). That is a big drop for the Democrats since Mr Obama was elected, but not necessarily fatal on its own. The real trouble is that an enormous “enthusiasm gap” now separates the two parties.

 In the general election of 2008 part of the Democrats' appeal was their fresh and inspiring presidential candidate. But Mr Obama is not up for re-election until November 2012, so even the diminishing number of voters who continue to find him inspiring might not vote in the mid-terms, when turnout is usually a good 15 points or so lower. That is especially true of the first-time voters, enthusiastic young people and fired-up blacks Mr Obama was able to mobilise in 2008. All polls now find that a far bigger proportion of Republicans than Democrats or independents are “more enthusiastic” about voting in the mid-terms. 

 A survey published by the Pew Research Centre on July 1st found that 56% of Republican voters were more enthusiastic about voting this year, the highest proportion since the Republican triumph of 1994. More Republicans than Democrats (64% to 50%) say they are playing close attention to election news. True, the same poll found that under-30s favoured the Democrats by a wide margin (57% to 32%), but only half of these were absolutely certain to vote. Among over-50s, on the other hand, the Republicans enjoy an 52% to 41% lead, but about eight of ten of these older voters said they were absolutely certain to vote. For the Democrats this is an ominous change: in the mid-terms of 2006, they held the same lead among young people but a 14-point lead among older voters too.

 The enthusiasm gap exists even among the growing proportion of voters who choose to register as independents. Pew finds that 44% of this group intend to vote Republican and 36% Democrat, and that 77% of the Republican-leaning independents are “absolutely certain” to vote, compared with 62% of those who intend to vote Democrat. Gallup says its polls show a bigger enthusiasm gap between the parties than it has measured in any previous mid-term, including the 1994 landslide.

 It gets worse. Our list of the battlegrounds (chart 2) shows the 70 districts that will be in closest contention in November and where control of the House will be won or lost. It is drawn from a survey for National Public Radio last month by Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who worked in the Clinton White House, and Glen Bolger, a Republican. The orange block at the top consists of ten Republican-held seats the Democrats might have some chance of winning; the light blue block lists the most vulnerable Democrat districts, and the dark blue block at the bottom represents the districts it will be harder for Republicans to capture.

 The headline finding is that opinion in the battleground districts is even less encouraging to the Democrats than it is in the country as a whole. In battleground districts 64% of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction against 27% who think it is on the right track (for the nation as a whole, the percentages are 59% and 34% respectively); nearly half of the voters in the vulnerable Democratic districts identify themselves as conservatives rather than liberals or moderates; and only 40% of voters in these districts approve of Mr Obama's job performance.

 Needless to say, opinions of Mr Obama vary a good deal by colour, class and region. Blacks still support him strongly. But Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute points out that many battleground districts are in less urban areas full of white blue-collar voters with fewer years of education than the average. The loyalty of this particular breed of traditional Democrat is less assured. Last May the Democrats held on in a special election in one such district, Pennsylvania's 12th, but Mark Critz, the candidate there, went out of his way to run on local issues and affirm his opposition to health reform.

 For all these woes, the Democrats could yet hang on. Mr Olsen makes the point that it is rare for a president's party actually to lose Congress in his first term: before the upset of 1994 the only previous such turnaround was when the Republicans lost in 1954 under Eisenhower. The Democrats enjoy stronger local organisation in many districts and, despite having fewer friends on Wall Street these days, are expected to have more money to spend. They have not given up hope of persuading the new voters who helped to elect Mr Obama in 2008 to turn out again; the campaign organisation he built for that election has been kept running, under the new name Organising for America. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Washington Post recently that the party was spending $50m on efforts to galvanise the first-time voters of 2008 to vote again in November.

For all these woes, the Democrats could yet hang on. Mr Olsen makes the point that it is rare for a president's party actually to lose Congress in his first term: before the upset of 1994 the only previous such turnaround was when the Republicans lost in 1954 under Eisenhower. The Democrats enjoy stronger local organisation in many districts and, despite having fewer friends on Wall Street these days, are expected to have more money to spend. They have not given up hope of persuading the new voters who helped to elect Mr Obama in 2008 to turn out again; the campaign organisation he built for that election has been kept running, under the new name Organising for America. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Washington Post recently that the party was spending $50m on efforts to galvanise the first-time voters of 2008 to vote again in November.

 Still, money counts for much less in so-called “wave” elections, those in which voters choose to send a powerful demand for a change of direction to the party in power. Over the coming months the Democrats will try to block any such wave by emphasising local issues while the Republicans cast the mid-terms as a national referendum. But keeping the public's mind off the national predicament will be hard at a time of continuing economic distress and mounting unhappiness about federal overspending and borrowing, not to mention the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (see figures from YouGov in chart 3).

 One hope on the Democratic side is that the conservative “tea-party” movement will drive the Republicans too far to the right for the taste of mainstream voters. But there is not much evidence of that in the polling. Indeed, the number of voters telling Gallup's pollsters that the Republicans are too conservative has fallen since 2008 from 43% to 40%, and the proportion who think them about right has grown from 38% to 41%. Meanwhile the share of voters who consider the Democrats “too liberal” has risen from 39% to 49%. That cannot be good news for Ms Pelosi and her anxious colleagues in the House. 

The mid-term elections

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Waiting to thump the Democrats

The only question is how bad will things be for the ruling party in November

United States July 10th 2010

From the July 10th 2010 edition

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