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Unusual Turnout Dynamic Keys Big Democratic Comeback
By Rhodes Cook
Editor, The Rhodes Cook Letter
As originally published in the "The Rhodes Cook Letter".
But in 2006, there was something a bit different in the turnout dynamic – a dramatic increase in the Democratic House vote from the last midterm election in 2002, coupled with a perceptible decline in the Republican vote.
With the vote count from the November midterm election essentially complete, the overall partisan breakdown in the nationwide vote for the House of Representatives stands at 53% for Democratic candidates, 45% for Republican candidates, and 2% for others. In actual ballots, Democratic House candidates have drawn 8.5 million more votes than they did in 2002, while the Republican tally is down by nearly 1.5 million votes from the first post-9/11 election four years ago.
Put another way, the Democratic House vote has grown by 25% from 2002 while the Republican House vote has shrunk by 4%. Both trends bear similarities to the turnout dynamic in 1994, when the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress. Then, the GOP House vote expanded by fully one-third from the previous midterm in 1990 (based on an increase of more than 9 million Republican ballots), while the total of Democratic congressional votes stayed roughly the same from four years earlier, declining in size by 1 percentage point.
The Democratic congressional vote was up this year from 2002 by more than 2.5 million votes in both the Northeast and Midwest, by more than 2 million votes in the West, and by more than 1 million votes in the South. Meanwhile, the number of votes cast for Republican House candidates was down in every region from the last midterm except for the West, ranging from a falloff of more than 1 million votes in the Northeast to a decrease of roughly 140,000 votes in the Midwest. The GOP congressional vote in the West was up by about 60,000 votes from 2002.
Republicans can argue that if the liberal bicoastal bookends of California and New York are removed – where Democrats will have 32 more House seats than the Republicans and all four Senate seats – the Republicans would still hold the edge in both chambers of Congress.
On the other hand, Democrats can argue that the GOP has been reduced to being the party of the South… but little else. In 2002, Republican House candidates won more votes than the Democrats in every region except the Northeast. In 2006, Democratic House candidates won more votes than the Republicans in every region except the South.
And Democrats consolidated their hold on the Northeast so firmly that it now provides a greater building block for the Democrats in congressional voting than the South now provides the GOP. To be sure, the South has more political clout in terms of raw numbers. Its 13 states (those of the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) have 142 House seats. The 12 states of the Northeast, stretching from Maine to West Virginia, have just 95 seats.
But with the rout of Republicans across the Northeast Nov. 7, the Democratic advantage in the region has reached 45 House seats, while the GOP edge in the South is down to less than 30 seats. Meanwhile, with Democrat Jim Webb’s victory in Virginia, Democrats will hold five Senate seats from the South. That equals the number of Senate seats the Republicans will hold in the Northeast, after the defeat of Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee. To round out their consolidation of the Northeast, Democrats gained a trio of governorships – in Maryland, Massachusetts and New York.
In the category of "how times have changed," once Republican New England is now the cornerstone of the Democratic Northeast. Democrats picked up both of the Republican House seats in New Hampshire, the land of “Live Free or Die,” plus two GOP seats in Connecticut. That leaves the House count in New England: 21 Democrats, 1 Republican, with Connecticut’s Christopher Shays, a 51% winner this year, the lone Republican standing.
Democratic success in 2006, though, was nationwide, as the party made inroads in all parts of the country.
In the Mountain West, Democrats continued their inroads from 2004, gaining a critical Senate seat in Montana, a governorship in Colorado, and a trio of House seats (two in Arizona, one in Colorado).
And in the South, Democrats made notable inroads on the fringes of the region, picking up a House seat in Louisville, two in southern Florida, and two in Texas (including one predominantly Hispanic district that stretches along the Mexican border from San Antonio to the El Paso area).
Democrats also dominated the Senate vote in the suburbs of Northern Virginia to the degree that Webb not only won but Democrats gained control of the Senate. For good measure, Democrats regained the Arkansas governorship and captured a western North Carolina House seat that is the home turf of evangelist Billy Graham.
There is little doubt that the results tarnish the Republicans’ reputation for voter mobilization that they have gained during the Bush II presidency. The GOP operation was clearly not strong enough to serve as a firewall in a political environment loaded with bad news for the party.
Yet it is also arguable that without their well-calibrated turnout machinery, Republican losses would have been even more severe this year, particularly in the House. There, a Republican loss of 30 seats might have approached 50, if a number of GOP incumbents – from Shays in Connecticut to John Doolittle in California - had not been able to narrowly weather the anti-Republican tide.
Roughly 80 million voters cast ballots in the 2006 midterm congressional elections, about two-thirds the number that participated in the last presidential election. But the turnout in November was still high for a midterm election, with the turnout rate for House elections the highest since 1982. Then, 39.5% of the citizen voting-age population took part. This time, the turnout rate was 39.0% of the eligible citizen voting-age population (which in 2006 was nearly 205.6 million, according to American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate).
Democrats scored significant gains in the House this year largely because they were able to expand the playing field, which had shrunk dramatically in recent elections. When Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, there were nearly 100 competitive House races (as measured by a winning percentage of less than 55% of the total vote). In 2002, that number was less than 50, and two years ago, the total of such competitive House contests fell to just 32.
But this year, the number of sub-55% winners jumped to 68, the highest total in a decade. Going into the election, the bulk of these seats were held by Republicans. But Democrats won many of them Nov. 7, with the result that a number of the marginal House seats are now held either by Democratic challengers who won narrowly or Republican incumbents who barely escaped defeat. Altogether, 35 Republicans won in 2006 with less than 55% of the vote, compared to 33 Democrats.
It is too soon to say whether the congressional playing field will remain as large in 2008. It is hard to imagine the next election cycle being as difficult for Republicans. Nor are all the Democratic newcomers automatic targets of opportunity for the GOP.
Certainly some will be. Democrats elected 10 new House members in districts that favored George W. Bush in 2004 by at least 10 percentage points, including those of ethically tainted Republicans such as Tom DeLay of Texas, Bob Ney of Ohio, and Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania. But often, House freshmen of both parties experience a “sophomore surge” when they run for reelection, using their newfound incumbency to vastly improve their vote percentage.
Clearly, the 2006 election was a unique one - a sharp rebuke for President Bush and his party, if not a vote of confidence in the Democrats. Yet the pro-Republican elections of 2002 and 2004, with their backdrop of war and terror, were also unusual.
Neither the Democrats or the GOP these days can realistically portray themselves as America’s ‘party of choice’ – underscored by the fact that even seemingly decisive elections like 2002, 2004, and 2006 were not determined by landslide margins. Not since 1986 has either party won more than 53% of the nationwide House vote. Not since 1988 has either party captured more than 51% of the popular vote for president. We may no longer be a ‘50-50’ nation, but we still are not far removed from being one.
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Rhodes Cook
rhodescook@aol.com© Rhodes Cook 2005.
