Return of a Democratic Congress? Not So Fast.
Electoral Intricacies: The 2006 Congressional Campaign Heats Up
By Dr. Michael Kolkmann

With the primaries already underway, the 2006 Congressional election campaign is heating up. It promises to be a very lively and exciting campaign. The Democrats, once again trying to regain the majorities in both chambers of Congress, have by and large succeeded in recruiting strong candidates. The policy themes that are emerging in the campaign so far also favor the Democrats. Electoral as well as institutional hurdles, however, will dampen their optimistic outlook come November. The outcome of that election will ultimately affect U.S. foreign policy and the future of the transatlantic relationship as well. What majorities can we expect to see in the 110th Congress? What role will foreign policy topics play in the campaign? Who are the people and what are to issues to watch as the campaign unfolds in the upcoming weeks and months?

The Starting Point for Both Parties
The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll finds the Democratic Party leading the Republican Party 55 percent to 39 percent among registered voters in the generic Congressional ballot. This is the largest lead Democrats have held over Republicans in the 2006 campaign thus far, reminding people of the national mood twelve years ago when voters rejected Democratic lawmakers on a large scale and installed a Republican majority in Congress for the first time in 40 years. This assessment, however, has only limited direct consequences for the 2006 election, since the race will be decided in the respective districts and states, as opposed to on a national stage. As of early April 2006, the Republicans hold 231 seats and the Democrats 201 (one member is an independent, two seats are vacant); in the Senate there are 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and one independent.

In the House, due to gerrymandering and redistricting, only three dozen seats are really competitive, meaning that both parties have a good chance to win the district. In an additional 30 districts the incumbent is heavily favored, leaving almost 370 districts in which the incumbent usually isn't threatened at all. Just three of the really competitive districts were carried in 2004 by the House member of one major party and the presidential nominee of the other. Today, incumbents are so safe in their seats that in 2004, Representatives in only twelve districts won with a difference of less than ten percent of the votes. Accordingly, the average margin of victory for House incumbents was 40 percentage points. The Democrats will only have one chance to win the majority in the House: winning all competitive seats while defending their own vulnerable districts (in the Senate, Democrats have to defend 18 seats, Republicans only 15; to reach the majority, Democrats need to pick up six seats from the Republicans).

Challenged Challengers
Why are so many Congressional seats so safe? The redistricting process -- the process undertaken every ten years in which the states draw voting blocs and map out new Congressional seats -- makes sure districts are designed so that incumbents of both parties are safe.

This also results in the party composition in Congress being more polarized then the population as a whole. If it's more difficult to win the primary than the general election, the more liberal Democrat and the more conservative Republican win, since their supporters are more active in the primary campaign than their moderate counterparts. The polarization in Congress and the shrinking political middle will make it even more difficult in the next Congress to govern on a traditional common-sense basis. This may prove especially true -- and particularly of consequence -- in matters of foreign affairs once the moderate voices are replaced to Congress by those who concentrate on domestic issues important to the voters in the Representatives' districts.

Another issue that keeps incumbents safe is money. Between 1974 and 2002, the amount spent by successful House challengers rose from $100,000 (in 2002 dollars) to $1.5 million, making it pretty difficult for many candidates to come up with this amount of money. Democrats have been surprisingly competitive with the Republicans in fundraising, and on the Senate side, where races are much more expensive, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has even out-raised its Republican counterpart.

Negative Coattails?
As a long-standing rule, the President's party usually loses seats in a six-year midterm election, making it a referendum on the President's performance as much as about his party in Congress. President Bush seems to be unable to lift his bad poll numbers, which have been around the mid-thirties for some months now, beaten only by the poll numbers from Richard Nixon's scandalous presidency. What's more, only 42 percent support his handling of the Iraq war in March, an 11 percent drop from February and down from 62 percent after his reelection. Republicans need to get the president's numbers up to the mid-forties if they want to have a chance to retain their majorities in Congress. But good ratings for the president usually are not enough to protect the incumbent's party in midterm elections. Reagan's approval rating in 1982 was around 42 percent when Democrats won 26 House seats and Clinton's ratings were around 46 percent in 1994 when Republicans gained 52 House seats (not a single Republican incumbent lost that year).

Not surprisingly, the Iraq War is currently the most dominant topic in the public debate and therefore of the 2006 campaign as well. According to recent polls, a majority still views Democrats as being weak on national security issues.  In late March they presented their national security plan, and thwarted themselves when current House Minority Leader and would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- in front of rolling cameras -- by accident held up her "Real Security" sign upside down and became the laughing stock of the evening talk shows. The Democrats, however, are running more than a dozen veterans in the House races, trying to beef up their foreign policy credentials. If only a majority of those challengers are successful, the foreign policy debates in Congress could assume a much more visible public role and a very different quality in the 110th Congress.

Pitfalls for the GOP
If Democrats are criticized for failing to produce a genuine policy agenda, the Republicans don't seem to have a coherent agenda either: "other than the desperate scramble to make something go right in Iraq, our national government seems to have no energy, no coherence and no sense of direction," as The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., put it in early April. Moreover, several political issues that are currently emerging in the political arena will likely hurt their reelection chances even further. The resignations of both Bush's Chief of Staff Andy Card and Bush's long-term Congressional ally Tom DeLay (effective in mid-June) are only the latest troubles on a long list of woes that includes the administration's ill-fated response to hurricane Katrina, the misguided candidacy of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, an exploding federal budget, and the recently-failed Dubai ports deal.

Or take for example the immigration issue. In late March, the House and Senate passed two starkly different versions of an illegal immigration bill; since then, the public debate within the Republican party that has erupted over this issue has not died down, possibly endangering the support from the increasingly important Latino population in the upcoming election; over the course of 20 years, the number of Latino voters has doubled. 

Despite the previously-mentioned institutional and political hurdles, do the Democrats have a shot at regaining a Congressional majority? Sounds like a sure thing, but don't bet on it. A Democratic victory come November would turn Washington upside down, presenting the Republicans with a torpedoed agenda and plenty of political payback.

But as of today the election is still seven months off. As always, the election outcome will finally depend on the efforts of both parties to get out their base on election day. Keep in mind that in presidential elections, roughly half of the voting-age population participates; in midterm elections, roughly a third. So, turnout could be the key. In this regard, the Republicans did a superb job in 2004. Whether they can repeat such an effort, however, is anyone's guess.

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Dr. Michael Kolkmann is currently a DAAD/AICGS fellow and was a former AICGS intern.

This essay appeared in the April 12, 2006 AICGS Advisor.