ShareThisBy JOHN MULLIGAN
Monday, October 30, 2006
The prospect of a two-house congressional power shift has moved in recent days from the realm of Democratic hope to palpable Republican fear, thanks largely to a former GOP congressman's scandalous dealings with underage House pages.
Along with renewed focus on bad news from Iraq and the traditional weakness of a president's party in the last election of his administration, disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley's e-mail scandal may at least for the time being threaten the Republican House and Senate majorities more seriously than at any other time since they seized control of Congress in the 1994 elections.
"If the election were held tomorrow, I think both houses of Congress would be in jeopardy," Brian Nienaber of The Tarrance Group, a prominent GOP polling firm, told reporters last week.
"It's a sixth-year election" in the second term of a Republican president who is at a low standing with American voters, said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. "The 'out' party" _ the Democrats _ "are going to gain House seats, they're going to gain Senate seats, they're going to gain governorships. The only question is how many they're going to gain."
All the same, independent and partisan analysts caution that the political winds could change before Election Day. For the most part, they also view majority control of the Senate as more difficult for Democrats to secure than control of the House _ essentially requiring them to win almost all the closely fought Republican seats while losing none of their own.
"There are those who've decided that the Foley thing will knock the bottom out for the Republicans and so it's all over," said Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate campaigns for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. On the other hand, polls taken since the scandal broke do not show uniform declines for individual GOP candidates. "We need to let this cook for a little while before drawing conclusions," Duffy said.
Rhode Island is getting an unusual share of attention from the national political community because Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee occupies one of the half-dozen Republican seats viewed as the likeliest to fall to the Democrats.
The Republicans hold 55 of the Senate's 100 seats, so a net shift of six would give the Democrats the majority _ along with the all-important power to set the Senate's agenda and to run the committees where much of the legislative work is done.
That basic arithmetic has not changed. Nor has most of the consensus list of states where Republican-held seats are in the most danger. Besides Rhode Island, they include Pennsylvania, Montana, Ohio, Missouri and Tennessee.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., are widely considered the most vulnerable because various public polls have showed them trailing by amounts that exceed the statistical margin of error.
Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio; Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo.; and Chafee _ who faces former Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse _ have all been locked in tight races close to or within the margin of error.
In Tennessee, Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. has narrowly trailed former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker.
Lately, Virginia Sen. George Allen has also loomed as a member of the most vulnerable. Several weeks ago, he publicly tagged a dark-skinned man at a campaign appearance with the racially demeaning term "macaca," spurring an examination of Allen's racial views that continues.
But New Jersey's Democratic incumbent, Sen. Robert Menendez, is also embroiled in an unexpectedly close race against the son of a popular former Republican governor. A key issue there is a spate of political corruption scandals that have touched Democrats, including a longtime Menendez associate.
Such vagaries of local politics explain why prognosticators always hedge their bets.
If Menendez were to loose, the Democrats would have to win all seven of their top targets in order to win the Senate majority. If he wins, "then they've got to win six out of seven, which would be tricky. But it would really be possible in a 'wave' election," said political scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.
By "wave," Ornstein meant the kind of blast of popular opinion that occasionally sweeps the nation, with lopsided gains for one political party.
