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The Washington Quarterly 25.2 (2002) 251-256



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The Equilibrium Election

Charles E. Cook Jr.


In less than nine months, U.S. citizens will go to the polls in the most hotly contested midterm election in a half-century. Strong, seemingly contradictory forces are at work. An economic recession and a very clear historical pattern of midterm election losses for the party that holds the White House forecast Republican losses. On the other hand, a president with unprecedented job approval ratings and a dramatically altered political agenda work against Democrats, potentially offsetting influences that favor them.

The Senate is almost evenly divided at 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats. In the House of Representatives, the Democrats are just a half-dozen seats short of the majority. As a result, in the fight for control of the two bodies, the stakes are high and every seat is pivotal. Additionally, Republicans currently enjoy a 27 to 21 edge in governorships (two are independents), but they are defending 23 seats this year, compared to only 11 for the Democrats. Complicating matters, incumbent Republicans are not running for reelection in 11 of those races, compared to only six for Democrats. Even most Republicans acknowledge that the question is not whether the GOP will suffer a net loss of governorships, but how many will they lose. Most expect a loss of three to six seats for the GOP, bringing the gubernatorial partisan balance to approximate parity.

A House (and Senate) Divided

To use the term "control" to describe the majority status of either party in Congress, now and likely after the 2002 election as well, is something of a [End Page 251] misnomer. With margins this narrow, neither party is in control. Democrats are holding on to their Senate majority status by their fingernails (just as the GOP did before Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords's party switch in May 2001) while Republicans have an equally precarious edge in the House. Although being in the majority is surely better than not, "control" suggests a degree of power that neither party in Congress currently possesses.

These razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, just like the 2000 presidential election results, reflect a nation split evenly between the two parties, a partisan equilibrium that could last through the balance of this decade, barring some cataclysmic political event. This equilibrium reflects a fundamental change in national voting patterns, with rural, small town, and southern suburban voters casting their ballots for Republican candidates in most cases, while urban and increasingly nonsouthern suburban voters are supporting Democrats. On a purely geographic level, Republicans are strongest in the "L," the vertical, north-south band of Rocky Mountain states connected at the bottom to an east-west swath of southern states. Democrats are strongest on the nation's coasts, with the industrial Midwest left up for grabs. Obviously these generalizations have exceptions, but for the most part, this voting pattern, which first emerged in 1992, holds consistent.

The hallmark of midterm elections is that voters punish presidents, but almost never reward them, and that bad things (usually economic downturns) usually happen to U.S. presidents halfway through their tenure, regardless of whether it is a first or second term. With the party holding the White House losing seats in the House of Representatives in 32 of the 34 midterm elections since the end of the Civil War, the outcome would seem clear. Add an economic recession, and it would seem almost inevitable. Republicans had hoped that they might gain as many as 8-10 seats through the redistricting process that could offset these traditional midterm election losses, but those gains have failed to materialize. The most likely outcome of redistricting is either a wash or one to four seats more predisposed to the Republican column during the next decade than today--a disappointing result for the GOP.

On a micropolitical level, for the third consecutive decennial redistricting cycle, state legislatures have opted in the vast majority of cases to preserve their state's clout in Washington by drawing district lines that...

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