GOP Comeback: Not So Fast

Republicans have been working overtime for days now trying to come up with newer and bolder ways of describing the 2009 election as an unmitigated triumph -- and a crystal clear sign their party will score a historic comeback in next year's congressional races.

Not satisfied to simply proclaim the dawn of a GOP "renaissance" one day after the voting, party chairman Michael Steele the following day warned House and Senate candidates not to put themselves "in a position where you're crossing that line on conservative principles, fiscal principles, because we'll come after you."

Beyond that, GOP officials from Steele to the most local grass-roots activists say the returns foretell a widespread spurning of the economic and social policies of President Obama and congressional Democratic leaders -- and toward the small-government, socially conservative views at the current core of modern Republicanism.

But there's a significant amount of countervailing evidence, not only in the relative handful of election returns from last week but also in the current polling about the national political environment and in the race-by-race assessments of the midterm campaigns for Congress, which by history's guide will inevitably turn on voter views of the first two years of this presidency.

Although polls show widespread voter anxiety, especially about the economy, Obama is holding on to a base of support roughly equivalent to his 53 percent share of the popular vote a year ago. The Republican Party "brand," badly damaged during George W. Bush's tumultuous second term, looks about as weak as it did then. And the GOP's ability to seize the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey was mostly about the strong GOP candidates and flawed Democratic candidates in both places.

Beyond that, the predictive power of off-year elections is shaky at best. Although GOP wins in 1993 and Democratic gains in 2005 accurately presaged big gains for those parties a year later, the most recent odd-year contests, in 2007, were a partisan wash that didn't hint at all of the historic 2008 triumphs in store for Democrats.

Moreover, it was in the 2001 election that the Democrats took both the New Jersey and Virginia governorships, and did so despite Bush's astronomical post-Sept. 11 poll numbers. Those wins were followed a year later by losses for the party on both sides of the Capitol.

"These tea leaves can't bear that much weight," said John J. Pitney Jr., a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College, about the GOP's analysis. "It's way too early to talk about rubble-bouncing Republican gains."

Paul S. Herrnson, director of the University of Maryland's Center for American Politics and Citizenship, said simply: "I don't think the election is a sign that the national tide is shifting in favor of the Republicans."

Fight to Keep, Not Just Gain, Seats It's also the case that the Nov. 3 results were decidedly mixed. After the gubernatorial contests, the most closely watched race was for a far-upstate New York House seat that had been an unbreachable Republican stronghold for more than a century. And, in the outcome with the most direct bearing on federal policy making, the Democrat won. Capitalizing on an intense GOP ideological feud, attorney Bill Owens prevailed by 4 percentage points -- suggesting that Obama's carrying the district a year ago, by 5 points, may not have been a fluke.

Picking up that seat, and holding a solidly Democratic California district in last week's other special election, put the number of Democrats in the House at 258 -- fully 40 more than the minimum needed to claim the majority. Only once in the past 43 years has the minority picked up that many House seats: the 1994 Republican landslide, when a 52-seat gain gave the GOP a majority.

There is time, with a full year before the next Election Day, for the Republicans to build momentum toward another such surge. But as of now, they have a very long way to go. A Republican is now the favorite in only one district currently held by a Democrat, while nine more of the party's take-away campaigns are tossups, and in another 19 districts the defending Democrats appear to be only tenuously ahead. But even a GOP sweep of all those races would leave the party short of its ultimate congressional goal of reclaiming the Speaker's gavel.

And that's if the Republicans can pull off the rare feat of keeping all the seats they now hold. At the moment, that seems unlikely: Democrats have become favorites in three districts the GOP now holds, the Republicans are defending one tossup, and they're only slightly ahead in 10 more such contests.

But a GOP House takeover appears comparatively plausible compared with the outlook in the Senate, where the party holds just 40 seats. Although Republicans are staging competitive bids for seven Democratic seats, the Democrats are staging competitive bids of their own for six Republican seats.

Poll Positions It is undeniable that Republicans decisively won governorships in two states that went for Obama a year ago, with former state Attorney General Bob McDonnell trouncing state Sen. Creigh Deeds in Virginia and former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie denying incumbent Jon Corzine a second term in New Jersey.

But both GOP winners ran campaigns that emphasized kitchen-table economic issues during a deep recession and played down their own conservative views on social issues. And so the usefulness of their victories in gauging the mood on national issues is limited -- an assessment reflected by the voters themselves.

Exit polls found that about three in five people said their gubernatorial decisions had nothing to do with their views of the president. Only one in four voters in Virginia, and one in five in New Jersey, characterized their ballot choices as driven by antipathy toward Obama.

The exit pollsters also found support has stabilized for the president in both states -- even as his party's top candidates were being rebuffed. While Obama's job approval of 48 percent in Virginia was a palpable, if hardly irredeemable, 5-point slip from his share of the vote there a year ago, his 57 percent approval in New Jersey precisely matched his 2008 showing.

And that echoes several national polls that show Obama's support base having returned this fall to about the percentage of the popular vote he got on the day he won the White House: 54 percent in a CNN/Opinion Research survey the weekend before the election, 51 percent in an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, 57 percent in an ABC News-Washington Post survey a week before that and 56 percent in a CBS News poll in the first week of last month.

These same polls suggest the GOP's potential for growth in 2010 may also be held back by the fact that its image hasn't recovered from the end of the Bush years.

Fully 46 percent of respondents to the NBC-Journal poll said they had a negative view of the Republican Party and just 25 percent professed a positive view -- down 7 points from a poll taken two weeks before the 2008 election. The Democrats' October 2009 numbers -- 42 percent positive, 36 percent negative and 20 percent neutral -- don't exactly rock the house, but they are considerably better than the Republicans' statistics.

Democrats Not Shoo-Ins Next Year All is far from rosy for the Democrats, and public concerns about the president's handling of specific issues could give the GOP material to work with. That NBC-Journal poll found a virtual tie in the public's view of Obama's economic stewardship and showed that respondents disapproved of his handling of health care, 48 percent to 43 percent.

With the jobless rate surpassing 10 percent, the Virginia and New Jersey exit polls showed a high degree of concern over the economy.

"Economic anger and anxiety drove most of the election results," asserted Darrell M. West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. "Republicans are correct in pointing out that people are worried, but they are wrong to assume that their candidates won because voters agree with them on all the issues. ... There was no ideological mandate that came out of these campaigns."

The GOP is taking a big gamble, too, with its confrontational approach to every marquee item on Obama's domestic agenda. If the economy is seen as being in recovery by next November -- and especially if there is evidence of job growth -- Democrats will have a strong case to make that deriding the stimulus package proved to be a mistake.

While Republican leaders are fond of telling Democrats they now own all the big issues and can no longer blame Bush for all national ills, it would require a horrendous political collapse by Obama to make that anything but wishful thinking. Democrats for 40 years made political hay by invoking the name of Herbert Hoover, the GOP president when the Great Depression hit, and more than a few Republicans resort to dropping the name Jimmy Carter when they've run out of other arguments against the Democrats.

"Right now things aren't looking as bad as they could be for Democrats," said Bruce Larson, an associate professor of political science at Gettysburg College. n