WASHINGTON – Democrats seized control of the House on Tuesday night after 12 years of Republican rule, bringing with them a broad agenda of legislative change and a promise to confront President Bush on issues such as war in Iraq and conservative economic priorities.
Victories from New Hampshire to Arizona marked a rebuke to Bush and a House Republican majority that has served as a firewall for the White House’s agenda. Republicans lost three seats in reliably Republican Indiana, a bellwether seat in Kentucky and suffered huge losses in Pennsylvania.
Veteran Republican Reps. Nancy Johnson in Connecticut and Clay Shaw in Florida lost to spirited Democratic challengers, while fresh-faced Republicans trying to retain the scandal-ridden seats once held by Mark Foley, R-Fla., and Robert Ney, R-Ohio, could not overcome the baggage of their predecessors.
“The message is clear: This is a referendum on the Bush administration’s failed policies and the inability of the Republican Congress to hold them accountable,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is set to become the first female House speaker and the highest-ranking elected woman in U.S. history. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., the longest serving Republican speaker, will almost certainly retire from GOP leadership as a new generation of Republicans tries to regroup.
Democrats will probably come to power in January with a narrow majority and a crop of moderate-to-conservative lawmakers eager to keep their party rooted to the center of the political spectrum. By late Tuesday night, Democrats had scored a net gain of 26 House seats, 11 more than the total needed to win control, and held leads in several more races.
Early Democratic priorities will include raising the minimum wage, boosting homeland security spending, shifting the nation’s energy policy away from oil and gas exploration toward alternative fuel sources, and reversing cuts to education spending.
Meanwhile in the committee chambers, aggressive new chairmen, such as Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., and Henry Waxman, D-Calif., promise a series of investigations and hearings into matters that have largely gone unexplored under GOP control, such as allegations of waste in Iraq and mismanagement of the war.
That alone could dramatically change the political atmosphere during Bush’s final years in office.
“We always recognized this was going to be a very challenging year,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said Tuesday night on CNN.
The first incumbent to go was six-term Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., whose low-key, almost blase campaign style could not keep up with the polished candidacy of Vanderburgh County Sheriff Brad Ellsworth. He proved to be the first of three Indiana Republicans to lose. Rep. Anne Northup, R-Ky., a proven survivor of Democratic assaults, then fell to Democrat John Yarmuth, a lightly regarded founder of an alternative newspaper.
From there, the Republican losses mounted quickly: both Republican seats in New Hampshire, House Appropriations subcommittee Chairman Charles Taylor in North Carolina, and senior House Armed Services Committee member Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania. Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., who made his name as a bombastic conservative and, more recently, a firebrand against illegal immigrants, lost to mild-mannered Harry Mitchell, the former mayor of Tempe.
“They voted their hopes, not their fears. We have gone to America with this positive agenda for change, with a better agenda for all our people,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
Taylor lost to former Washington Redskins quarterback Heath Shuler, one of several Democrats in Republican districts who ran as moderate pragmatists, often sharing their constituents’ more conservative stances on social issues, while vowing to put aside partisanship to produce the education, health-care and energy legislation that voters say they want. Republicans tried to attack these candidates as closet cheerleaders for the liberal Democratic leadership, but the tactic ultimately failed.
Republicans were still hoping to pick up two Democratic seats in Georgia, but late returns showed Reps. John Barrow and Jim Marshall holding narrow leads. That raised the prospect of another historic milestone: No party in modern times has failed to gain at least one seat in a House election, and Republicans were facing a shutout late Tuesday night.
Republicans faced the largest possible losses in the industrial Midwest and Northeast. In another early victory, Democrats took Vermont’s only House seat, which was being vacated by Rep. Bernie Sanders, a liberal independent heading for the Senate. Republicans had hoped Martha Rainville, a well-polished adjutant general of the state National Guard, could blunt the Democratic surge by taking one seat from the Democratic column.
Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan political analyst, has called New York the potential GOP Waterloo. As many as half a dozen Upstate New York seats were in play, and expected landslide wins for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer and Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton may have depressed Republican turnout.
In Pennsylvania, three GOP-held seats were gone by midnight and two others were in danger. One of the Republicans’ few bright spots was in Ohio, where losses were being held to a minimum. In New Hampshire, Republican incumbent Reps. Charles Bass and Jeb Bradley had appeared to be coasting to re-election, but both lost Tuesday night.
Most of the Northeastern lawmakers who were in trouble are moderate or mainstream Republicans who try to steer clear of divisive and partisan battles. But they are highly vulnerable this year because of their support for the war in Iraq.
New Englanders in particular are deeply opposed to the war and furious at the Republican-led Congress for failing to challenge Bush’s handling of it. Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, long-serving and widely respected, was another GOP incumbent who could pay at the polls for his unwillingness to call for the troop withdrawal that his constituents increasingly support.
After their successes in the East, Democrats quickly scooped up seats in the West, winning the seats of retiring Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., and Hayworth. The Democrats were also running strong races in conservative Kansas and Wyoming.
The size of the Democratic victory was yet to be determined. Democrats are favored to pick up seats in Colorado and Iowa, where two Republicans are retiring to seek governorships. In New Mexico, GOP Rep. Heather Wilson, a perennial Democratic target, was facing the toughest challenge of her political career from state Attorney General Patricia Madrid. Other candidates, such as Reps. Jim Ryun, R-Kan., and Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., faced strong challenges that few political observers predicted a year ago.
Three West Coast races promised to keep politics watchers up into the early morning hours. California GOP Reps. Richard Pombo and John Doolittle have been hammered for their associations with disgraced lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff and could lose despite the strong Republican registration advantage in their districts.
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