WASHINGTON – The wave is coming.
At least that is what political scientists are predicting about the midterm elections on Nov. 7. The academics could be wrong, of course; they often are.
But a peculiar fact about American politics is that every once in a while, voters decide in the same year to reject an unusually large number of candidates for Congress from one party and to replace them with candidates from the other party.
That outpouring, known as a wave, last occurred 12 years ago when Republicans gained 53 seats in the House, taking control of that chamber for the first time in 40 years. Polls are now showing signs that the tide of public opinion is flowing the other direction and that voters could oust Republicans in droves this year, returning Democrats to power in the House and possibly in the Senate as well.
“This is going to be a wave year,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “The only question is whether it will be medium-size wave or a high wave for the Democrats.”
Indiana State University’s Carl Klarner and Stan Buchanan used fancy computer models in June to predict that Democrats would pick up 22 seats in the House, enough to give them 224 seats, six more than they would need for majority control. Alan Abramowitz of Emory University in Atlanta used his own model last month to forecast that Democrats would gain 29 House seats.
The professors did not predict that Democrats would take charge of the Senate, where a six-seat gain is needed to win a majority, though they do envision Democratic gains.
Nonetheless, the realization of these numbers would constitute a wave.
This year’s anti-Republican swell would be modest by historical standards, said Linda Fowler, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Voting waves were tsunami-size in the 19th and 20th centuries. Seven times before World War II and in 1948, 70 or more seats flipped in the House.
No one expects a change of that magnitude this year. The main reason is that most congressional districts have been carefully reconfigured in recent decades to elect candidates from one party regardless of the national mood.
But a big turnover of seats is still possible. In fact, a wave has struck Congress once or twice a decade for the past 50 years.
These have mostly come in midterm elections when presidential candidates were not on the ballot, including 1958, 1966, 1974, 1986 (in the Senate) and 1994.
All these movements occurred when most voters were unhappy with the president. “A general sense of dissatisfaction with the president and his party is often a cause of a wave, as it was in 1994 under Bill Clinton,” Abramowitz said.
The party that controls the White House routinely loses at least some House seats during midterm elections. But presidents who are broadly disliked compound that effect, sometimes enough to produce waves that dash members of his party.
Recent waves have also coincided with highly publicized scandals (in 1974, it was Watergate) and unpopular wars (in 1966, it was Vietnam). This year Bush and his party face both: fallout from the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals, and widespread disapproval of the war in Iraq.
“With a combination of scandal and war, the makings of a wave are all there,” said John Pitney of Claremont McKenna College in California.
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