A Cleansing Election

Two days after the mid-term elections were over, we met at the Rolling Stone offices with two people we think are among the most acute observers of modern politics. Peter Hart, known for his non partisan poll for NBC and The Wall Street Journal, has conducted public-opinion research for thirty governors and forty U.S. senators, from Hubert Humphrey to Jay Rockefeller. David Gergen, now director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has served in the White House as a senior adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.

Bush is now the only president in history besides Woodrow Wilson to lose control of both the House and Senate in his second term. At his press conference the day after the election, even he was forced to acknowledge that it was a "thumping." How would you characterize the results?
David Gergen: It was a car wreck for the Republicans. We learned some years ago that American politics moves in cycles -- about every fifteen to twenty years we reverse directions. The conservatives had dominated our politics since the beginning of Reagan through this election, a longer period than normal. There was a view that government was not the answer to most problems, and the voters gave power to the Republicans. For a while they used it well -- but then they began to abuse it. I think this is the natural end to the Reagan era. It came with a smashup in this election. Voters said, "Hey, we gave you guys all this power and you mismanaged a war, you let this culture of corruption creep in, you couldn't handle Katrina" -- all these things that leave people feeling the Republicans may not be up to this.

Peter Hart: This defeat was wide, broad and deep. Wide, because it wasn't just the Northeast -- it extended from coast to coast. Broad, because it was way beyond the traditional Democratic coalition -- the party picked up ten of its twenty-nine or so congressional seats in districts that Bush carried by double digits two years ago. Deep, because it was not only on the congressional level, but six governors and nine statehouses also moved into the Democratic column.

Gergen: In class yesterday, one of my students said, "The headline for this election ought to be you're fired." That's essentially what voters did -- and I don't think it's going to magically get better for Republicans over the next two years. For the first time in twenty-five years, conservative government didn't seem to work. They bungled it. People were pissed.

So this was a broader-scale rejection of the Republicans, and not just a referendum on the war, as everyone keeps saying?
Gergen: I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, this was a cleansing election in the same way that '94 was a cleansing election for the other side. The war was central to it, but the war became associated in people's minds with the administration's arrogance and incompetence. The arrogance factor is very, very big. It's a theme that runs through every single aspect of this.

Hart: Iraq was the top issue in this election. The most interesting period in the campaign was after the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Bush made the point that our security at home is tied to our success in Iraq, and that had some resonance at the time. But by the end of September, the voters had adjudicated that and said, "No, these are two separate things." In the exit poll, sixty percent of people said, "There is no relationship between Iraq and our security here at home."

Gergen: That's right. The GOP's comeback attempt was cut short by the Mark Foley scandal. They got about five days into it, and boom. Voters were not only rejecting Bush, they were also saying to Congress, "You have not acted as a watchdog on the war. You're complicit -- you've been lap dogs all the way through this. You guys are just lining your pockets when you should be looking after our needs in this war."

A third of white evangelicals voted Democratic this year. What does this election say about the power of the religious right?
Gergen: Not only did large numbers of evangelicals vote Democratic, so did mainstream Christian churchgoers. That's partly because of the Republican scandals -- but it's also because the Democrats ran a lot of new faces who convinced voters that they do not represent a godless party. The evangelical vote cannot be taken for granted now; Republicans are going to have to earn it back.

Hart: Karl Rove misunderstood the 2006 election. He believed it was all about the base. What he forgot is, the middle decides elections. Independents went two-to-one for the Democrats this year. I've never seen that before, in all of my years of polling. Independents decided this election. It wasn't even close -- they were the Colossus of Rhodes towering over this election. If you wanted to win, you had to go to them. What Rove did was drive the Republican bus right into the ditch. He left the independents right there for the Democrats, who secured them.

The Democrats control the Senate because of two key races: Jim Webb in Virginia and Claire McCaskill in Missouri. And in both cases, they did the antithetical thing for Democrats: They spent their final weekends campaigning in rural, conservative areas. Not going to their traditional urban base, but reaching out to rural voters, because they realized that they could talk about values. They reduced the margins in rural areas, and that was the difference for them.