If the political Armageddon scheduled for Nov. 8 fails to arrive on time for Democratic congressional incumbents, the reasons will have less to do with President Clinton’s popularity-or lack of same-than with a fundamental election-year dynamic:
Sooner or later, the opponent has to stop talking about you and start talking about his or her own candidacy.
Democrats are resigned to a year in which they will lose three or four Senate seats (they currently hold a 56-44 edge) and upward of 25 House seats.
That’s about the historical average for non-presidential years, and if you offered Democratic Party officials those losses this morning, they’d take them and cancel the election.
Not surprisingly, Republican expectations are considerably higher. Scratch a consultant or a pollster and you’ll hear it suggested that voters are so angry and alienated they will sweep out 40 or 50 House Democrats and turn over control of the Senate to the GOP with a shift of at least seven seats.
But as the election nears, a strange calm has begun to settle over some Democrats. They think, in the end, voters will settle into the pattern they’ve developed in the past, voicing contempt for the institution of Congress but returning their own representative to Capitol Hill.
Before Congress adjourned this month, Democratic incumbents were largely running against “other,” the blank slate always a popular choice with the voters.
Back home, however, some incumbents have been able to make their case while drawing attention-largely through television ads-to the policy pronouncements and backgrounds of their rivals.
In Massachusetts, for example, it turns out that clean-cut Republican businessman Mitt Romney has a corporate past that involved laying off workers and later rehiring them at lower pay with fewer benefits.
A well-orchestrated exposure to that bit of background has stalled Romney’s campaign, and a Boston Herald survey last week gave the much-maligned Sen. Ted Kennedy a 10-point lead.
Kennedy may well lose his last hurrah, but the gaudy notion that Massachusetts voters were going to summarily toss him out after 32 years for a neatly packaged unknown commodity has been exploded.
“Republicans have had the advantage so far of being the angry party of protest,” said Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg. “That’s changed somewhat since Congress adjourned and the members went home.”
Still, Greenberg is hardly a cockeyed optimist, calling this a “dangerous election” for Democrats. “No one is saying we’re going to change the mood of the country in the last part of this election,” he said.
Around the country, many congressional Democrats and challengers for open seats have taken advice from the Democratic National Committee and begun to attack the so-called “Contract with America” drafted and signed by hundreds of Republicans Sept. 27.
The contract, a poll-driven compilation of vague tax cuts, increases in defense spending, proposals for congressional reforms and a balanced-budget amendment, was inked on the steps of the Capitol, and many a Republican has spent the intervening weeks running away from it.
Democrats designed a series of TV ads attacking the contract, insisting the GOP had handed them an economic issue in a year when Republicans had wanted to make the election a national referendum on Clinton.
Besides, the contract afforded Democrats the opportunity to do what they most enjoy when in electoral peril: accuse Republicans of threatening Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Republican strategist William Kristol, a former adviser to Dan Quayle who nowadays roams Washington by fax machine, makes the case that Democrats are engaged in wishful thinking.
“There’s no concrete evidence to suggest the Democratic anti-contract pitch will move votes in the next three weeks,” Kristol said in his missive last Wednesday.
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“It’s just talk. It . . . functions as the Democratic Party’s best-case `pre-spin’ on the landslide losses they seem resigned to incur.”
When you look at Clinton’s limp job-approval ratings across the South and West, factor in Ross Perot’s close-enough endorsement of a Republican Congress and weigh the anecdotal evidence from a furious electorate, well, a generic Democratic incumbent appears to be in more danger than the spotted owl.
But candidates are face-to-face in these closing days, and the voters are beginning to pay attention, if only to the TV ads now crowding the airwaves. Some of these Washington dinosaurs may be returning for another era or two.