Does anyone remember the newsstand from November 1994? The Republicans took the House and Senate from the Democrats, and Time ran a cover cartoon featuring an elephant charging forward, trampling over a donkey. The headline read, “G.O.P. Stampede: Special Report”.
The pundits think it will happen again – with the Democrats taking control at least of the House. This view is echoed in a front-page article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “Support for Congress Slides Further, Dimming Outlook for Republicans.” 1 The article states: “In October 1994, with the public fed up with scandals and his party’s failure to deliver in key areas such as health care, voters said by a six-point margin – 44% to 38% – that they wanted Republicans to take control. That compares with the 15-point margin today in favor of Democrats taking the reins.”
However, there is one big difference between 1994 and 2006: in 1994, the Republicans had a message that was something other than “Not the President; Not the current Congress”.2 Today, the Democrats don’t have a coherent message beyond “not George”, and the Republicans still have a message.
The Republicans can weather the discontent if they stick to a single theme: Democrats will raise taxes.
1Subscribers to the Wall Street Journal can find the article here.
2For a good discussion of the Republican Victory in 1994, see Dick Morris’s book, The New Prince which, while I do not agree with all of his arguments in the book, makes a good case about the ‘94 election.