Washington – Americans expressed their discontent with President Bush, the war in Iraq and single-party Republican rule on Tuesday, giving Democrats control of the House of Representatives, more Senate seats and a majority of the nation’s governorships.
The Democratic victory in the House put Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in line to become the first female speaker, the highest rung of elective power ever to be claimed by an American woman.
By midnight, Democrats had picked up the 15 seats they needed to claim control of the House – and then some.
“Today the American people voted for change and they voted for Democrats to take our country in a new direction, and that is exactly what we intend to do,” Pelosi told jubilant Democrats gathered here.
“Nowhere did the American people make it more clear that we need a new direction than in the war in Iraq,” Pelosi said. “We cannot continue down this catastrophic path.”
A dozen Western House races and Senate contests in Montana and Arizona were among the 60 fiercely contested battlegrounds that determined the outcome of the struggle for Congress.
Democrats took four Senate seats from the Republicans in early returns.
Bob Casey defeated Sen. Rick Santorum, a staunch Iraq war supporter, in Pennsylvania; Sherrod Brown bested Sen. Mike DeWine in Ohio; Claire McCaskill won over Sen. James Talent in Missouri, where embryonic stem-cell research was a key issue; and Sheldon Whitehouse toppled moderate Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island.
In Montana, Democrat Jon Tester was leading over Sen. Conrad Burns in early tallies. But the Republicans held onto a sharply contested seat in Tennessee, and another in Virginia remained too close to call.
Thirty-six states elected governors, and the Democrats were on track to win enough of those races to have a majority of the nation’s governorships for the first time in 12 years.
Democrats replaced Republican governors in Colorado, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Arkansas and Ohio. But Republicans hung onto governorships in the important Sun Belt states of Texas, Florida and California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cruised to victory.
The Democratic Party’s gains were fueled by the stunning collapse of President Bush’s popularity since he won re-election two years ago. In many of the final polls, less than 40 percent of the voters approved of his performance.
After winning re-election in 2004, Bush claimed a popular mandate, but his proposal to privatize Social Security stalled in the Republican Congress and the federal government faltered when responding to the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. On Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans were shaken by a series of scandals.
Still, given the advantages of incumbency and the comfort afforded by redistricting, the Republicans might have muddled through this midterm election if it had not been for the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
“Over the last two years, a lot of things have changed, … but none has changed it more than the war in Iraq,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, the Democrat from New York who chairs the Democratic Senate campaign committee.
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said that his election-eve and election- day polling showed “there is no doubt that Iraq was the dominant issue.”
Schumer and his House counterparts found fertile ground when they sought out donors and potential candidates. They recruited dozens of military veterans to run for Congress and put the party’s backing behind candidates whose opposition to abortion and other centrist stands clashed with liberal dogma.
The Democrats were aided by the sensational scandals that swept Congress. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted and resigned, other members were caught in the machinations of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and, in the final weeks of the campaign, House Republican leaders were called on to explain how they ignored reports that Rep. Mark Foley of Florida had been making inappropriate advances to young male pages.
The Republican House and Senate have held relatively few oversight hearings on the conduct of the war in Iraq, but in the last year, a series of government studies, intelligence estimates and investigative reports cast negative light on the Bush administration’s strategy and operational failures in Iraq.
Americans began to look to the Democrats as a check on Republican power, the Democratic leaders said.
“People want a Congress that’s … going to be independent of the president rather than a rubber stamp,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Democrat from Illinois who chairs the House Democratic campaign committee.
Republican strategists played a shrewd game of triage in the fall, cutting their losses in some states and districts while they pumped millions of dollars into TV advertising and turnout efforts in more viable contests.
Pelosi said the Democrats would push a legislative agenda that includes lobbying reform, a hike in the minimum wage and increased federal aid for embryonic stem-cell research.
Staff writer John Aloysius Farrell can be reached at 202-662-8920 or jfarrell@denverpost.com.
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