2006 Election Outlook.

[demosincebirth]

March 30, 2006

2006 Election Outlook: The Macro and the Micro
by Ruy Teixeira

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to looking at the outlook for this year’s Congressional elections. One is the “macro” approach, where one looks at a variety of national indicators to gauge the mood of the electorate and how that’s likely to affect the incumbent and challenging parties. The other approach is the “micro” approach, which assesses how each individual House and Senate race is likely to turn out, and aggregates up from that level to assess the likely gains and losses of the two parties.

The two methods tend to tell different stories and that is particularly true this year. First, let’s look at the macro story. According to these indicators, the GOP is in terrible shape and likely to get swamped by the Democrats in the election. Indeed, by these indicators, as Charlie Cook recently pointed out, the GOP is at least as bad off as the Democrats were at this point in the 1994 election cycle.

Right Direction/Wrong Track

In spring of 1994, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal (NBC/WSJ) poll has this critical indicator of the public mood at 47 percent wrong track/33 percent right direction. Today, the same poll has this indicator at 62 percent wrong track/26 percent right direction.

Generic Congressional Contest

In the most recent Gallup poll, the Democrats had a 16 point lead among registered voters (55-39) in the generic congressional contest, their largest lead on this question since 1982. The Democrats’ average lead in all public polls since the beginning of March is 13 points. Even assuming the generic question overestimates Democratic support by 5 points (the average difference between Gallup’s final poll among registered voters and the actual election result), that still gives the Democrats an average lead of 8 points.

The Democrats are also running large leads among independents in the generic Congressional ballot–generally in the 14-22 point range. As far back as I can get data (1982), the Democrats have never had a lead among independents larger than 4 points in an actual election, a level they managed to achieve in both 1986 and 1990. Indeed, since 1990, they’ve lost independents in every congressional election: by 14 points in 1994; by 4 points in 1998; and by 2 points in 2002. So, even leaving questions of relative partisan turnout aside (and I suspect the Democrats will do better, not worse, in this respect in 2006), the implications of a strong Democratic lead among independents in this year’s election, if it holds, are huge
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