Referendum: The 2006 Midterm Congressional Elections

Abstract

Collectively, the American electorate treated the 2006 midterm congressional elections as a classic referendum on the performance of the president and his party. Most voters held negative views of both George W. Bush and his Republican partisans in Congress, and as a consequence, Demo crats won majority control of both chambers for the first time in twelve years. Table 1 summarizes the results. Democrats picked up thirty seats in the House, fifteen more than necessary to take over, winning a majority one seat larger than that held by the Republicans in the previous Congress. They also gained six Sen ate seats, all taken from Republican incumbents, to win a one-seat majority in the upper house. Remarkably, Democrats lost not a single seat in either body, the first election in U.S. history in which a party retained all of its congressional seats. According to the political science literature, party fortunes in midterm elec tions are broadly shaped by three basic factors: the number of seats the presi dent's party already holds, how well the economy is performing, and how the public views the president's performance in office.1 Although there is no consen sus on the relative importance of each condition or the way they ultimately influence voters' decisions, in combination, they do predict midterm partisan seat swings with considerable accuracy. This was true in 2006 as well; for example, a simple model employing standard measures of these variables predicts a twenty six seat gain for Democrats in the House.2 Because the economy was doing quite well by customary measures, the model attributes the Republican losses to the President's extraordinarily low standing with the public. Bush's 38 per