http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15549907/Until mid-September, House Republicans' built-in advantages appeared strong enough to protect their majority, despite the electorate's increasingly anti-Republican mood. The GOP had few vulnerable open seats, most of its incumbents were skilled at waging hard-hitting campaigns, and the party seemed to have plenty of time and money to defend its most-endangered seats.
Now, in the final days before Tuesday's election, Democrats are poised to take control of the House by flipping more than the necessary 15 seats. And the real question doesn't seem to be whether they will succeed but how large their majority will be. A Democratic edge of five to 10 seats, perhaps more, looks probable.
All of the political storm gauges suggest that the climate is now at least as bad for Republicans as it was for Democrats heading into the 1994 election, when they lost control of both the House and the Senate. President Bush's job-approval rating, 37 percent in the latest Gallup Poll, is 9 points lower than President Clinton's was at the same point in Gallup's 1994 pre-election survey. Moreover, just 26 percent of voters in the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (October 13-16) said the country is headed in the right direction, while a whopping 61 percent said it is on the wrong track. That's more pessimism than the electorate showed 12 years ago, when the same poll found 39 percent of likely voters saying "right direction" and 48 percent saying "wrong track."
Even though the number of competitive races continues to grow, Republican operatives are still hoping to localize enough of them to preserve their majority. The most-competitive GOP-held House districts are being flooded with Republican messages -- financed by the National Republican Congressional Committee and the candidates' own campaigns -- that depict the Democratic challenger as an unacceptable alternative to the unpopular status quo. But because the national spotlight has been riveted for weeks on the issues that are most hazardous to the GOP -- the chaos in Iraq, the dysfunction on Capitol Hill, and the unhappiness with Bush -- Republicans have found it all but impossible to shift the debate to topics that might work in their favor.
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