Will This Year’s Midterms Look Like 2006 All Over Again?

Yesterday, Amy Walter, editor in chief of the Cook Political Report and former editor of National Journal’s Hotline, suggested that this year’s midterm elections are starting to feel like 2006, a year that is somehow, by some impossible trick of the calendar, 20 years ago. Walter noted that, like that year, this year a reelected Republican president and GOP Senate and House are hamstrung by an unpopular war in the Middle East and some ugly sex scandals.

Speaking of sex scandals, that incumbent House Republican who’s attracted bad headlines and criticism from GOP colleagues for troubling behavior announced he won’t seek reelection after all.

No, not Ohio Republican Max Miller. North Carolina Republican Chuck Edwards is dropping his bid for reelection, days after the House Ethics Committee recommended he be censured for inappropriate conduct toward two female staffers. The state Republican Party’s executive committee for the congressional district will choose a replacement nominee. The good news for the GOP is that this is a fairly Republican-leaning district, with a R+5 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index.

I do wonder if Republicans have forgotten what it feels like when a midterm election year really breaks badly against them. Yes, 2022 was a disappointment, but the GOP still won a slim House majority. Four years earlier, 2018 was a disappointment, but the GOP actually gained two seats in the U.S. Senate.

Ironically, as bad as 2006 was — Democrats picked up 31 seats and control of the House — it could have been worse; 19 Republican seats were won by 5 percent or less. Polling suggested that a deeply dissatisfied portion of the GOP base “came home” in the final days, averting an even bigger Democratic wave.

There are reasons to think that this year’s House elections will not result in a 30-seat wave as 2006 did. My back-of-the-envelope math at the end of May concluded that the redistricting wars left Republicans with a net of “eight more friendly districts. . . . But there are some big caveats. As Texas Republicans are worrying, just because a person voted for a party last cycle doesn’t mean they’ll vote for the same party this year.” The generic ballot numbers are better for Republicans now than they were in 2006, but they’re still pretty darn bad.

There’s no getting around it: the overall outlook for Republicans for this November is bad. Trump’s job approval is about as bad as George W. Bush’s was at this point in 2006. The perception of the economy was better in 2006, but it didn’t help Republicans much, because Iraq was such a dominant issue. There’s traditionally less public polling of House races than Senate races, so it’s harder to say how the most competitive House races are looking, but the overall political environment is rough if you’re an incumbent Republican. And including Edwards, 38 House Republicans aren’t running for reelection and are retiring or running for another office. Not all of those Republicans represented competitive districts, but it’s one more complication.

I know that there will be a lot of Republicans arguing that today’s Democrats, by openly embracing socialism, are more extreme and controversial than Democrats of 2006 and thus should be easier to beat. And yes, you won’t find many candidates like Heath Shuler, Brad Ellsworth, or Joe Donnelly running for this cycle.

But the “you can’t vote for my opponent, he’s too extreme” argument doesn’t always work as well as the GOP hopes. Republicans ran a lot of commercials in 2006, arguing that  Nancy Pelosi would be a radical extremist as speaker of the House. It didn’t really work that cycle, or the next one . . . but it did work in 2010, once Americans had gotten a good look at a Pelosi-led majority and Obamacare. When a majority of the country is really irked with a president, his party usually takes it on the chin in the midterm election, no matter what arguments they make to the electorate: 2006, 2010, 2014, and arguably 2018 and 2022.