Friday, November 08, 2002 :::
I've been behind on my Andrew Sullivan.
We don't have the full results yet, but it seems clear, as I write, that the Republicans will gain in the House and win back the Senate. For a first term president who didn't win a plurality to win in a mid-term election with a deeply troubled economy is, quite simply, an astonishing victory.
Actually, the fact that he didn't win a plurality may have helped. The most common theory for why the president's party does badly in mid-term elections is that people get tired of him -- which they clearly haven't in Bush's case -- but an other theory, which I rather like, says he has coat-tails going in, so the backswing two years later is just a lack of any coat-tails to ride. Every Republican congressman who won re-election this week had won an election two years earlier with no coat-tails, and every Democratic Senator besides Carnahan who was up for re-election had won the previous race in 1996, with a President helping, rather than campaigning for their opponents.
I'm sure there have been empirical studies of this theory, but I've either not seen them or forgotten them. I suppose I could probably find the data myself, but I'm more interested right now in doing some analyses of the latest Massachusetts results.
::: posted by Steven at 1:46 PM
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