Bush's Youth
If the Republicans do badly in the November 2006 elections - and you have to assume they will - the international press will attribute the losses to the Iraq war.
And look: Iraq does not help. But Iraq was not going so well in November 2004 either. Yet the Republicans still won decisively. If they lose this time, the difference will less be Iraq than immigration and the scandals in the GOP Congress. To understand why, take a closer look at the mechanics of an off-year congressional election.
When the presidency is not at stake, fewer Americans turn out to vote. Some 105 million Americans voted in 2000 for example - but only 89 million voted in 2002.
In 2004, some 120 million Americans voted - almost 60% of the total voting-age population, the highest proportion since 18-year-olds got the vote. (And since about 15 million of the voting-age population are non-citizens, 120 million people is closer to two-thirds of the actual eligible electorate.)
But nobody expects anything like that number to turn out to vote in 2006.
So the great question that will decide the outcome is: Who will come out - and who will stay home?
In 1994, the year the Republicans took both houses of Congress from the long Democratic majority, there was a surge of some 4 million new voters over the number who voted in 1990.
1998 by contrast was a low turnout year: 2.5 million fewer people turned out to vote than in 1994. And that year the Republicans lost seats - a defeat that cost Newt Gingrich his job as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
WhatÕs going on? One very rough way to think about the American electorate is that the Democratic party relies most heavily on the votes of older women, especially older nonwhite women, while the Republican party does best among younger white men. And the great Republican challenge is: young men are much less likely to vote than older women.
In 1994, younger white men were offended by the leftward bias of the Clinton administration: gays in the military, the presidentÕs wife as an unelected co-president, tax increases and so on. So they come out in big numbers to punish the administration.
In 1998, by contrast, the impeachment battle failed to galvanize Republican voters - but did mobilize older women, who rallied to support President Clinton. Turnout dropped, and so did Republican seat totals.
2002, by contrast, saw another huge vote surge: up to 89 million, 5.8 million more than in 1998. The issue was the war on terror - and perceived Democratic weakness in the face of AmericaÕs Muslim extremist enemies. The result: Republican gains.
This time, though, the big issues of the day do not excite Republican voters: They demoralize them. Overspending by the Bush administration and congressional Republicans now threatens the tax cuts of 2001 and 2002: the administrationÕs one great conservative legislative achievement. Those tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2010, and few expect them to survive intact even if the Republicans do hold Congress.
And if that were not enough to offend the GOP base, President Bush and the Republican Senate are pushing an immigration plan that amounts to an amnesty for illegal aliens - and a "guestworker" plan that would bring millions more low-wage workers into the country more or less permanently. Republican voters overwhelmingly prefer to emphasize enforcement of the immigration laws - but their wishes have been disregarded. Immigration splits the Republican party: It divides Republican voters from Republican donors. The party leadership has chosen to heed the wishes of the donors - and so nobody should be too surprised if the voters in their turn choose to stay home.