To keep the 2010 midterms from repeating 1994, Democrats can learn from Reagan

By Jim Kessler
WashPost
Sunday, September 5, 2010; B01

"We are going to lose the House and the Senate."

Those were the opening words of a memo that I faxed to my then-boss, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), on Labor Day in 1994. Schumer was still in the House, I was his legislative director, and my prediction was based on one overarching idea: The Democratic Party had lost its way. Our national agenda had been hijacked by the parochial agendas of aggrieved special interest groups. And as a result, we were badly misfiring with the middle class.

Today, Democrats are fretting and Republicans are salivating at the prospect that 2010's midterm elections will be a repeat of 1994, when the GOP took control of both houses of Congress. A new Gallup poll shows Republicans with a 10-point lead on a generic two-party congressional ballot -- a margin unmatched in more than 60 years of polling. Several incumbent senators have lost what should have been safe primary races. House Republican Leader John Boehner has gone so far as to boast of 100 possible GOP pickups and has already begun outlining a three-point plan for his tenure as speaker.

All in all, the president's party holds some pretty bad cards -- but even so, this year needn't be like 1994. If Democrats take a close look at what happened that year, they can avoid repeating it. And if they look to another election year, 1982, they might even find inspiration in an unlikely place: President Ronald Reagan's leadership. In the run-up to that year's midterm elections, Reagan faced 10.8 percent unemployment, 6 percent inflation, a declining GDP, an approval rating barely above freezing and the indignity of having drastically increased the budget deficit over the previous year after running as a fiscal hawk. You can't get a hand much worse than that, but Reagan nonetheless managed to hold all 54 GOP Senate seats while losing only 26 House races.

Back in the summer of 1994, Democrats didn't seem to think they had such an awful hand. In the first of several major differences between the situation Democrats face now and the one they faced then, few thought Congress was going to change hands. A Gallup poll that July had Republicans ahead on a generic ballot, but by a benign five-point spread. Besides, Republicans had been in the minority in the House for more than four decades. The likelihood of them taking power seemed akin to the Cubs' chances of winning the World Series.

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