Democrats sense they are winning the battle for US hearts and mind
By Tom Baldwin
Polls show that 75 per cent of voters are angry about the direction of their countryAS CAMPAIGNING gets under way in earnest for the mid-term elections in November, Democrats believe that they have a gilt-edged opportunity to end years of Republican hegemony in Congress.
They must make a net gain of 15 seats to recapture the 435-seat House of Representatives, where the Republicans have been in the majority since 1994. Winning back the Senate, controlled by Republicans for the past four years, by gaining six additional seats out of the thirty-three being contested this year will be harder for the Democrats. But the combination of George Bush’s unpopularity, deep unease over the war in Iraq and voter anger over high petrol prices have made the prospect of victory seem at least possible.
The President’s approval ratings are about ten points lower than those enjoyed by Bill Clinton in 1994 when the Democrats lost 53 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate. Polls also show that three quarters of voters are angry or unhappy about the direction of their country, the same proportion as 12 years ago, when the Republican hold on Congress began.
Over the summer the number of Republican House seats on the “watch list” for vulnerability has doubled to about 40. Significantly, these include swaths of the suburban north and Midwest — across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, New Hampshire, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin — which for most of the past century were Republican strongholds. But just as the southern states have moved remorselessly out of Democrat hands, the states carried by Abraham Lincoln in 1860 are moving in the other direction, propelled by what pollsters believe is a growing mood of economic and personal insecurity.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2348076,00.html
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