C-Span/Congressional Quarterly 2006 Election Forecast Map

Special Report: The Battering Ram and the Bulwark
By Bob Benenson | 4:03 PM; Oct. 28, 2006 | Email This Article
CQ Weekly has released its final special report before the 2006 midterm elections, complete with analysis of every competitive race in the country by the staff of CQPolitics.com.

This final overview of the political landscape finds the Nov. 7 elections shaping up as a collision between the Republican Party's fundraising and voter turnout proficiency with an ever-expanding field of competitive seats and a consistent decline in the GOPs support among voters on issues across the board. The result is a Congress up for grabs, and an energized Democratic Party trying hard not to seem overconfident.

The story package also presents a breakdown of competitive Senate contests, regional breakdowns on the battle for control of the House and a summary of the electoral "signposts" CQ analyzes in making its projections.

• The Senate: Four Close Races
• The House: Northeast | South | Midwest | West
• Eight Electoral Signposts

An analysis at the overall landscape follows after the jump.

The growing probability that the Democrats will win control of the House on Nov. 7, and still have a chance at the taller order of capturing the Senate as well, has hardly caught the political class by surprise.

For more than a year, signs of trouble for the Republican congressional majority have been aggregating without interruption. And with the midterm campaign in its final fortnight, all the major indicators point to significant Democratic gains.


CQ's Current Projection:
Click Here to View Graphic
There are the dramatically depressed approval ratings for both President Bush and the Republican-run Congress; polling showing that majorities prefer the Democrats over the Republicans on the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq — and also on almost every other top-priority issue except, in some surveys, the war that Bush has declared on terrorism; the taint of corruption, exacerbated by Mark Foley’s tawdry behavior toward congressional pages; and the national Republican Party’s emergency infusions of hundreds of thousands of dollars into races that looked safe for the GOP when the election cycle began.

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As of Oct. 27, CQ’s individual assessments of all 435 House races showed Democrats seriously contesting Republican holds on 72 seats (31 percent of the party’s current total) with seven of those races already leaning toward a Democratic takeover and 18 more considered genuine tossups — the result of a combination of Republican political weaknesses and the Emanuel team’s success at growing the roster of competitive Democratic challengers, many in districts that the party had not contested in years. By contrast, only 21 Democratic seats were in play, and only a handful appeared seriously at risk. The bottom line is that the Republicans are now ahead at least marginally in only 207 races, meaning that even if they hold on to all of those (which won’t happen) they must win 11 of the 18 tossups to retain power. The Democrats are now ahead in 210 races — nine more than the number of seats they have now — so if they hold all those leads they will need to win just eight of the tossups to gain control.