Anatomy Of An Election
Some wags are saying that Bill Clinton ingeniously carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky in order to increase the chances of a Democratic victory in Campaign '98.
While nobody is seriously suggesting that the wily Arkansas homeboy snookered Newt Gingrich and his men by bonding with Monica, it's clear that something was in the political water this midterm election.
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The Democrats fought the GOP to a standstill in Senate and gubernatorial elections and even managed to pick up five House seats - the first time the party in the White House has done so in an off-year election since 1934.
The repercussions shook Washington.
President Clinton's impeachment is nearly a dead letter. House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde all but lowered the flag by deciding to confine impeachment hearings to one major witness: Independent Counsel Ken Starr. Hyde would like to see the whole thing wrapped up before Santa slides down the nation's chimneys.
In the House, meanwhile, a mob of angry Republican representatives brandishing pitchforks and torches drove Speaker Newt Gingrich from office a scant three days after the GOP embarrassment. Gingrich was blamed for the poor Republican election performance.
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"There are two lessons to learn from this," said GOP pollster Linda DiVall. "You need an issue agenda, and Republicans need to do a better job of governing and getting their work done in the Congress."
The absence of a GOP agenda enabled the Democrats to dominate the battlefield.
"Across the nation, the election was fought out on Democratic issues like education and Social Security," said Gary Jacobson, an expert on congressional elections. "The issues that the Republicans have had as their bread-and-butter over the years - taxes, crime, foreign policy - didn't come into play."
And - needless to say - the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal proved to be the biggest bomb since Waterworld. Exit polls showed that most votes simply didn't care about Mr. Bill's Oval Office adventures with Intern No. 1.
"The election was not a referendum on Bill Clinton's impeachment and it is very lucky for the Republicans that it wasn't," Jacobson said.
Indeed, two Democratic House hopefuls, Jay Inslee of Washington and Rush Holt of New Jersey, used anti-impeachment ads in their winning campaigns against Republican incumbents.
Holt hurt GP Rep. Mike Pappas with a highly effective commercial that exploited Pappas' decision to sing this little ditty on the floor of the House last summer:
Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth Starr
Now we know how brave you are
Holt crafted a radio ad that interspersed the voice of the singing Congressman with accusations that Pappas has spent "months and millions" on "partisan investigations."
Other factors also contributed to the GOP reversal.
"The Democratic ground war defeated the Republican air war," said congressional scholar Tom Mann.
The GOP used its traditional edge in campaign funding to bombard the nation's airwaves with political commercials, but the Democrats overcame that advantage by turning out black, Hispanic, and union voters.
Black voters provided crucial support for Democratic victories in the Old South and other states, while Hispanic voters helped to sink the GOP in the nation's most politically important state, California.
The union performance was even more impressive. The number of voters from union households jumped from 14 percent in 1994 (the last off-year election) to 22 percent on Tuesday.
Instead of spending millions of dollars on largely ineffective TV commercials, as it did in 1996, big labor threw money and energy into getting union voters to the polls. The results of this effort were evident from coast to coast.
To cite but one example, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada owes his narrow victory to the union label. Nevada is one of the most unionized states in the nation, and the union vote-pulling operation was particularly effective there.
The theme of the election, in short, was that the Reagan Democrats returned to the fold, Republican anti-immigration initiatives came back to haunt the party, particularly in California, and that Bill Clinton has more political lives than an entire litter of cats.
The House Republicans, meanwhile, will go into a new term with a majority so slim that it can be undone by a half-dozen defections. Newt Gingrich may wind up being happy that he relinquished the speakership.
Written by CBS.com Producer Dan Collins
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