Preventing Pelosi: is it possible? Maybe, but things look grim.

THE question about the November elections isn't whether the Republicans will lose seats, but how many they will lose.

As summer draws to a close, the forecasts are getting bleak. If Republicans lose 15 House seats, they will lose their majority as well. Robert Novak writes that if the election were held now, "the GOP would probably lose 26 seats." Al Hunt chortles: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chairman Charles Rangel and Chairman--again--John Dingell. Those titles will soon sound familiar." Republican Hill staffers are eyeing the exits, looking to get out while the getting's good. They may be too late: K Street lobbying shops are hiring Democrats in anticipation of a shift in power.

Republicans are doing better in the Senate. They are likely to lose seats there, but probably not their majority. Even if Republican incumbents lose in all of the states where they are most at risk--Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana, and Missouri--Democrats would still have to pull off an unlikely victory in either Virginia or Tennessee to win the majority. It is at least as likely that Republicans will offset their losses by picking up seats in Maryland or New Jersey.

This happier outlook in the Senate is historically anomalous. The political analyst Jay Cost points out that since the direct election of senators began, the House has never switched hands without the Senate's doing so. This pattern isn't just a statistical fluke: While congressmen can gerrymander their districts to withstand the gales of public opinion, senators can't redraw the borders of their states. (In 2004, 98.8 percent of House members were reelected. Only 10 of the 435 races were won with less than 55 percent of the vote.)

But all such rules of politics are true only till they're not. In 1998, Republicans took comfort in the fact that off-year elections had gone well for the opposition for more than six decades, especially in the sixth year of a presidency. But while the historical observation was accurate, President Clinton's party still won seats from the Republicans. This year, voters could make history again by giving the House to the Democrats while leaving the Senate to the Republicans.

HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS

House Republicans face a daunting national political environment. The continued fighting in Iraq, along with the absence of a clear path to victory, has demoralized Republicans and angered Democrats. It has soured the public mood even on seemingly unrelated issues. High gas prices have reduced effective take-home pay and added to worries about the solidity of the economic boom.

Some Republicans have drawn hope from the fact that forecasters thought they would lose seats in 2002 and turned out to be wrong. But most of the poll numbers looked worse for Republicans in August 2006 than they did in August 2002. In 2002, 51 percent of Americans thought the country was "on the wrong track" while 43 percent thought we were headed "in the right direction." That eight-point gap has ballooned to 38 points: Now 66 percent of the public thinks we're on the wrong track, compared with 28 percent who think the opposite.

The biggest difference between now and then is that President Bush's numbers have declined. In August 2002, 65 percent of the public approved of his performance. Now he's south of 40 percent. Not even Bush's handling of terrorism wins reliable majority approval anymore. The data on congressional incumbents aren't encouraging either. In 2002, about 60 percent of voters wanted to reelect their congressmen. That has dropped to 51 percent--just barely above the 49 percent that voters registered in 1994, the year they threw out the Democratic majority that had ruled the House for 40 years.

As if this weren't bad enough, many Republicans now have to campaign in difficult local environments as well. Republicans may lose three seats in Ohio alone. Scandal-prone Republican governor Bob Taft has a 17 percent approval rating (which is a good part of why Republicans also look likely to lose the governor's mansion and may lose a Senate seat in Ohio this fall). Three more Republican seats are at risk in Indiana, where Republican governor Mitch Daniels's fights with the legislature have sunk his approval rating to 39 percent. That puts Daniels ahead only of Ohio's Taft, Alaska's Republican governor Frank Murkowski, who just lost his primary for reelection, and Kentucky's Republican governor Ernie Fletcher, who has been indicted. All of these governors have lower approval ratings, by the way, than Louisiana's Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco, who dithered while New Orleans sank.

Other Republican incumbents just have the bad luck of running in blue states in a blue year. Three of the four endangered congressmen in Pennsylvania are running in districts that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry. The three at risk in Connecticut are also running in Kerry country.

And Republicans have fumbled in a few races. The fourth at-risk Pennsylvanian, Don Sherwood, is from a district that Bush comfortably carried. But voters were not pleased when a former mistress alleged that he had abused her. Tom DeLay decided not to run for reelection in his Texas district only after winning the primary. Republicans tried to put a substitute candidate on the ballot, but their maneuvers were harebrained--as a result, this majority-Republican district will have no Republican candidate this fall. John Hostettler, in southwestern Indiana, always has unnecessarily tough races, not least because he eschews PAC money and the advice of party professionals. Even in 2004, a good Republican year, he ran ten points behind Bush. Needless to say, this isn't a good year for Republicans.

At the start of the year, Republicans thought they might be able to win a handful of Democratic seats to offset their losses. They thought they might knock off Melissa Bean, who had beaten a longtime Republican incumbent in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago in 2004, largely because of the latter's personal problems. They saw an opportunity, as well, in the southeastern Ohio seat that Democrat Ted Strickland vacated to run for governor. Those hopes have now faded to nearly nothing. Almost every expert's list of competitive races includes only seats currently held by Republicans. The Democrats have a target-rich environment, and the Republicans are playing pure defense.

NOT FAT AND HAPPY

"This is the toughest off-year election for Republicans since 1982," says Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican widely respected by his peers for his political acumen. He thinks they might weather this storm because they know it's brewing. In 1994, none of the forecasters warned the Democrats that their reign might end. It took (too many) months of bad polls to shake today's congressional Republicans out of complacency, but at last they understand their peril. They have started running ads early.

In 1994, as Cole says, many of the Democrats who lost were "fat and happy." Many of the Republicans in tough races this fall--such as Hostettler, Heather Wilson in New Mexico, and Rob Simmons and Chris Shays in Connecticut--have, in contrast, been in tough races before.

It helps that House Republican leaders understand the stakes. In a normal year, they might have let Bob Ney, a congressman caught up in the Jack Abramoff scandal, try his luck in November. That is especially true because Republican majority leader John Boehner, like Ney, is from Ohio, and Ohio Republicans are a clannish bunch. This year, with every precious seat counting toward the majority, Boehner pressured his colleague to step down and let someone else try to salvage the seat. Boehner won his job in early February by defeating Roy Blunt, who kept the position just below Boehner's. Backbiting between the two might have been expected, but the present challenge seems to have put their rivalry in abeyance. Their colleagues give them credit for working closely together.

No such unity exists on the Democratic side. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, urged Jack Murtha to challenge Steny Hoyer, the relatively conservative Democrat who ranks just below her. Rahm Emanuel, who runs the House Democrats' campaign committee, has conducted a semi-public feud with party chairman Howard Dean over strategy. (Dean wants to build the party in all 50 states, while Emanuel wants to allocate resources where the immediate opportunities lie.)

This inside-the-Beltway scuffling won't have any direct effect on voters. But it is a sign that Republican politicians have more confidence in each other than Democratic politicians do. "Ken Mehlman at the RNC versus Howard Dean at the DNC is a no-brainer," says Cole. "Who brings more to the battlefield?" Democratic donors appear to share his assessment. The DNC has $11 million in the bank compared with the RNC's $43 million. Emanuel has taken to chastising his party's top donors in the press for not giving more.

Mehlman himself points to a recent special election in San Diego as evidence that the Republicans' sophisticated turnout operation can help them prevail in a difficult environment. The facts were pretty grim. The incumbent Republican, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, had been sent to jail for taking bribes from lobbyists. The party was divided in the primary race to replace him. The winner, Brian Bilbray, got only 15 percent of the primary vote. Worse still, his most recent job had been as a lobbyist. The Democrats spent $2 million running against a Republican "culture of corruption." Bilbray still won.

The race also demonstrates that this year's elections are likely to be won by whichever party gets its core voters to show up, not which one appeals to on-the-fence voters. Turnout in both parties' primaries has generally been low, which suggests that it's the most committed voters who are likely to participate in the fall elections. The Republican base has been unenthusiastic about the party lately, chiefly because of spending and immigration. But as the threat of a Democratic House looms larger, conservative voters may get motivated--more Republicans than Democrats know who Pelosi is.

House Republicans think that immigration works in their favor. They have generally taken the view that the law has to be enforced before anything that smacks of amnesty is considered. They think that is the politically smart position to take--and even some party officials who prefer Bush's "comprehensive" plan agree. It is an issue that might help Republicans win one of their toughest campaigns. Republican Peter Roskam is facing Democrat Tammy Duckworth, a disabled Iraq War veteran, in the race to succeed retiring Republican Henry Hyde in Chicago's western suburbs. Duckworth has endorsed the Senate's immigration plan. "The immigration issue is off the charts, and '(r)secure the border' works everywhere [as a message]," says a top party strategist.

Iraq's role in the elections is complicated. The public is deeply unhappy about the way the war has been going, and Republicans get the blame. But the public is split on what to do next. There is no majority for withdrawing quickly. Hence Democrats are split, too. Many of them, including their House leadership, have endorsed a timetable for withdrawal, but most of the candidates running in competitive races have not. Thus Dick Morris's recent advice to Republicans--quit talking about Iraq, because the public is not going to be persuaded to support the war--is dead wrong. It is unworkable: Candidates can hardly pretend the war isn't going on. And the public can be persuaded to support Republican positions on the war's future, if not its past.

More to the point, a crucial segment of the public can be reached: the former Iraq War hawks who have become dispirited. Happy talk about the progress of the war will fall on deaf ears. But an acknowledgment of the crisis in Iraq and an emphasis on what would be the disastrous consequences of defeat there may very well strengthen this voting bloc's resolve.

Other War on Terror issues help the Republicans more straightforwardly. Look for Republicans to demand that congressmen go on record on the National Security Agency's wiretaps and the rights of suspected terrorists. If the election is only a referendum on the Republicans, the party will lose big--the public isn't happy, and the Republicans are in power. But if the election is a choice--Which party has better plans for the challenges facing the country?--then Republicans will do better. Mehlman has been making that argument for months. So far, Republicans have not succeeded in converting the election from a referendum to a choice. Democrats are not going to help them by offering detailed proposals.

TO THE VICTOR GO THE SPOILS

If the Democrats win the House, they will probably have a very slender majority. During the last six terms, Republicans have, on average, had a ten-seat majority. During the previous six terms, Democrats averaged a 44-seat majority. The Democrats might have a single-digit majority next year, which hasn't happened since the middle of World War II.

Even a slender Democratic majority would be able to pass some legislation. This would mostly be legislation that already enjoys majority support in this Republican House, but that House Republican leaders have, through various stratagems, blocked. The minimum wage would be increased. The re-importation of drugs at discounted prices would be allowed. The government would probably use its purchasing power to impose de facto price controls on the drug industry. Congress might enact some restrictions on wiretapping in the pursuit of terrorists. A Republican Senate would be unlikely to defeat these initiatives, especially since the Republican margin there will probably be small.

There would, however, be no grand legislative agenda. If they had a large enough margin, House Democrats might be able to pass popular legislation and dare Republican senators, or President Bush, to stop them. But they probably wouldn't have the votes even to score such political points.

What they would have the power to do is to issue subpoenas. A Democratic House would launch investigation after investigation. The Bush administration's conduct during Hurricane Katrina; every conceivable aspect of the Iraq War; the putatively nefarious conduct of the oil and gas industries: All would be fair game. Democrats could overreach with these investigations, as congressional Republicans sometimes did in their investigations of the Clinton administration in the 1990s. But such Democrats as John Dingell and Henry Waxman are better at running investigations than the Republicans are, and would find it easier to use the media in the course of them.

A Democratic House would make it deeply unpleasant--and expensive--to work for the Bush administration. "If you think that leaks have hurt [the Bush administration] over the last five years, just wait until people are testifying under oath," warns Marshall Wittmann, who served in the first President Bush's administration when Democrats ran Congress, and who has subsequently joined the Democratic Leadership Council.

Asmall-margin Democratic Congress would feature more investigations than legislation. The other likely outcome of the election, a small-margin Republican Congress, would probably not feature much of either: It would lack the power to legislate and the motive to investigate.

Americans are mad at Washington in part because its denizens do more bickering than problem-solving. Unless the political climate changes dramatically between Labor Day and Election Day, they're going to have more to be mad about over the next two years.