Divided Government

Taking the classic Tip O'Neill "all politics is local" approach, The Cook Political Report examines the 435 House races individually. That step-by-step process indicates that Democrats will lose 30 seats, 10 shy of what Republicans need to take control. But this year, the overall national environment must also be taken into account.

Measures estimating the overall popular vote for the House, such as the Pollster.com and RealClearPolitics.com averages of national poll results on the generic congressional ballot test, give Republicans a 2.8-percentage-point advantage. Considering that most polls are now surveying registered voters -- which tends to skew the results too Democratic, because midterm participants are older and more Republican than participants in presidential years -- these averages suggest a worse outcome for Democrats. The majority party holds 59 percent of the House seats.

Gallup's tracking poll of registered voters for the week of April 5-11 gave Republicans a 4-point advantage, 48 percent to 44 percent. Gallup won't switch to polling only voters who are likely to turn out in November until later this year. But with 48 percent of Republicans enthusiastic about casting ballots in the midterm compared with 30 percent of Democrats, and with independent voters favoring Republican candidates by an 11-point margin, we can easily imagine that poll results will look even worse for Democrats once Gallup focuses on likely voters. Those results will almost certainly point toward a GOP takeover.

Combining its own race-by-race calculations with the results of national polls, The Cook Political Report officially projects a Republican gain of 30 to 40 seats. I suspect that the GOP will do even better if the trend over the past seven months continues.

On the other hand, the Intrade electronic markets give Democrats a 56 percent chance of holding the House. The views of other experts vary as well. Most political scientists who have weighed in tend to think that Democrats will suffer serious losses but retain control. Analysts who look at individual races and then add "macro" national dynamics to the mix, however, largely expect Democrats to have real trouble hanging on.

Despite all of this disagreement over whether the House will flip, there is pretty much of a consensus in the political community that President Obama's chances of getting re-elected will rise if his party loses the House or Senate. (In my book, the latter is quite unlikely.)

There are two arguments supporting the notion that the president might benefit from divided government. First, a GOP-controlled House would provide Obama with a foil. Republicans would have some governing responsibility; Democrats wouldn't "own" Washington and automatically get the blame for everything that does or doesn't happen. A strong case can be made that President Clinton would not have been re-elected in 1996 had Democrats not lost control of Congress in 1994.

The second contention is that losing control of the House would allow (or force) Obama to take a more centrist approach, to replicate the "triangulation" that worked well for Clinton in 1995 and 1996. Positioning himself and his administration as less liberal than congressional Democrats and less conservative than congressional Republicans, Clinton became the moderate honest broker in policy, riding that course to victory over Republican Bob Dole.

Divided government certainly seems to have benefited the Democratic president who preceded Obama, and it might be even more helpful to the current one because the politics of 2010 are considerably more polarized. It's not just the country that is much more divided along red and blue lines than it was a decade and a half ago: Ideological purges are breaking out in both parties. Look no further than Republican Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah, who may not even survive his state party convention to get on the primary ballot. Likewise, Democrat Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the Senate Agriculture Committee's chairwoman, is facing a barrage of negative ads from organized labor and liberals for not being sufficiently pure, despite representing a very conservative state.

In a world where Bennett is considered too liberal for Utah Republicans and Lincoln too conservative for Arkansas Democrats, anything that helps presidents move to the middle in time for a general election is likely to boost their chances of winning re-election. Think of the battering that Obama took from many liberals for failing to include a public option in the health care bill. With Republicans in control of the House, will the White House still get that kind of pressure? The short answer: No.