Democrat victory 1998 midterms - 6 November 1998

"Why?" asked a roving reporter on the streets of Chicago, of a passing black man. "We're trying to find out why so many people didn't vote in the election. Why didn't you vote?"

The young man tossed a cheerful, surprised look. "What election?" he said. He was not a joker. "Oh well," he said, "maybe next year." Except next year there is no election. He didn't stay long enough to hear the reporter teach him the bare-boned, elementary facts about Congressional elections, that whereas presidents are chosen every four years, the House of Representatives is elected every two years, Senators every six years. There are a hundred of them, two for every state, no matter what its size or population, so one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years also.

Even these simplicities may sound difficult enough to a foreign audience, but Tuesday's feature film was the election of the 435 Members of the House and we won't even go into the issues since a research outfit has calculated there were 36 separate issues throughout the 50 states, A moment's thought should convince you that no pollster or wizard, alchemist or crystal-ball gazer could work out, in the next two years, what single issue, or combination of issues anywhere, led voters to vote as they did.

If your mind hasn't already gone into spasm and you're still with me, I'll try and scramble though the whole website and download a few surprising, but true, generalisations that I believe will interest more people than Americans. First let me say about our cheerful black man, who hadn't even heard there was an election, he was one of a kind. While only 35% of registered voters throughout the nation bothered to vote, more than 80% of registered blacks did go out and vote, and by a flood-like margin, voted for anyone who was on President Clinton's side in anything.

The main interest, I'm sure, everywhere, was what effect would the House election have on the president, or shall we say, vice versa. Right up to election eve, Republicans believed that the president's lie on television last January, when he swore he'd had no sex with Miss Lewinsky, was still the thing that would turn the voters away from him. They believed this enough to have their national committee pay ten million dollars to broadcast, in states where the race was tight, 10-second commercials, simply showing President Clinton with red-rimmed eyes, telling that solemn lie, last January.

The Democrats went on till the end saying, with their fingers crossed, the people had long ago forgiven or wanted to forget the president's affair. And the pundits – well now, I'm thinking of the best of them, a half-dozen journalists who have a record for great knowledge of the House and the history of mid-term, non-presidential elections – nobody went out on a lonely limb to prophesy a Republican sweep, since the Republicans are still in a healthy majority in both Houses. The landslide already happened two years ago, thanks to the leadership of Speaker Gingrich. But the best communal guess was that the Republicans would gain two or three seats in the Senate and somewhere between eight and ten seats in the House. Mr Gingrich predicted that the Republicans would gain 40 seats in the House.

Well, the result. No change whatever in the Senate but the Republicans lost five seats in the House and the Democrats gained four seats. Not much in numbers, but the result staggered everybody and thrilled the White House. The Republicans set their jaws next day and said, "We should not be too quick to seize on any obvious explanation". But the obvious, and as far as they were concerned, the awful, historic fact, was there for all to see. For the first time in 64 years, the president's party gained seats in a mid-term election.

Why should this happen so rarely? Well, to put it with gross simplicity, such is the pomp and the regal publicity that whirls around a man who is going to be not only the leader of his political party, but the head of state, so every four years the American people choose a president in the emotional atmosphere of the Children of Israel electing their Moses, to lead them out of what the winner assures them has been a wilderness of inept leaders and broken promises.

After four years or even after two years, it usually turns out that the man is not Moses running a crusade, but a human being running something tricky and much less commanding, hoping to dictate, if not pass, laws, in an office that is far less powerful than that of a Prime Minister. Maybe he has enough charisma or something to be re-elected, but certainly, by the middle of his term, it's absolutely normal for the voters to yearn for another Moses and they register their disillusion in the current impersonator by voting against his party in the mid-term election.

So why was 1934 the rarity, when the president's party actually gained seats in a mid-term election? Because that president was Franklin Roosevelt, who had swept everything before him two years before, in the pit of the Depression, at the most desperate moment for the American system since the Civil War.

In the hour of his inauguration the new president had dared to say he might ask for powers even beyond the Constitution. In the result, he got them. Republicans and Democrats and Independents and Socialists alike were near despair and believed the country was close to revolution. Well, there was widespread misery and despair but no revolution. What lifted up the whole country was Roosevelt's incomparable spirit, the buoyant tone with which he poured into the government huge infusions of the bankers' own secret, borrowed money, and began massive public works. At the end of two years, the morale of the nation was palpably rising and the 1934 mid-term Congressional election renewed the vote of confidence in him by sending even more Democrats back to the House.

Well that being the dramatic, unique precedent for Tuesday's astonishing, and totally unpredicted, result in the House, should be enough to help us see why President Clinton could go on television on Wednesday and afford to look the Republicans in the eye, his own eyes not red-rimmed for once, and say he was proud of his party and proud of the people.

After that talk, the first thing he did was to telephone the Speaker of the House, Mr Gingrich, who was busy trying to crack a smile and saying, "Mr Speaker, how about getting down to business, the moment we assemble in January. I suggest we get busy at once on my plan to guarantee the survival and success of Social Security".

The president's born-again confidence sprang not only from the result of the election in the House, but from what most politicians looked on as the bonus prize, the plum, the brass ring of this election. For the first time in 18 years, the governorship of California has gone to a Democrat and not a handsome, throbbing, spellbinder either. A very grey figure, well-named Gray Davis, the Republicans said.

This was a whopping victory because California now can have as big a say for the Democrats in the next presidential election as New York once had. It is now far and away the most populous state and every state, as you know, is assigned electoral votes in relation to its population. In all, there are 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president. Each state adds two Senators to the number of its Congressmen.

Thus Vermont and Wyoming each have three votes – two for their Senators and one Congressman. You have to be pretty thinly-settled territory to have only one Congressman. New York has 33 but California has 52, plus two Senators, 54 electoral votes. In other words, in any presidential election, nearly one California vote in five is needed to elect and of course, nobody can wield more power, more patronage, in running the state's delegation to the next convention than a governor. And also, for the first time since I don't know when, California has two Democratic senators, both women, and a Democratic governor.

All this leads to the point where the Republicans said it was bound to lead, and where the Democrats hoped it wouldn't, to Topic A, to the president and the prospect of impeachment. The most telling statistic about Topic A shows, without much doubt, that the scandal and the president's character and his performance as president were somehow mixed up in the minds of many people, as they went off to vote.

Voters who were directly challenged by the question "Was the President's affair the main reason to vote?", only 5% said yes, but – and here's the puzzle that reflects an active conflict in many minds – the president's popularity as a president has gone down from the middle 60s to 55%. His rating as a human being, as a moral human being, has dropped to a dismal 33%, a strong hint there that some punishment is deserved.

So the one thing the joyful Democrats and the bruised Republicans agree on is that the great majority of voters, whatever else they were voting for, were saying as, of all people, Speaker Gingrich said on Wednesday, "We're not taking a stand on impeachment or non-impeachment, we're saying we want to forget the whole topic".

Mr Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the man today nobody loves to envy, says he'll try and get his committee to vote on the charges before Thanksgiving, which is only two weeks from next Thursday. In the heavy shadow of the election, the chance that Mr Clinton will be charged by the committee, let alone the House or Senate, with high crimes and misdemeanours, appears to be fading into invisibility.

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