Republicans’ Majority Tinged With Melancholy

WASHINGTON — After months of turmoil and turbulence, Tuesday’s election seems unlikely to produce much more than a ripple of change in the numerical balance of power on Capitol Hill. But it could change the psychological atmosphere in Congress enormously--particularly on the question of whether President Clinton should be impeached and removed from office.

After earlier expecting that a backlash against President Clinton’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky might produce significant gains, Republicans were almost certain to lose seats in the House, which would mark the first time since 1934 that the party not holding the White House had lost House seats in a midterm election. In the Senate, where Republicans earlier hoped to pick up the five seats they need for a filibuster-proof majority, the GOP failed to add a single seat.

Democrats also dramatically reasserted themselves in the South:recapturing governorships in South Carolina and Alabama, holding a governorship in Georgia that Republicans had expected to win and taking back a North Carolina Senate seat after a bitterly fought race.

At the same time, victories by Democrats in the night’s two most closely watched contests--the battle for the California governorship and the Senate seat in New York--could signal systemic problems for the GOP in heavily suburban battlegrounds that likely will decide the presidential election of 2000. “There is a serious problem with California,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz.

The evening hardly provided a Democratic sweep. Barring an unexpected turn in the final results, Republicans will maintain their majorities in the House and Senate--sustaining their control over legislative chambers that Democrats held almost by birthright for a full generation.

Even with the apparent victory for Democrat Gray Davis in California, Jeb Bush’s win in Florida means that Republicans will continue to control the governor’s mansions in seven of the eight largest states. And in Texas, Gov. George W. Bush instantly anointed himself as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 with the night’s single most decisive victory.

‘Terrible’ Results for Republicans

But, despite those assets for the GOP, the unexpected congressional results left Democrats cheering and Republicans stunned. “Watch the body language: Democrats will come away looking like they’ve won and Republicans will come away looking like they’ve lost,” said Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.

Social conservative leader Gary Bauer, who is contemplating a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, had a more succinct verdict on the early results: “terrible,” he said.

In Washington, the most immediate question will be whether the results change the prospects of the House advancing impeachment proceedings against Clinton. Judgments will not come until final counts are available in congressional races.

But many Democrats immediately saw in the early returns signs of a backlash against the impeachment effort. Exit polls indicated that a large turnout of African Americans--Clinton’s staunchest supporters--boosted Democrats in several key states, including Georgia, South Carolina and Maryland. In New York, Democratic Rep. Charles E. Schumer unabashedly trumpeted his opposition to impeachment in his stunning victory over seemingly indestructible Republican Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato. And in North Carolina, Democrat John Edwards won convincingly, despite Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth’s relentless efforts to tie him to Clinton.

Given the large financial advantage that Republicans enjoyed and the natural tendency of the party outside the White House to gain seats during midterm elections, an impeachment backlash “is the only way you can account for this election,” argued Greenberg.

Republicans refused to concede that point. But GOP pollster Bill McInturff acknowledged that the congressional move to launch impeachment proceedings lent energy to Democratic voters in a way that diluted the turnout advantage Republicans had expected earlier in the year, when anger over Clinton’s behavior had depressed his party.

“From late September on, Democrats did a very good job of telling core Democrats, ‘Don’t look at the man behind the curtain, look at the other guys,’ ” said McInturff.

Exit polls themselves offered somewhat mixed messages on the scandal’s direct impact on the election. Most voters surveyed Tuesday by Voter News Service said that Clinton’s problems had not affected their vote; 18% of those remaining said they were voting to express support for the president, while 21% said their vote reflected opposition to him, according to CNN.

In some respects, Americans who voted Tuesday were more critical of Clinton than the public at large. About one-fifth of those voting said that moral and ethical values were the top consideration in their vote--and they voted, 6 to 1, for Republicans. And both approval of Clinton’s job performance and opposition to impeachment was slightly lower among the electorate than the public at large, the exit polls found.

But even so, nearly 60% of those voting believed that Congress “should drop the whole matter” rather than continue with impeachment proceedings. And at 55%, Clinton’s job-approval rating among those voting was fully 14 percentage points higher than the approval rating for Congress.

Though House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) on Tuesday night brushed off suggestions that the results would affect the impeachment process, many other observers believe that if the GOP makes only minimal gains--much less if it loses seats--GOP moderates could grow increasingly resistant to moving forward. That ambivalence likely would deepen if Democrats can knock off a few of the Republican incumbents representing districts that Clinton carried in 1996, such as Pennsylvania’s Jon Fox, who was an early casualty Tuesday.

Even House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) seemed a bit shaken Tuesday--though still determined. “There’s no possibility of us dropping this,” Hyde said at his election party in Bensonville, Ill., before adding: “I don’t feel a great deal of momentum behind us.”

Clinton’s problems may have been a critical subtext to the election but rarely were they the central focus of debate. Though the two national parties exchanged a late flurry of ads over the scandal, in most campaigns candidates on both sides mostly stayed away from the issue.

Though no single issue dominated the national dialogue--leading some to dub this “the Seinfeld campaign”--the election, in fact, provided a revealing snapshot of the two parties’ agendas six years into the Clinton era.

Almost without exception, Democrats of every ideological stripe emphasized the same three issues--preserving the budget surplus for Social Security, reforming health maintenance organizations and reducing school class sizes, primarily by proceeding with Clinton’s plan to hire 100,000 new teachers.

Republicans Called for New Tax Cuts

In many campaigns, Republicans countered with calls for new tax cuts, more defense spending and turning federal education programs into block grants for states. But as the results poured in, some conservatives already were complaining that the disappointing numbers in several states reflected a failure by the Republican Congress to more sharply define an agenda beyond pursuing Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal.

“I think the message here is that Republicans have got to get serious about the whole agenda from real tax cuts to real cuts in the size of government, and then the social issues,” Bauer insisted.

One sub-theme from the results with potential implications for the presidential race was a heightened emphasis on abortion in both parties. On the one hand, several Republicans effectively trumpeted their opposition to “partial-birth” abortions.

Perhaps even more striking, several Democratic winners stressed their support for legal abortion with powerful effect against Republicans in more moderate and suburban states. Schumer in New York, Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, Tom Vilsack, the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee in Iowa, and Davis and Sen. Barbara Boxer in California all made support for legal abortion the sharpest point in their efforts to drive wedges between centrist voters and their Republican opponents. And all went home winners Tuesday night.

Times staff writer Stephen Braun in Bensonville, Ill., contributed to this story.