Brian J. Gaines is an associate professor of political science at Illinois and is a faculty member at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. His research interests are elections, political behavior, and political institutions and he is widely quoted in news media on elections and politics.
How unhappy with the GOP-controlled Congress are voters?
They’re quite unhappy with the general state of politics in the country right now. Some of it is clearly directed at President Bush so it isn’t helping his fellow Republicans running for congressional seats. Some of it unhappiness from the left – people who weren’t that happy with Bush to begin with, but he’s taking it from both sides. There are conservatives who are unhappy with the level of spending. So it’s not all unhappiness with particular Republicans, but I think the party is at a low point, and that’s bad news coming into a mid-term election.
Is that going to translate into Democratic votes?
Almost everybody believes it is going to translate into a Democratic House and many are now saying there is a shot, maybe a 50-50 shot, at the Senate. I’m still a little bit more guarded in my predictions. I think there is a chance, maybe a 20 percent chance, that Republicans will retain the House and very little chance that Democrats will take the Senate.
In a way, I think this election is about two competing theories in political science. On one hand, mid-term elections, until the last two, have always involved the president’s party losing seats. And with President Bush’s popularity being low, this looks like a classic opportunity for gains for the Democrats. On the other hand, for the last three elections, the story has been the Republicans have perfected the get-out-the-vote operation and they have more money to spend and they’ve figured out how to get their base excited and out in a way that Democrats just haven’t managed. If Republicans retain the House, people will be saying Karl Rove really is a genius, the get-out-the-vote operation the Republicans have built outclasses the Democrats and they defied all the forces and trends. If they lose the House, then all that scuttlebutt about the Republicans’ superior electioneering machine just sort of disappears.
If Republicans maintain control of the House, what is the likelihood that Dennis Hastert will remain Speaker given the uproar over the Mark Foley scandal?
I suspect Hastert will be Speaker if Republicans get the majority, and if they don’t I think he may well be in his last congressional term. I wouldn’t expect him to retain a leadership position within the Republican Party and then I don’t think it would be very interesting for him to stick around the House in a reduced role. So, for him, I think this is a make-or-break election.
Polls in Illinois show Gov. Rod Blagojevich with low approval ratings, yet many of those same polls show he should easily win re-election. Does Judy Barr-Topinka have a ghost of a chance to unseat the incumbent?
I think she probably has just a ghost of a chance. Blagojevich’s numbers look very bad by historical, base-line standards. The problem is her numbers are just as bad or worse. He had a great deal more money than her. He ran negative ads all summer. He’s had negative mailings going out. He’s spent his money in what some find a disheartening but classically effective kind of way of attacking her and tearing her down. It’s worked, she has very low positives. I think her only hope of pulling a rabbit out of a hat now is some new, big, late revelation, something that she cannot control. It’s not going to be that she runs a great final ad or that she has a series of clever speeches or campaign stops. It’s going to have to be some breaking news.
