Web Video: From the Vault: 2006 Midterm Elections

MS. IFILL: Washington turned upside down: the Democrats in, Rumsfeld out. Tonight, on "Washington Week."

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: (From tape.) If you look at race by race, it was close. The cumulative effect, however, was not too
close. It was a thumping.

MS. IFILL: Even the president could not find a silver lining this time, as Democrats partied from coast to coast.

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): (From tape.) Tonight is a great victory for the American people.

MS. IFILL: Republicans licked their wounds.

SENATOR GEORGE ALLEN (R-VA): (From tape.) The people of Virginia, they have spoken, and I respect their decision.

MS. IFILL: Don Rumsfeld lost his job.

PRESIDENT BUSH: (From tape.) I named a good man to succeed Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director Bob Gates.

MS. IFILL: And both parties rethought the way they do business. Tonight we'll assess the impact of Election 2006.

MS. IFILL: Good evening. Call it a revolution or a rebuke, or maybe the voters emphatically putting Washington on notice. However you measure this remarkable week, you've got to start with the numbers. Democrats are now in charge in the House. They needed 15 seats to retake the majority; they won at latest count at least 28 seats. And they took the Senate, too, winning the six seats they needed to claim a bare majority. Overnight, the base of congressional leadership changed. What was the driving force behind all of this, Gloria?

MS. BORGER: Gwen, I think you could say the driving force was that old refrain "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." And that's what we've heard from the voters.

It was really an election about change with voters rejecting Washington; rejecting Republican rule in Washington that had given them scandal, corruption, partisanship and nothing getting done. And this was also really a vote of no confidence on the president's management of the war in Iraq. And they decided that they wanted to give the other guys a shot.

When you step back and you look at the numbers closely, I also think this was an election about centrism. Forty-seven percent of the people who voted define themselves as moderates. Overwhelmingly they went for the Democrats. And so they said to the Democrats -- okay, we're going to let you guys try and govern with specific instructions: get something done.

MS. IFILL: Okay. Let's talk about the voters who don't understand and what they understood on Election Day and how those dominos began to fall? Jimmy, you were crunching all the numbers in the exit polls.

Who voted each way that allowed this outcome?

MR. BARNES: Well, I think one of the -- as Gloria was saying, this election was to some extent a very big referendum on President Bush. The people who went to the polls, according to the exit polls, gave him a 57 percent job disapproval rating. Only 43 percent approved. Compare that to four years ago, 2002, when Republicans picked up seats. The president's job approval rating for those voters that year, for that election: 64 percent. So that's a very big difference.

And secondly, I think we heard a lot of talk this election about turning out the base, and that was going to be the key and the Karl Rove strategy was going to be get a lot of Republicans out, the Democrats were furiously working at it. Well, as it turned out, they both pretty much turned out their bases. Roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans went to the polls and by roughly overwhelmingly equal margins the Democrats voted for Democratic candidates, the Republicans for Republican candidates.

But in elections a lot of times we hear things about every election cycle, well, we're going to have a soccer mom group or who are the NASCAR dads? But it really comes down, I think, a lot of times, to this plain old group in the middle called independents. And independents went to the polls and they overwhelmingly voted for Democrats. Something like 57 percent voted for a Democratic House candidate. Roughly 39 percent voted for a Republican House candidate. Most elections, the independents just swing back -- a couple of points this way, a couple of points the other way. The last election that we had where we saw this big of a gap among independents, 1994, when they voted 55 percent for a Republican candidate and only 41 percent for a Democrat.

MR. MCMANUS: George W. Bush now starts the last two years of his presidency -- his chance to put whatever his final legacy is going to be in history books -- under almost the worst conditions imaginable. He's a lame duck; that was there anyway. He's just lost Congress. He's got that awful war in Iraq on his hands. And there are a lot of Democrats up there, despite the moderation you've heard from Claire McCaskill, and you've heard some of the same moderation from Nancy Pelosi, who said impeachment is off the table.

MS. IFILL: And John Conyers said --

MR. MCMANUS: And John Conyers. There are a lot of Democrats up there who want to investigate, investigate, investigate. Anyway, what can be on the president's agenda? He talked about it: he wants his tax cuts, he wants to do -- that's going to be hard, that's partisan. There were some bipartisan things that are possible, immigration, lobbying reform, education reform, but they're not going to be that easy because it's been a poisonous atmosphere. And then finally, Iraq is still his legacy, and that is going to be a really hard one to fix.

MS. IFILL: So now, breaking this down state by state, let's talk about what actually happened because one of the interesting things of course is that Republicans argue that this was supposed to be a national election -- no, a local election. And the Democrats said it was a national election. The Democrats seemed to win. But midterm elections are by their own definition these little chunks, states, and little tiny counties, and redistricted areas. Did it become a national election or a local election in most cases?

MR. BARNES: Well, I think it probably was a national election. I think this really was a referendum election and the Republicans of course made great efforts to say we want this to be on local issues. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the Republican House Campaign Committee said this is going to be about local issues. Just one problem, though. If you look at the exit polls and people who said they were voting on local issues, a slight majority of them voted for a Democrat, so even that really wasn't working.