Why Republicans Lost

One of the fundamental principles of these columns is that the voters have a wisdom, and, in handing the House and likely the Senate to Democrats, the voters were making a statement that it is worth trying to understand. The polls, unreliable as they are, indicate voter dissatisfaction with the course of the war in Iraq, and the results must be sobering to those who have argued that Iraq has been a success. Voters were dissatisfied with the execution of the war, a message President Bush apparently heard when he fired Secretary Rumsfeld. "Iraq is not working well enough fast enough," the president said yesterday.

Yet it would be a mistake to interpret the results as a rejection of the Bush strategy of taking the war to enemy ground. Witness the victory of Senator Lieberman in Connecticut over an anti-war opponent, Ned Lamont. Witness the victory of Christopher Carney, the Richard Perle-backed hardline Democrat who was elected to a House seat in Pennsylvania. If the war is going more poorly than Americans hope, it isn't because Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld have been following every policy suggestion issued by the neoconservatives, many of whom have argued for a harder line on Iran and Syria and who favored a provisional government in Iraq rather than an American occupation.

One of the shrewdest politicians behind the Democratic victory in the House, Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, attributed a substantial portion of his party's gains to voter reaction to Republican entanglement in various scandals. Among the Republican seats lost were those of Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, who resigned after being caught making inappropriate e-mail advances to teenaged pages; Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, whose family members and a friend were the subject of a recent FBI raid; Rep. Robert Ney of Ohio, who pleaded guilty in the Jack Abramoff scandal; and Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, who resigned under indictment. "People want their congressmen to be honest and ethical," Mr. Bush said.

Ballot initiatives suggest that voters agree with Republicans on some issues. Bans on gay marriage passed in eight states and lost in but one. Voters in Michigan resoundingly approved a ban on racial preferences. Initiatives to protect property owners from eminent domain won in nine of the 11 states in which they appeared on the ballot. And the elections weren't all bad news for the Republicans; California's Governor Schwarzenegger won re-election by a wide margin in a state in which Democrats have a plurality of registered voters.

Our own view is that the Republican losses are attributable, in addition to ethics and corruption and the war in Iraq, to the decision of Republicans in the Congress to balk at some of the domestic initiatives on which Mr. Bush campaigned and won the presidency, including an overhaul of immigration laws, a change of Social Security to include private investment accounts, and tax simplification. In respect of the war, we find it hard to divorce the problems in the Iraq theater from the failure to act against the two other Axis nations, Iran and Communist North Korea, as well as Syria. It only stands to reason that the voters would assign to the Republicans who controlled the Congress for the past six years a portion of the blame for the inaction.

For the 107th, 108th, and 109th Congresses, the past six years have not been without achievements; even the Republicans turned out of office yesterday can be proud of five years without the terrorists having succeeded in attacking the American mainland and of tax cuts that have spurred a broad, even historic economic expansion. But the voters, in their wisdom, reckoned that performance could be improved by dividing control of the government between the parties and strengthening the checks and balances for which the Constitution provides. The next two years will be a test of that proposition; if that period too produces a record that falls short, then it would not surprise us to see the voters take a far more serious look than ever before at a three-party or non-party approach to the system of checks and balances.