Democratic Comeback Possible

If you are bored - as many people who normally savor politics appear to be - at the prospect of Kan. Sen. Bob Dole challenging Bill Clinton in the presidential race, then shift your gaze to the contest for control of the House of Representatives. You will find a battle that ought to delight any political buff.

Implausible as it seemed even a few months ago, the Democrats actually appear to have a chance of regaining control of the House from the Republicans and cutting short the “revolution” that began with the election of 1994.

True, Rep. Bill Paxon of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and architect of the victory that made Newt Gingrich speaker of the House, is sticking with his early prediction that Republicans will add at least 20 seats to their current 236, thus doubling the size of their majority. He brags about his committee raising four times as much money in this cycle as in the last and points out that 21 House Democrats are quitting politics, many of them from shaky districts, compared with only a dozen Republicans, most of them in safe seats.

But Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has been talking optimistically for months about the Democrats’ chances of picking up the 19 to 21 seats they would need to elect Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri as the next speaker. (They have 197 sitting members, 21 short of a majority, with one Democratic vacancy in Oregon and a Socialist independent from Vermont who regularly votes with them.)

In the last few weeks, some smart people are beginning to think that Frost may not be nuts. One of them is Charles E. Cook Jr., whose Cook Political Report is a widely respected tout sheet relied on by reporters, lobbyists and political consultants who know that Cook makes it his business to check out more of the challengers in every election cycle than anyone else in the business.

In the latest edition of his report, Cook says that “we’d put the chances of Democrats taking control of the House at about 1 in 3, maybe slightly better.” That is a lot shorter odds than anyone would have given the Democrats until recently.

On Cook’s preliminary scorecard, Democrats are defending four more hard-to-hold seats than the Republicans - 32 Democrats, 28 Republicans. But he adheres to the same adage I was taught years ago by the late James H. Rowe Jr., a wise old Washington lawyer and Democratic operative.

When we would meet at this time of an election year and everything seemed murky, Rowe would instruct me, “Remember, David, there is always a trend. Sometimes you see it early and sometimes late, but there’s always something moving out there.”

Cook points out that in 12 of the last 25 House elections, the trend has been strong enough that one party or the other has gained at least 20 seats. In eight of those elections, the swing has been at least 30 seats, and in six of them, at least 40 seats.

The first signs of a possible Democratic trend are turning up now in the national polls, which in the past month consistently have found that the “generic ballot test” has swung against the GOP. When pollsters ask which party the voters intend to support for Congress, the Democrats now have a slight advantage, usually around five points.

That may not sound like much, but it is a seismic shift from 1994 when the Republicans outpolled the Democrats by seven points in the national congressional vote and gained 52 seats.

Will the Democratic trend hold? The truth is that no one knows.

Congressional Republicans have been off-stride and on the defensive ever since they were blamed by most voters for causing the two shutdowns of the federal government in the budget battles with the president last winter.

But with six months still to go before Election Day and a host of hot issues on the agenda, an intriguing psychological profile of voters released last week by the Center for National Policy shows both parties’ messages to be off-target in dealing with widespread public anxiety about Washington. So there is time aplenty for the picture to shift.

Nonetheless, it looks as if two big decisions - not just one - will be made in November. It’s not just a question of which party will control the White House, but it’s also a choice between Gephardt and Gingrich for speaker.

And to paraphrase George Wallace, there’s a lot more than “a dime’s worth of difference” between those fellows.

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