Where the Seats Are

POISED TO ASSUME THEIR respective posts atop new congressional Democratic majorities, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) can be forgiven a certain giddiness as the 2006 midterm elections approach. Pelosi recently told Time that establishment Democrats in Washington "can't even believe the fact that I'm going to become Speaker, but they're getting used to it." A bit more cautious but no less hopeful, Reid has noted that "history's on [the] side" of the minority party in a president's second midterm cycle. Regionalized partisanship is beginning to emerge anew. Republicans won every southern state in the past two presidential elections and now have 18 of the region's 22 senators and two-thirds of its House seats. In 2004, despite [Bush]'s two-and-a-half-point defeat of John Kerry, outside the South the Democrats actually gained congressional seats in both chambers. That's right: If the five House seats produced by the re-redistricting of Texas orchestrated by former majority leader Tom DeLay and the five Senate pickups made possible by those southern Democratic retirements are held aside, the Democrats won the 2004 congressional elections. The Northeast and Midwest are also home to four of the five most vulnerable Republican senators running for re-election this cycle: Missouri's Jim Talent, Ohio's Mike DeWine, Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum and Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee. The fifth is Montana's Conrad Burns.