Off-year elections as bellwethers

8 November 2005, 2256 EST

John Whitesides, of Reuters, writes:

Voters across the United States went to the polls on Tuesday in elections that could gauge the depth of President George W. Bush’s political woes and affect next year’s critical congressional elections….With control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress and 36 governorships at stake in 2006, both parties will scour Tuesday’s off-year election results for clues to next year’s political climate and the long-term effect of Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, now the lowest of his presidency.

Mark Kennedy,of the Associated Press, tells us that, without a doubt, “Today’s Voting Could Be Test for GOP”:

Voters in New Jersey and Virginia picked governors Tuesday after high-spending, mean-spirited campaigns that were closely watched by political analysts for signs of the public’s mood ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Elsewhere, New York and a few other major cities selected mayors.

I have a question to put this all in perspective. Why is it that no one wrote the following headline on the first Tuesday in November last year: “Election Could Gauge Political Climate for 2005”?

Anyway, I seem to remember Democrats winning the two “key” elections in 2001. That sure told us a lot about what was going to happen in 2002.

Filed as: elections, predicting elections

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.