The Midterms Feel Like 2006 All Over Again

The war in the Middle East is increasingly unpopular. So is the president as his numbers dip perilously — a common development in the sixth year of a presidency. Congressional Republicans are embroiled in unsavory scandals. Americans are shelling out big bucks for gas while economic anxiety runs high.

The grim backdrop for November’s midterm elections has created a steep challenge for Republicans and opportunities for Democrats that look much the same as those they encountered in 2006. Back then, congressional Republicans faced the voters at the midpoint of President George W. Bush’s second term, with the public roiled by the war in Iraq, high fuel prices and a series of ugly accusations against members of the G.O.P. majority on Capitol Hill.

“It is striking,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader and chief architect of his party’s Senate campaign strategy this year and two decades ago. “The ***ogy is amazing.”

The parallels are not perfect, since politics and campaigns have both changed radically over 20 years. But the comparisons are instructive, as officials in both parties stare down the final months of an election that will determine who controls Congress for the remainder of President Trump’s term.

“This is 2006 2.0,” said Rahm Emanuel, who in 2006 was an ambitious Democratic House member from Illinois and Mr. Schumer’s counterpart across the Capitol as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The similarities are eerie.”

Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Schumer both have good reason to look back fondly on 2006, when Democrats triumphed in a blue wave.

Exceeding expectations that year, Democrats picked up six seats in the Senate, taking control of the chamber. In the House, where the Republican majority seemed to have exhausted itself after a dozen years, Democrats gained 31 seats and installed Nancy Pelosi, who is now retiring, as the first woman speaker. Mr. Bush, another victim of the six-year presidential itch, famously branded the outcome “a thumping.”

This year, the Senate map is stacked against Democrats — they would need to win at least four Republican-held seats to take control, all but one of them in states that Mr. Trump won in 2024. And not all of the most competitive races have gone as party leaders had hoped. But Democrats have benefited from some political twists in places where they had not anticipated being competitive, such as in Texas, where Mr. Trump’s primary endorsement of the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, over Senator John Cornyn, put that seat in play.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Thursday moved its ratings of the Texas and Iowa Senate races from leaning Republican to a toss up, underscoring the expanding battleground that Democrats would need in order to replicate 2006. Democrats say that they believe they are also increasingly competitive in other states carried by Mr. Trump two years ago, including Kansas.

While clear similarities exist this year, significant differences are present as well — not the least of which is that Americans consume and process political content far differently than they did 20 years ago, with an emphasis on digital media rather than traditional television advertising.

Other structural changes have taken place that could influence the results. The two parties this year engaged in a redistricting war that could help stem some of the House losses Republicans might have suffered in a midterm year that traditionally runs against those in power. Polarization runs deeper, making it harder to shake voters from their party identification. Mr. Trump’s hold on his base seems stronger than Mr. Bush’s was in 2006, though it is potentially weakening amid a backlash to the war with Iran.

In the Senate and the House, the Democratic establishment did not get its preferred candidates through the primaries in some key races, including in Maine and Michigan. And the rise of far-left socialist candidates has Republicans seeing an opening to try to brand Democratic contenders across the country as part of a movement out of step with typical Americans.

For those reasons and more, Republicans say the comparison between the two elections comes up short.

“Democrats are running with a radically different party on a dramatically different map, and the fundamentals are stacked against them,” Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement. “Republicans have stronger candidates, a historic fund-raising advantage and a more favorable battlefield, while Democrats are letting socialists hijack must-win races from Michigan to Colorado, Arizona, California and Maine.”

In 2006, the war with Iraq was the central issue in the campaign as Americans soured on Mr. Bush’s handling of the conflict, particularly after his main justification for the invasion — the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of m*** destruction — turned out to be false. Mr. Trump’s conflict with Iran has not gone on nearly as long, nor has it produced the same level of casualties. But Mr. Bush had significantly more support at the start. Public opposition helped drive approval numbers for the two presidents below 40 percent, a dangerous midterm level, as both wars also drove up fuel costs.

Then as now, Democrats tried to capitalize on kitchen-table economic concerns with the potential to drive voters. In 2006, it was Mr. Bush’s proposal to privatize Social Security, which never came to p***. Now, it is the Republican-written law slashing Medicaid and other safety net programs to pay for large tax cuts, as well as the G.O.P.’s decision to allow health care subsidies to expire, sending premiums soaring.

“We found an issue early,” Mr. Schumer said, recalling 2006. “Rahm and I did Social Security. Now we found the costs issue, particularly led by health care.”

Another undercurrent of the 2006 campaign has an equivalent today: the image of disturbing Republican misconduct. Twenty years ago, Democrats campaigned against a “culture of corruption,” pointing to a series of financial and *** scandals that led to resignations and jail time for a series of senior Republicans.

Then, in September 2006, it was disclosed that Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, had sent ***ually suggestive messages to male House pages, and that Republican leaders had failed to take action even when they had been alerted to his actions, putting a cloud over the party two months before the election.

This year, Republicans have again had to contend with high-profile ***ual misconduct accusations against multiple House members, though Democrats have had their own to deal with as well, a difference from 20 years ago.

Top Democrats have sought to emphasize Republican conduct on Capitol Hill and in an administration in which the president, his family and his allies have faced scrutiny for profiteering. In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” earlier this month, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said a central element of the Democratic campaign agenda was “pushing back against the corruption that has been unleashed on the American people, and holding the crooks accountable beginning on day one in January of next year.”

It is not clear whether it will all add up to a repeat of 2006. But Nathan Gonzales, the editor of the nonpartisan Inside Elections, sees the potential for the factors working against Republicans building into a resounding voter backlash against the party in power, as they did two decades ago.

“I remember 2006 when everything snowballed against Republicans,” Mr. Gonzales said. “Ordinarily unrelated events got lumped together under one umbrella. Everything was Bush’s fault. The war with Iraq and Mark Foley really had nothing to do with each other, but it cultivated an appetite for change. I could see that happening again.”