The message of this wipeout is that Americans believe they’ve lost the war

Washington

On Monday afternoon, President Bush addressed a crowd of several thousand Republican supporters in Pensacola, Florida. The appearance was meant to shore up the sputtering campaign of Charlie Crist, the Republican candidate to succeed Mr Bush’s brother Jeb as governor of Florida. Crist was one of the rare Republican candidates willing to appear with the President in public. Until this week, that is. Crist (who won his race in the end) stood Bush up. He suddenly remembered that his campaign was ‘doing very well in Pensacola’ and that there were a lot of votes to be canvassed for in Palm Beach, several hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico. President Bush, appearing solo, gave his standard speech. ‘As you go to the polls,’ he told the assembled crowd, ‘remember we’re at war.’

‘Oh, but we do,’ the country replied, in its way, a day later. Democrats took 34 seats in the House of Representatives, their best showing since 1974. Voters unloaded the well-liked congresswoman Anne Northup of Kentucky. They dumped the not-so-well-liked two-term senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, belatedly ratifying ex-Senator Bob Kerrey’s immortal judgment. (‘Santorum…,’ said Kerrey in 1994. ‘That’s Latin for “a–hole”.’) Republicans lost seats throughout their old northeastern strongholds — at least one in Connecticut and two in New Hampshire — to the point that New England Republicans are coming to resemble Scots Tories: an ex-party.

It was a resounding repudiation, considering that the science of gerrymandering has been brought to such a pitch of computer-aided perfection that only a handful of seats change hands in the average election. Districts are designed to be impregnable: in the last election just ten members of the outgoing Congress won by fewer than five percentage points. What is more, although recounts are pending as we go to press, Democrats were within a few thousand votes of taking over the Senate, too, if you count the two independent senators from Vermont.