Pow! what an election! (Republican victory in state legislature elections)

• Author: Hansen, Karen

SUDDENLY EMERGING FROM THE MINORITY WILDERNESS, REPUBLICANS KNOCKED OUT THE OPPOSITION AND NOW FIND THEMSELVES IN CHARGE ALL OVER THE COUNTRY.

The knockout punch thrown by Republicans on election day gave the GOP its biggest state legislative victories in 28 years.

When the final count was taken, Republicans, who held the majority in eight legislatures going into the election, had taken control of 19. Democrats, who before election day controlled 24 legislatures, were left with 19. Control is split in 11 others. And in 15 states, the GOP has total statehouse control--both the governorship and the legislature--compared to the Democrats' seven states.

The number of new seats told the story: Republicans, 472; Democrats, 11.

"The surprise in this election was the magnitude of the swing away from the Democrats," says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "We knew a wave was coming, we didn't know it was going to be of tidal proportions."

The GOP's election day rout did not stop with the U.S. Senate, Congress and governorships. It reached the nation's legislatures, too, making a travesty of the notion of term limits. Democrats had controlled the majority of the nation's state legislatures for the past 38 years. The Republican sweep cut across every age group, every region and every economic class in both state and national elections. Not a single Republican incumbent was defeated in the U.S. House, Senate or gubernatorial elections. And only a handful of Republican state legislators lost.

In exit polls, 69 percent of the people said they disapproved of President Clinton and 72 percent of them said they had voted Republican. Not since Harry Truman was president in 1946 have Democrats lost as many seats in the U.S. Congress. And not since the Eisenhower era in 1956 have the Democrats controlled so few state legislative chambers.

What makes this legislative election so different from most is that the stunning repudiation of congressional Democrats swept down to state races, which are usually insulated from national politics. The Republicans' "Contract with America," according to Michael Tolchin, publisher of The Hill, was a "masterstroke. It successfully nationalized the election." But whether or not it was the "contract," with which a reported 90 percent of the electorate is unfamiliar, by concentrating on taxes, crime, welfare and the economy, Republicans were able to refocus the election away from individuals and toward the GOP.

It is usually some major cataclysm--war, scandal or recession--that provokes changes of this magnitude. Democrats won 528 state legislative seats in the 1964 Johnson landslide and lost 762 two years later. They picked up 628 seats in 1974 because of Watergate. But since 1980 an average of only 110 seats have changed hands in off-year legislative elections.

A NATIONWIDE SWEEP

This year's Republican victory was "the largest mid-term election majority sweep of the century," says Republican National Committee Chair Haley Barbour. "It was from coast to coast and up and down the ballot."

The uniformity of the swing, according to Mann, "is really quite remarkable and suggests that Republicans have been given a real opportunity here to achieve some kind of dominant position in the party system at all levels of government.

"Whether they seize that opportunity and consolidate their gains remains to be seen."

For now, at least in statehouses, the political world has turned upside down:

* Republicans are a force in the South. For the first time since Reconstruction, the GOP will...