Politics 101: the meaning of the midterms.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

Off-year elections are murky affairs. Most Americans don't pay attention to them. Even fewer vote in them. And their political significance must be discerned, oracle-like, from the results of hundreds of House and Senate races, most of which turn as much on local as national issues.

Still, once the returns are in, a roughly accurate consensus usually forms about the meaning of a particular midterm. In 1994, the GOP took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in over 40 years. That rout was widely seen as a rejection of sclerotic and uninspired Democratic congressional rule, a rebuke of the shaky first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency, and a sign that a growing portion of the electorate was open to conservative ideas. In 1998, the Senate held steady and the Democrats picked up five House seats. That result--the first time since 1822 that the party not in control of the White House had failed to gain seats in the mid-term election of a president's second term--was understood as a protest against impeachment inquiries then underway against a by-then-popular Clinton. In 2002, the Democrats lost their paper-thin Senate majority along with seven House seats. In that case, too, the message was clear: The public wasn't impressed with tremulous Democrats who, 14 months after 9/11, only wanted to talk about prescription drugs.

While midterms offer important lessons, politicians don't always learn them. After 1994, Bill Clinton got it fight: He retooled his staff, reembraced New Democratic ideas like welfare reform, and won big in 1996. After the 1998 midterms, by contrast, GOP House leaders ignored the message voters were sending and impeached the president anyway, a move now widely seen, even by many conservatives, as a mistake. And after 2002, Democrats waited another year--for Iraq to descend into chaos and for presidential candidate Howard Dean to show them how to fight before challenging the GOP on national-security grounds.

This year's midterms are at least as crucial as the last three, and already it is possible to predict how their results will be read, and misread. In a nutshell, if Democrats win, both parties will likely learn the right lessons. But if Republicans win, both parties are liable to take away the wrong lessons.

"Had Enough?"

Consider the former possibility: that Democrats take the House, and possibly the Senate. Many conservatives are already so openly disgusted with the behavior of House Republicans--the...