The Fightin' Dems.

• Author: Conway, Brendan
• Position: Reporter-at-large

"WE'RE GOING to take that Hill", vowed Richard Klass, executive director of the Veterans' Alliance for Security and Democracy (VETPAC) on a late September morning at Washington's Phoenix Park Hotel. Klass was speaking before as many as one hundred reporters and photographers as he introduced Congressman Jack Murtha (D-PA), the outspoken critic of the Iraq War and ex-Marine, who in turn introduced a dozen of the lesser-known of this year's 57 "Fighting Dem" military-vet candidates. If "we" is understood to mean Democrats generally, Klass was prescient: Scores of aggressive Democratic campaigns around the country this year coupled with public unrest over Iraq and displeasure with Republican-dominated Washington to flip both houses of Congress in what even President Bush called a "thumpin'" of the Republican Party. The key issue, of course, was Iraq.

If "we" is taken to mean military-vet candidates, however, the story is more complicated. Two of the twelve Democratic military vets present that morning with Klass and Murtha would end up winning--a percentage within shooting distance of the rather small total number of "Fighting Dem" victories in this year's midterms (six of a total 57), which itself is not so different a proportion than the number of veterans in the general public (around 10 percent). The rest of the party would storm the halls of Congress. Which prompts a question: Did the much-discussed "Fighting Dems" really matter much?

In one immediately important respect they did: It was a "Fighting Dem" who delivered the Senate to Democratic control this year and outflanked many seasoned election prognosticators. That candidate, James Webb of Virginia, scored his party the upset it needed over incumbent George Allen with a 7,000-vote victory margin out of 2.3 million cast statewide to take control of Congress' upper chamber. This in turn has positioned Democrats to influence the war that these candidates so criticized--which would have been much more difficult to do had Democrats failed to seize both chambers. In that respect a single "Fighting Dem" vindicated the many candidates who echoed Klass in his vow to take Capitol Hill for the Democrats.

The rest of the "Fighting Dems" narrative is not so clear. First, it is not even clear whether "Fighting Dems" were ever a statistically significant political phenomenon this year except in the eyes of the beholder, people looking for a wartime election "trend." To say that the "Fighting Dems" may not have been a statistically significant trend is not to say that the phenomenon was not real. Surely it was in the minds of party enthusiasts and, once the message filtered out, in the minds of voters anxious about Iraq. Right now it is...