It’s a nice day to be a Democrat

DUNDALK, MD. —  A day after the landmark midterm election of 2006, America remained the same ungainly patchwork of red and blue, just as polarized as it had been for two bitterly fought presidential elections. But the blue patches pulsed Wednesday with a heady feeling of triumph -- along with the angry, impatient expectation among revitalized Democrats that their newfound electoral clout would be followed by action in Washington.

Election day came and went in this working-class Baltimore suburb with little trace of the pent-up disenchantment so visible elsewhere in the nation. But even at quiet polling places where retirees drifted in like sleepwalkers and election workers traded jokes in the November chill, the anger was there, building over the Iraq war and aimed like a Predator drone at Congress and the Bush administration.

Jean Sisk, 41, a Baltimore bartender, had voted for Democratic candidates Tuesday, casting her ballot at a nearly empty polling place at a Dundalk elementary school.

On Wednesday, Sisk was back at work at the Knotty Pine Inn, taking a measure of quiet satisfaction as she watched President Bush at a televised news conference grappling with the new political realities. While her customers stared blearily at Bush’s image flickering on the screen overhead, Sisk ticked off her reasons for sending Washington a hard-edged message.

“Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” she said. “Like he says, we can’t leave Iraq tomorrow. But they can’t keep sending our guys over there at the rate that they’re getting killed.”

From Dundalk to Seattle, Democrats reveled in their sudden resurgence while dispirited Republicans wondered what had gone wrong with their well-oiled machine. Pet theories abounded: the corruption, the attack ads, the cycle of political realignment. But it always came back to Iraq.

“Let’s face it: The war was the top issue,” said GOP eminence Melvin R. Laird, who has an intimate sense of what it is to be a Republican in the hot seat during an unpopular war. Three decades ago, he was President Nixon’s secretary of Defense, overseeing the drawdown of American forces from Vietnam. As Tuesday’s election approached, he consulted with former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and members of the Iraq Study Group advising the Bush administration.

“It’s easy to get into a war, but it’s hard to get out,” Laird said Wednesday. “That’s what the voters are telling the president and Congress, and now they have to get it right.”

Laird preaches patience, but in blue-hued strongholds, some emboldened critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy insisted that Tuesday’s vote was a mandate for a speedier withdrawal.

“I think the war is going terribly,” said Allison Manning, 64, of Seattle, pausing to exult in the Democrats’ good fortune as she hurried into Pike Place Market to meet a friend for breakfast. “I don’t know why we are in Iraq, but I am sure it’s not for any of the reasons we have been told. I think that’s what this election did end up being about.”

Even in the central Texas town of Killeen, a military community that abuts Ft. Hood, voters were divided over Iraq and its polarizing sway over the electorate. For Frederick Harris and Larry Revis, the war was paramount to their votes on Tuesday -- and caused a fissure in an otherwise close friendship.

The men became friends about a year ago when they kept running into each other at a local Starbucks. They shoot the breeze almost daily over a cup of coffee but rarely talk politics. Wednesday was a tense exception.

“Let’s just say I was very unhappy with the results” of the election, Revis said.

Though he usually watches three or four hours of Fox News daily, “I turned off the television last night. I was feeling sick. The main issue for me, for everyone this year, was the war. I don’t think it was about anything else,” said Revis, a 45-year-old real estate agent.

Harris, 47, who owns a lawn service company, sat quietly as Revis talked about the election. But when he finally spoke up, he didn’t mince words.

“We needed a change, and I’m glad we got one,” said Harris, who objects to the spending of billions of dollars in Iraq instead of the U.S. A 22-year Army veteran, he said: “It’s easy to say the war should continue, but when you don that helmet and have 185 rounds on you, your tune will change. Americans are tired of what the Republicans have done. I wanted someone else to have a chance because what’s going on now isn’t working.”

Thomas F. Schaller, a University of Maryland political science professor, read the election results as strong evidence that the Democratic Party’s best chance for growth now lies in Midwestern and interior Western states. Schaller, who advances the thesis in a new book, “Whistling Past Dixie,” pointed to House pickups in Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas and Colorado as sure signs of future Democratic prospects.

“The question is, can the Democrats build on it?” Schaller said. “There were a lot of close votes.”

Indeed, Republicans and Democrats alike won many contests by a single percentage point or two, and several House races remained too close to call Wednesday.

“I don’t see how the polarization abates, and in fact, it could get worse,” Schaller said, contending that more moderate Democratic candidates such as new Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey Jr. are more the exception than the rule. “I’d argue that the Democrats are more liberal and the GOP is more conservative” with the loss of moderate office-holders.

For loyal Republicans, a loss was a loss, however slim the margin. In St. Louis, David Stokes, 34, an assistant to GOP County Councilman Kurt Odenwald, was nearly forlorn Wednesday.

In the weeks leading up to the election, Stokes said, he grew worried about a general sense of discontent that even fellow Republicans were voicing. “There was anger over the economy and anger over the war,” Stokes said. “Mostly, people were angry with the White House.”

When he returned home after the polls closed at 7 p.m. to watch the results on TV, his heart sank. Not only did the GOP lose the House and the hotly contested Jim Talent-Claire McCaskill Senate race, but Stokes’ boss was unseated after 17 years.

As of January, Stokes is out of a job. “It’s so upsetting,” he said. “I knew that people were unhappy with Republicans on the federal level. I didn’t realize that that anger would drift all the way down to the local level.”

*

steve.braun@latimes.com

Times staff writer P.J. Huffstutter in St. Louis and Times researchers John Beckham in Chicago, Lianne Hart in Killeen, Texas, Jenny Jarvie in Memphis, Tenn., and Lynn Marshall in Seattle contributed to this report.