Democratic Party: Low as a Nixon-Felled GOP, Heading for the New 1994?

Inveterate politics watcher Michael Barone thinks so:

I have not seen a party's fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal and a president who carried 49 states was threatened with impeachment and removal from office.

The victory of a Democrat in the special election to fill Vice President Gerald Ford's House seat in February 1974 was a clear indication that the bottom had fallen out for the Republican Party. Brown's victory last week looks as if something similar has happened to the Democratic Party.

Many people ask me whether the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment. Back in 1994 I wrote the first article in a nonpartisan publication suggesting that the Republicans had a serious chance to win the 40 seats necessary for a majority in the House. That article appeared in U.S. News & World Report in July 1994.

This year political handicapper Charlie Cook is writing in January, six months earlier in the cycle, that Republicans once again would capture the 40 seats they need for a majority if the House elections were held today. I concur. The generic vote question—which party's candidates would you vote for in House elections—is at least as favorable to Republicans as it was in the last month before the election in 1994.