The national conversation among political junkies, insiders and reporters over whether the Republican party can take the US House and/or Senate this November is fraught with dysfunction, so it’s really hard to reach beyond the many smokescreens and attempted manipulations of public opinion to get a good read on it.
The comparisons to 1994, when then-House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich and his “Contract for America” brought GOP triumph in 52 Democratic congressional districts, ending 72 years of Democratic control of the House, are manifold. It was the midterm election after a Democrat (Bill Clinton) won the White House, and the ghost of ’94 still has Democrats spooked, Republicans pumped and political reporters and pundits reaching for the easy comparison.
I covered those elections in ’94 for The Boston Phoenix, and let me please just point out some key differences between then and now:
As of last year, 62 percent of Americans had Internet access in the home (and 82 percent of those had broadband). That wasn’t the case in 1994. As late as 1997, only 17 percent of Americans had Internet access in the home. And, today, about 90 percent of US homes have cable or satellite TV. That was a healthy 62 percent in 1994, but without the screaming cable news channels like Fox on the right or General Electric’s MSNBC counter-programming to reach a liberal demographic audience. CNN was basically the only national cable news channel in town in 1994.
Back then, network TV news and daily newspapers were all powerful in determining the political discourse in the United States: ABC, CBS and NBC, and their local affiliates, were royalty. Their news shows were the most important slot for candidates to place their campaign ads, because that's where most of the voters could be found each night. Network TV news and daily newspapers still enjoyed the illusion of authority. People actually believed that what the local TV newscaster or the editorial page writer said was true!
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/4086/primer-2010-us-house-and-senate-elections
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