My cell phone sounded an excited and impatient “beep! beep!” when the text message arrived at 3:00 am. I had been asleep, but only for an hour or so. Pretty sure about what it was going to say, I let myself go back to sleep. The next morning I read it, tapped out in the wee hours by a former student and fellow political junkie (one with more stamina than I). “Dems won the Senate.”

On that recent election night, the Democratic Party surprised most pundits by winning control not only of the House of Representatives (as expected) but also of the Senate. I was among the “experts” proven wrong. A few days before the election, I predicted a Democratic pickup of about twenty-five seats in the House and five in the Senate, which would have left Republicans in control of the upper house. This was not so far off the final result of thirty seats in the House and six in the Senate, but that one extra Senate seat is the one that really matters. Of course, pundits always get the last word. We get to tell you what it means.

How important is this victory for the Democratic Party? One recent book has predicted a dawn of The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner, 2002). The authors predicted that sometime between 2004 and 2008, demographic and cultural trends would create a dominant Democratic electoral majority. Suddenly, their prediction—laughed at after the 2004 elections only a couple of years ago—seems remarkably prescient. Could the Democratic sweep of 2006 represent the turning point, the first win by a new Democratic electoral majority that combines economic populism, social tolerance, and a multi-cultural ethic? Did the “beep! beep!” of my cell phone in the middle of the night trumpet the first stage in an historic electoral realignment?

Probably not. Before the 2006 election, Republicans controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress, but this itself was something of an anomaly. Between 1900 and 1966, Americans elected the same party to control all three of these institutions in twenty-six of thirty-four elections (66% of the time), but since 1968 we have done so in only six of twenty elections (30% of the time). Today’s voters split their tickets and seem to prefer divided government.

Permit the social scientist in me to offer a little more data. In Presidential and House elections between 1998 and 2004, Republicans garnered between 48% and 51% of the national popular vote. In the same period, the Democrats took between 46% and about 48% in each election. The average Republican margin of victory in this period was only about 2%. In the 2000 election, exit polls on Election Day put party affiliation at 39%–35% in favor of the Democrats, and the 2004 exit poll put it at 37%–37% (Almanac of American Politics, 2006). Although Republicans have done well in recent elections, they have not created the sort of dominant electoral coalition that allowed the New Deal Democrats to run the country for the better part of four decades.

Their control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress is more likely the result of their highly effective campaign organizations and of an issue context that focused attention on national security, traditionally their strongest area. The Democratic Party’s recapture of Congress is thus probably best understood as a return to the divided governments of the 1980s and early 1990s that better reflected an almost evenly divided electorate than did the one-party control of recent years.

But is it still possible that this election marks an erosion of even that small 2% Republican advantage? After all, the Democrats won this year’s popular vote for the House of Representatives by roughly 52%–46%, almost identical to the Republican margin of victory in 1994 when their decade of electoral dominance began. This is of course a possibility, but there is no clear evidence yet to confirm it.

In this years exit polls, voters were asked how important certain issues were in their vote for a US House candidate. Thirty-six percent said that the war in Iraq was “extremely important.” This group voted for Democratic candidates 60%–38%. The Republican Party, under the leadership of President Bush, took this nation to war. The nation has been at war for a long time now, and we have not seen the promised results. The increasingly dire situation in Iraq obviously hurt Republican candidates. Even many voters who supported the initial decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power have since lost faith.

However, in those same exit polls a slightly larger percentage, 41%, responded that “corruptions and scandal in government” were extremely important in their vote, and this group voted for Democrats in similar numbers. Voters who turned against Republicans did so not only because of Iraq but because of their perception that Republicans had not been managing our nation’s affairs responsibly and ethically. The drumbeat of news about lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the Valarie Plame affair, and Congressman Foley clearly took a toll.

This election was about competence. In recent years, the Republican Party had won the right to govern the country, nearly unopposed. Since the Republicans were in complete control, the voters were able to hold them completely accountable for the results, and clearly the voters did not like what they saw.

Had the President himself been on the ballot this year, he would have fared no better, and the Democrats would have swept the table. Of course, the President was not, and this President never will be again. Two years from now, voters will make new decisions about who should be President and who should control thirty-three Senate seats and 435 House seats. In all likelihood, they again will vote for a divided government. This is not a flaw in the American political system; this is its design.

The American Founders did not count on America’s statesmen (or America’s voters) acting like angels. The “enlightened statesmen” of Madison’s Federalist 10 might sometimes take the helm, but not often. The Founders understood that a ruling party given control of an entire nation’s government even by the narrowest of majorities cannot be expected to act like the humble and cautious agents of a divided people; they more likely will act like the arrogant and ambitious rulers described in Federalist 51. They will act much like our Republican President and Congress have been acting. The solution is not to elect more virtuous rulers. The solution, at least the solution proposed by the Founders, is to “supply…, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives.”