Voters threaten to turn Bush into a lame duck

Tom Baldwin and Tim Reid

America votes today in congressional elections that could turn George Bush into a “lame duck” President for his final two years of office, as well as having profound consequences for the future course of US foreign policy in Iraq and beyond.

Democrats remain hopeful that they can seize control of the House of Representatives by making a net gain of 15 seats out of 435 being contested. Polls suggest that they have established clear leads in 13 districts, while a further 15 are judged as too close to call.

Some pundits believe that the Democrats could gain as many as 40 to 50 seats as they ride a wave of voter anger against Mr Bush and the Iraq war.

But with the contest finely balanced, more than 10,000 lawyers from both parties were on standby to pounce on any allegations of irregularities, intimidation and defective voting machines. Democrats, still fulminating over the Florida recount in 2000, declared that they were on a legal hair trigger and dispatched 7,000 lawyers to 19 key states.

The first indication of the scale of electoral upheaval may come in results from what is being termed the “killing fields” of the economically depressed Ohio River Valley, which snakes westwards from Pennsylvania through up to half a dozen seats in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.

The Democrats also have a fair chance of retaking the Senate, where they must make six net gains from the 15 seats being defended by the Republicans. An early indication of whether this will be possible will come in exit polls from Virginia, where the Republican Senator George Allen has faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from the Democrat Jim Webb. But a flurry of final-day opinion polls suggested that the Republicans were regaining some lost ground. Nationally, the Democrats still lead by 6 per cent, down from 10 per cent a week ago.

Although some polls for bitterly contested Senate seats such as Virginia and Montana suggested that the Republican incumbents are drawing even or pulling ahead, it is an indication of how volatile these races have become that other surveys published in the past 24 hours gave the Democrats increased leads.

The pollsters themselves, who have sore memories of the 2000 debacle when they declared Al Gore the new president, and 2004, when exit polls predicted a John Kerry victory, said that they were going to be extra-cautious on election night.

Before the race results are called tonight, said Joe Lenski, a leading election-night pollster, “the real desire is to make sure the data is absolutely correct first”. He said he was happy to call races later than in past contests, to minimise the risk of blunders.

The final 24 hours of campaigning was marked by bitter clashes once again over Iraq. The Democrats angrily dismissed Republican claims that they were “happy to lose” in Iraq, but insisted that today’s vote nonetheless gave America “the chance to change the direction” of the both the country and the war.

Nancy Pelosi, who will become first female House speaker if the Democrats win tonight, said that she was cautiously optimistic about her party’s prospects. “We are thankful for where we are today, to be poised for success,” she said.

Much of the most frantic activity was out of sight, with thousands of volunteer Republicans and Democrats working telephone banks and canvassing neighbourhoods using sophisticated techniques for identifying likely supporters.

Lawyers for both sides say that Maryland, Texas and Virginia are already ripe for litigation because of problems with voting machines during primary elections earlier this year.

Republicans refused to say how many lawyers they had mobilised, but said that they had received many requests for attorneys in two swing states — Missouri and Pennsylvania — and had sent out 150 top legal experts to help local lawyers in Florida, Michigan, Missouri and Tennessee.