The 2002 midterm elections would be bad for the Republicans because:
1) The dubious nature of George W. Bush's election could continue to be used to fire up the Democratic base.
2) The Enron scandal exposed a lack of corporate regulations, playing into Democrats' domestic policy agenda.
3) The loss of two million jobs within two years of the Bush presidency doesn't look good.
4) Neither does GDP growth that looks like this:
View attachment 292164
5) By 2002, a $313 billion surplus was turned into a $21 billion deficit, which was not primarily the result of the War in Afghanistan or an increase in defense spending - something that would be all the clearer here.
6) The Democrats have the ability to frame the Beltway sniper attacks as the result of insufficient gun regulations.
7) The OTL 2002 midterms were only the third time since the Civil War that the incumbent President had his party gain seats in Congress.
I think you'd get results that look like 1990 or 2006, where in the House elections Democrats got 52.1-3% of the overall vote and Republicans received 44.3%, or maybe just a swapped version of 2002, Democrats getting 50% to Republicans' 45%.
Democrats would take the following districts (including OTL 2002 gains in parenthesis):
- Alabama's 3rd
- Arizona's 1st
- (California's 39th)
- Colorado's 7th
- (Georgia's 3rd)
- Georgia's 11th
- Indiana's 8th
- Iowa's 2nd
- Kentucky's 3rd
- (Louisiana's 5th)
- (Maryland's 2nd)
- (Maryland's 8th)
- (New York's 1st)
- Pennsylvania's 6th
- (Tennessee's 4th)
The 2000 Republican redistricting gains would be sufficient to reduce the Democrats' majority to one or two seats, however. In the Senate, Democrats would likely gain in Arkansas and New Hampshire while holding all of their seats (including Minnesota), giving them a majority of ~52-53 in the Senate. These majorities are sufficient to kill the 2003 tax cut, although the Partial Birth Abortion ban probably still passes. I think the primary contenders for the 2004 Democratic primary would be Dick Gephardt, Paul Wellstone, and John Edwards. I'm not sure who would win in such a contest, but I believe
the fundamentals would favor Bush and the Republican Congress.