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The Democrats managed to reverse the majority in the House and reclaim the Senate by one seat in the November midterm elections. The defining issue was the looming defeat of the United States' intervention in Iraq, but the Democrats have to be cautious about anti-immigrant and sinophobic members in their own party.

House and Senate Democrats intend to be pragmatic in their approach as they gain control of Congress, learning from the mistakes of their previous term in power and also in avoiding the mistakes of the preceding Republican Congress. They aim to set a realistic, limited legislative agenda, keep the committee chairmen accountable, concentrate on issues fostering unity in the party, and seek bipartisanship in running Congress.

The people of Democracies who either bear the ideals or bury them, or do both, are politicians, and for them, parties are the indispensable means of political power. Parties in Democracies, which consist of people who aspire to political power and win public support by making promises, lead the public to a compromised land and finally end up in the hands of insiders with vested interests, supporting the officeholders to retain their offices.

This article evaluates the New Democrats. The author maintains their alliance with big business will ultimately hurt them and they need to appeal to minorities, working class whites, and affluent suburbanites.

This article addresses the tensions running through the Democratic Party. The author, maintaining the Democratic Party is debating whether to take a left or moderate stand on the issues, argues the party needs to present itself as both if it is to win the next election.

The issue of government spending provides an interesting context for testing issue-framing effects in American public opinion. Competing partisan elites clearly portray the spending issue in different ways: Republicans tend to focus on broad, general appeals, while Democrats aim at more specific forms of programmatic expenditures. Their differing arguments undoubtedly rise because the varied issue frames generate different kinds of responses. This study uses data from the 1992 CPS National Election Study to examine the preceding hypothesis. The results from the empirical analysis show that public opinion on government spending does, in fact, vary markedly with the presentation of the issue. This framing effect is powerful enough to induce individual-level opinion change. And, framing effects arise because varying presentations of the government-spending issue activate different sets of influences on citizens' issue attitudes. These findings have broad implications concerning both the magnitude of framing effects and the explicitly political nature of the issue-framing process.

The Democrats were able to lessen the Republican lead in the House, Senate and gubernatorial races in the Nov 1998 midterm elections. The Democratic Party, however, is still considered a weak party and its weakness is due to the declining support from whites, Hispanics, downscale and midscale whites. The Democrats can regain their majorities in government by attracting the support of affluent voters who want to be protected on issues such as health care, social security and education or by rebuilding their ties with white blue collar voters.

Political opposition is ubiquitous in the US political system. Its operation is primarily affected by the system of checks and balances written into the US Constitution, especially the mechanisms of impeachment and federalism. Interest groups, the media and political parties provide the primary engines for expressing opposition outside of these constitutional instruments. The US system of checks and balances discourages systematic, ideologically based opposition, reflects a strong bias toward the political status quo, and fosters policy making that is based upon broad, nonpartisan consensus.

Republican and Democratic partisans are in agreement on certain foreign policy features, suggesting that both want a foreign policy less confrontational and more cooperative than the one adopted by the administration of the U.S. President George W. Bush. Public opinion indicates that the end of the dominance of Bush and the Iraq war, the two major foreign policy polarizers, would result in a bipartisan shift toward a more multilateralist foreign policy.

Democrats, on gaining control of Congress, are planning a coordinated, careful but vigorous oversight of the administration of the US President George W. Bush on various issues such as the Iraq war, intelligence programs, presidential power, the Vice President's involvement in corruption, fraud and abuse by the administration, Medicaid and voting reforms. However, since they are also focusing on the 2008 elections for the White House and Congress, they would not go overboard at the risk of giving an impression of being obstructionist and extremist in targeting the government policies.

The mid-term election campaigns of 2002 of the Democratic and Republican Parties are examined. The author, maintaining both parties are running neck and neck, states the Democrats are focusing on Social Security, health care, and environmentalism, whereas the Republicans are stressing the war on terrorism and taxes.