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WASHINGTON (AP) -- After months of frenzied campaigning by the candidates, the political promises stopped Tuesday and the voters made their statement.A Republican congressional majority and a multitude of new voting equipment are bing put to the test in an election that will define the balance of power for the rest of George W. Bush's presidency. Both parties hustled to get their supporters out in high-stakes contests across the country, Democrats appealing one more time for change, and appearing confident the mood was on their side. Republicans conceded nothing as their vaunted get-out-the-vote machine swung into motion. About a third of voters were using new equipment, and problems in several states were reported right out of the gate. The government deployed a record number of poll watchers to the many competitive races across the country. In Tennessee, where Republican Bob Corker and Democrat Harold Ford Jr. were in a pitched battle for a Senate seat, even a spotty rain made Corker edgy. "Any candidate doesn't like to see rain," Corker said, greeting supporters on a damp Tuesday morning in Kingsport. "You don't know what kind of variables that brings into it." His opponent, bidding to become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, declared the election to be in "God's hands" as he stood a respectful distance from the Lindenwood Christian Church, doubling as a polling station. But Ford wasn't leaving everything to divine fate. When he spotted voters standing in the church doorway, he shouted, "I would come up there but I don't want to get in trouble. I'd appreciate it if you'd vote for me." At stake in the midterm election were all 435 House seats, 33 in the Senate, 36 races for governor, ballot measures on gay marriage, embryonic stem cell research, the minimum wage and more -- plus the overarching fate of President Bush's agenda in the last two years of his presidency. Democrats hoped finally to answer the rout that drove them from legislative power in 1994. Even their opponents conceded Democrats were certain to make gains and, despite brave words for public consumption, Republicans worried that control of the House would slip from their hands. Even Senate control was up in the air, but a tougher climb for Democrats. Unsurprisingly, the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican parties talked optimistically as voters went to the polls Tuesday. "I believe we're going to defy the experts and maintain our majority in the House and the Senate," GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman said on CBS's "The Early Show." Countered Howard Dean, his Democratic opposite number: "If you want change, we can give you change." 'A chance for a change' That's just what 60-year-old Ron Bowman, a Democrat from Windsor, Connecticut, had on his mind when he went out to vote first thing Tuesday. "It was a chance for a change," he said, after casting his ballot for Democratic senatorial candidate Ned Lamont over incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman, running as an independent. Another voter who echoed Bowman's sentiment, Shirley Swanson of Windsor, said that she, too, voted for Lamont. "He's not Lieberman. Joe isn't listening to us," she said. Democrats needed to gain 15 House seats or six in the Senate to form a majority, a development that would give them a stronger voice against a war that has cost more than 2,800 U.S. lives and has come to be seen by most Americans as misbegotten. Sharply critical of Bush's prosecution of the war throughout the campaign, Democrats nevertheless lack a common position on how to get the U.S. out. Views on Iraq war sway votes The war, as predicted, was prominently on voters' minds. Separated by age, party of choice and their position on the war, Melanie Tate, 22, in Louisville, Kentucky, and Mario Georgalas, 41, in Miami Beach, Florida, both spoke of the energizing experience of voting. "I was more excited the first time I got to vote than the first time I got to drive," Tate, 22, a political science student and head of the University of Louisville Democrats, said after casting her ballot. "We're seeing our friends going to the war. A lot of us are voting for Democratic candidates who will work to end the war," Tate said. Georgalas cast his ballot on the way to work. "I was in the Navy for six years, that's why I vote," he said. He voted for the GOP ticket because he didn't believe the U.S. should leave Iraq. "What you start," he said, "you should finish." 'When you screw up, you get fired' Scandal also figured into people's choices. Tony Rigazzi, a 54-year-old Collinsville, Illinois, engineer, said he voted against GOP Rep. John Shimkus after supporting him in past elections. The reason: He believed that Shimkus, as chairman of the House board that oversees the congressional page program, did not do enough to protect young people from former Rep. Mark Foley's advances. "It's just a registration of my personal dissatisfaction," Rigazzi said. "He screwed up, and when you screw up you get fired." Republicans have been the acknowledged champions at getting supporters out to polling stations, a critical skill in midterm elections when turnout is typically low, around 40 percent, and one that heightened suspense over which party would hold the levers of power at the end of the counting. Evangelical conservatives are the foundation of that mobilization and motivation drive, but their own enthusiasm was in question as they faced the prospect of a president too politically weak to take forward their agenda and looked back on a campaign tainted by the congressional page sex scandal and more. At least two dozen Republican House seats were at risk. Among GOP-held open seats, those in Arizona, Colorado, New York, Ohio and Iowa seemed most vulnerable. Republican Reps. John Hostettler, Chris Chocola and Mike Sodrel of Indiana; Charles Taylor of North Carolina; Curt Weldon, Don Sherwood and Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania; and Charles Bass of New Hampshire were in particularly difficult re-election struggles. In Senate races, Republican incumbents Mike DeWine in Ohio and Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania appeared in deepest trouble; Sens. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island and Conrad Burns in Montana somewhat less so.
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