On 2006 election dynamics:
A Washington Post poll (found that) independents by a margin of 2-to-1, 60 percent to 30 percent, are favoring Democratic candidates. That’s the first time I’ve seen a number that big with the independents breaking to the Democratic side. It makes it possible this will be a tidal-wave election with Democrats winning 35-40 seats instead of the 15 they need (to regain control of the House). That could change and things could stabilize….

Seven of 10 independents say there has been no benefit to them from the strong economy. This is the only time in the post-war economy in which there’s been real growth in gross domestic product and no real growth in average wage income for workers when the economy is strong. That explains it right there, in many ways. If you don’t feel anything strong about the economy personally, then you’re not going to give anyone credit for running a strong economy. You start worrying about other things – health care, retirement benefits, all of those things. That sense of unease that things are screwed up, that the country is going in the wrong direction, is just palpable.

On the Democratic mantra as the election nears:
So democrats are making it very clear, very precise – a new direction is the mantra. They’re saying it over and over again. George Bush is the one who wants to stay the course. The course is bad. We need to change that direction. They’re pounding that message everywhere. And being pretty effective. And they’re not doing what Democrats usually do, which is to screw it up at the end. They are sort of holding together and being fairly disciplined in delivering their message....

Here’s the way you’ll know what the result is (election night). If Bush’s favorable rating is significantly below 40 percent in the last polls going into the election, then the Democrats could probably win both the House and the Senate. Right now the aggregate number is 39, so if it goes above 40 percent, the Republicans probably will hold the Senate. They can win the firewall states. But if President Bush really tanks, then we will have a tidal-wave election with a significant majority in the House and maybe a majority in the Senate….

On the new world of communications:
Everything about the way in which we communicate and persuade voters is rapidly changing in politics. And I think it impacts corporate communications and everything else, too, because of the rise of new media and the new techniques of communicating and the fragmentation of the audience. Across the entire Internet and various digital places, people can go to get information. This (so-called) 72-hour program (of the Republicans to get out the vote) is about micro-targeted communications with pockets of the electorate in different places. If that’s at work now, and I think that’s why the president and (political advisor) Karl Rove seem optimistic about their chances, it’s because they’re doing some miraculous thing at the grassroots level to identify and persuade and to get voters to turn out. But I’ll tell you, we Democrats are catching up in that work. We’re doing the same kind of market-targeted outreach for the first time. We’ll see how effective that is.

On the outlook for business should Democrats regain control of at least the House:
There would be very interesting dynamics. Voters on the Democratic side clearly question corporate interests and business. But broadly, across the electorate, there’s a real desire to see bipartisanship and seeing some of these problems solved like Social Security, health-care access for people who don’t have it, an energy policy that doesn’t leave us dependent on foreign oil. There’s a real hunger for getting people to come together to solve problems….

There’s a palpable hunger for people to work together that will force a Democratic House and a 50/50 Senate actually to come together with the president and do something. They actually could pass immigration reform as soon as they convene. There are other centrist things that could happen. They could increase the size of the Army. A lot of homeland security things could be enacted and a modest but important entitlement reform taken to shore up Social Security. There’s also a chance we could get some better politics happening in this country that could lead to solutions. That’s a dynamic for 2008.

The big question for our politics looking ahead to 2008 is this: Is this going to be a continuing contest between the two political parties or is it now tripartite, and (New York City Mayor) Mike Bloomberg or Colin Powell could come and galvanize this political center and run as an independent?