By: Daniel Libit

A devastating Election Day for the GOP could provide some comfort for at least one group of Republicans: the ones who lost their seats two years ago.

“I can say what a relief it is I’m not on the ballot,” says former Connecticut Rep. Rob Simmons, who lost by a demoralizing 82 votes to Democrat Joe Courtney in 2006. “To be a candidate this year, with the tremendous bitterness directed against the Bush administration and nastiness directed against John McCain and Gov. [Sarah] Palin — the environment here for Republicans is just toxic.”

When Simmons and several of his GOP colleagues were defeated in 2006, they might have wondered at the time what exactly they were losing. Maybe their party would regain the majority in 2008; surely there couldn’t be a second big Democratic wave. But if Democrats pick up another 20 seats this go-round — and that’s the commentariat’s conservative guess — the losers of 2006 can rest assured that better days were never just around the bend.

“If we had all won [in 2006] and Republicans had passed the bailout just like we passed the [Iraq] war resolution, then Nancy Pelosi would only have had to wait two more years to become speaker,” says former Indiana Rep. John Hostettler.

Of the 22 House Republicans who lost their seats in 2006, only four — Jeb Bradley of New Hampshire, Anne Northup of Kentucky, Mike Sodrel of Indiana and Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania — have decided to belly back up for what could be another cold dose of electoral medicine.

The rest have moved on.

“I went to bed for the first two nights very unhappy,” recalls former Rep. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.). “Then that Thursday, I got halfway through my run and I said to myself, ‘Charlie, it is over. It is over.’ And after that, that was it.”

If you’re going to lose, it may be better to lose in a wave. In interviews with Politico, a number of deposed Republicans noted that the staggering nature of the 2006 election — the “thumpin’,” as the president described it — made it easier to accept the results without second-guessing themselves or the reelection campaigns they ran.

“Could I have influenced the outcome if I spent another $5-10 million? Maybe,” says Bass. But “my election wasn’t even close. It wasn’t about a specific vote or something I had done or failed to do. The fact was, the Republicans had it coming.”

Simmons’ race was close, and for a time he wondered whether his support for the war in Iraq cost him his seat. Not anymore. “I point out that [former Sen.] Lincoln Chafee, who voted against it, did not win reelection,” he says. “Others who voted against it left Congress, and people who voted for it stayed.”

Not only did Hostettler vote against the resolution, but he was one of the more vocal Republican opponents of the Iraq war. That didn’t much matter when Election Night rolled around two years ago. After 12 years of service, he became just another political casualty of Indiana’s “Bloody 8th.”

Some Republican incumbents fear the $700 billion bailout bill will loom as large as the war did in 2006. As he voted for the legislation, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) said he’d “rather lose an election on this than see the economy crumble.” Later, he said that if he loses, it will be because of his bailout vote.

To hear Henry Bonilla tell it, it’s not a big loss either way.

“People will ask me if I miss it, and my answer is, ‘It’ is not there anymore,” says Bonilla, who lost to Texas Democrat Ciro Rodriguez in a runoff last time around. “Back in the late 1990s, Republicans would get excited about getting after it, and we pushed our issues forward. The environment now is low-accomplishment. People are playing gotcha politics. Others are afraid of their own shadow.”

Bonilla still attends a regular gathering of the Texas Republican delegation, where he says his former colleagues often note that he’s the one sporting the biggest smile.

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