But Republicans may have another thing going for them in this election cycle: the rarely broken historical trend line that the party in power usually loses seats in its first midterm election.

Former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, who chaired the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, is a believer in that historical trend line. It has been broken only twice in American political history, once by FDR and more recently by President Bush in 2002.

"What everybody forgets is the trend that the out-of-power party usually wins seats in midterm elections. Where will that trend line be two years from now? When you look at it historically, it is unlikely that it will be where it is now," Davis told me in an interview.

"Democrats now have the burden of governing and will have to make some very tough choices that are going to disappoint some elements in their coalition. The question for Republicans is, Can we absorb elements of that coalition?" he said.

A very high level of energy in last year's campaign fueled the Obama Democrats, but Davis thinks that in the physical rules of political alchemy, "that energy has peaked for Obama. Now he's in, so a lot of that energy goes away."

The man who helped boost the GOP's numbers in the House when the GOP was making its comeback thinks that "if you look at this in a historical context, Republicans will come back in some degree" next year. But Davis is brutally realistic about the huge challenges and obstacles his party faces at this critical juncture. "They've got a tough Senate lineup. It looks pretty bad right now," he said.

But things happen over the course of a young administration in its first two years -- unintended, unanticipated things that send its polls down and persuade some voters that this wasn't the change they wanted.

Obama and the Democrats are riding high now, but it remains to be seen how their big-spending, big-government, big-debt policies play out in what is shaping up to be an election cycle of growing economic and political turmoil.