So while most Americans aren't against going to war with Iraq, passionate opponents of it seem to outnumber passionate proponents. "This is not a war that the American public is demanding that George Bush fight," says James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Congress and foreign policy. "It's more a war that George Bush is insisting to the American public must be fought." And in elections, he says, passion matters. "To a good extent, politics in this country depend upon and respond to people with deep, intense preferences," he says.

That's why he wasn't surprised that Wellstone's no vote seemed to give him a boost. "For someone like Wellstone, someone heavily identified in voters' minds with a certain policy position, if all of a sudden he turned on a dime, he sullies his own image and alienates an important part of his constituency."

Sometimes, says Lindsay, "Politics and good policy are lined up. For Wellstone that was the case."

If pundits have missed the electoral significance of enraged liberals, it might be because they have a bad habit of taking the right-wingers who claim to speak for ordinary Americans at their word. Boyd sees an analogy to the Republicans' impeachment campaign, which party leaders and pundits alike both assumed enjoyed the support of the masses. "I remember 1998, after the Republicans took up the strategy of impeachment. Going into midterm elections, the Republicans thought it was a pretty good strategy to undermine the president." MoveOn ultimately raised $2.5 million for politicians who voted against the 1998 impeachment.

Inslee shares his analysis. "I think many people have missed the impact of this issue like they missed the impeachment issue. In 1998, Democrats were just terrified that they were going to be killed on the impeachment issue and they refused to confront it," he says. "I perceived that there was a very strong group of people, maybe a minority, who felt impeachment was the wrong decision." Both Inslee and Rush Holt ran opposing impeachment, and both beat Republican incumbents.

"If more Democrats had recognized the existence of that intense feeling against impeachment, the Democrats would have recaptured the House in 1998," he believes.

Of course, that assumes that voters in the rest of the country share the views of Washington and New Jersey, two states with particularly strong liberal blocs. The situation varies regionally, and most of those who voted against Bush's Iraq resolution don't live in deeply conservative districts, where such a vote might have been used effectively against them.

"I can't tell you, if I were a candidate in Arkansas, if I would view this the same way," says Durbin. "Most Democratic candidates in the South and the West were quick to gather around the president. The marginal seats were in conservative areas. The leadership felt the sooner they could neutralize this issue the better."

Another group of Democrats who voted for the resolution includes presidential hopefuls like House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, who might have feared the issue would come back to haunt them. Lindsay doesn't believe it would have. He calls the idea that antiwar votes derail political careers "the Sam Nunn fallacy," which he describes as "the notion that San Nunn took the wrong position on the [Gulf] war and as a result saw his presidential ambitions go up in smoke." Of course, after voting against the Gulf War resolution, the conservative Democrat watched his presidential bid flounder.

"The failure of Nunn to become a major Democratic presidential candidate had a lot more to do with fact that his domestic political views were more in tune with the Republican Party than with the typical voter in a Democratic primary," Lindsay says.

Besides, he says, while some politicians might regret how they voted on the Gulf War, that conflict isn't necessarily analogous to the current situation. "Back in January of '91, a lot of the Democrats voting had in mind what happened with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. When they voted in the fall of 2002, many had in mind the first Gulf War resolution. Like generals fighting the last war, Democratic presidential candidates tend to vote for the last resolution."

Of course, Democrats weren't so much trying to toughen up their image as change the subject. Kori Bernards, a spokeswoman for Gephardt, insists that the war isn't a major issue for his constituents. When he travels, she says, "people don't ask us about Iraq. People ask us about prescription drugs and Social Security and healthcare."

Given the overwhelming concern other Democrats are hearing about an imminent war, this seems unlikely. Yet it's in keeping with the Democratic leadership's attempt to sweep the issue aside -- a plan some say was a terrible idea. "The strategy that many folks on the Democratic side are trying to pursue is a foolish one -- that if they just don't talk about this war stuff they can get it off the agenda," says Boyd. "They're the opposition party now and the president sets the agenda. Period. They needed to talk about this, needed to present an approach to it that really met their constituents' concerns."

Recent Stories