Democrats Take Control of House

President George Bush's job is a lot tougher this morning, after the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, breaking the conservative monopoly of power in Washington and clearing the way for congressional investigations into the conduct of the Iraq war.

The future of the Senate still hangs in the balance, with two states yet to be decided. The Montana count is tight but leaning towards the Democrats, while in Virginia lawyers were preparing to fight over the outcome. The Democratic challenger, Jim Webb, holds a lead of a few thousand out of 2.3m votes cast. If the vote is close enough, with less than a 0.5% margin, Virginia state law gives the loser the option of calling for a recount once the first count has been finalised by November 27.

In the early hours of the morning, the Republican incumbent, Senator George Allen, said counting would continue throughout the night and he called on his supporters to watch the tally "like eagles and hawks". Even before the sun rose over Virginia, both parties were firing off emails to sympathetic lawyers calling on them to prepare do battle over provisional ballots, absentee ballots, challenges to results from computerised voting machines and every other legal grey area.

Complicating the picture still further, the FBI opened an investigation into alleged fraud and intimidation involving phone calls made to Democratic voters in Virginia falsely claiming their names were not on the electoral rolls or giving false information about the location of polling stations.

Elsewhere, the Democrats made Senate gains in Missouri, Ohio, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Joe Lieberman won the Connecticut race standing as an independent. He beat the Democratic candidate, Ned Lamont, but has pledged to vote with the Democrats in the new chamber.

The Democrats also won a brace of governorships, putting the party in power in a majority of states, an important boost to the party nationwide and a strategic advantage for the 2008 presidential election.

The president will give a press conference at 1pm (1800 GMT) and the Democrats will be listening critically to his tone as they try to gauge how ready he is to work with the new Congress and compromise over the management of the war. By then, Mr Bush will almost certainly have made the call he must have feared most, saying "Congratulations, Madam Speaker" to Nancy Pelosi, who Republicans turned into a hate figure in the last days of the campaign.

Ms Pelosi, a tough, resoundingly liberal Democratic leader from San Francisco will become the first woman ever to serve as speaker of the House of Representatives, where the party looked likely to gain 30 or more seats.

Among other milestones passed last night, Bernie Sanders of Vermont became the first socialist in the US Senate and Deval Patrick was elected governor of Massachusetts, only the second black governor in US history. Keith Ellison in Minnesota became the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives.

As speaker, Ms Pelosi will be in a powerful position. She will appoint the chairs of the all-important House committees - which can launch enquiries and ask difficult questions about the Iraq war and other issues - and she will control the legislative agenda in the chamber. She and her party will also have a powerful say over taxes and spending.

In theory, the job gives her less sway over foreign policy, but in her victory speech last night, she made it clear she would not be bound by such traditional constraints. "Today the American people voted for change and they voted for Democrats to take our country in a new direction and that is exactly what we intend to do. And nowhere did the American people make it clear they wanted a change more than in Iraq," Ms Pelosi told a crowd of supporters in Washington. "And so we say to the president, Mr President we need a new direction in Iraq. Let us work together to find a new solution to the war in Iraq."

She promised to restore "civility and bipartisanship" to the political process in Washington. Whether that happens remains a major unanswered question. In France they call it cohabitation, but in the US a situation in which a president from one party has to work with a Congress from another is usually known as gridlock.

Cooperation between the White House and a Democratic majority in the House would require a sea-change in political style on the president's part. On the basis of the most questionable mandates in 2000, he governed as if he had won a landslide.

It will also require some tough decisions from Ms Pelosi, who must bridge the gap between the liberals on her wing of the party and its conservatives, boosted by the new intake of House Democrats such as Heath Shuler from conservative "red" states. Mr Shuler won his seat in the deepest Republican territory of North Carolina only because he stood as a social conservative, opposed to abortion, gun control and gay marriage.

Gay marriage was one of the big losers in the election as a string of ballot initiatives calling for a ban were passed. In South Dakota, however, a proposal to ban abortion under almost all circumstances was defeated.

Overall, the election continued a long political realignment in the US, leaving the demarcation line between a Republican south and a Democratic north-east and west even more pronounced. The biggest Republican losses last night were "behind enemy lines" in the liberal east, holdovers from a more bipartisan age. By that measure the sharp geographical divide in US politics just got deeper.