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A big question hangs over American politics: Could next year be 1994 all over again?

That was the year a bitter debate over health care led to a disastrous congressional election for Democrats, in which they lost 54 House and 10 Senate seats and ceded control of both chambers to the Republicans.

Things have started to look similar under Democratic President Barack Obama. His poll ratings slipped through the summer months, his party was damaged by a bruising health-care debate, and the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows the job-approval rating for the Democratic-controlled Congress has slumped to 22% -- almost precisely where it was at this time in the 1994 election cycle.

Combine that with the fact that a new president's party almost always loses seats in the first election after he takes office, and leaders of both parties now agree Democratic losses appear inevitable in the 2010 congressional election. Even some high-profile Democrats, such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, face tough fights.

The election is still a year away and pressing issues such as the health overhaul, the lagging economy and the future of the Afghan war could tip the balance. Yet, there are some little-understood forces that suggest a full repeat of 1994 is unlikely.

For the moment, all but nine House Democrats have said they are defending their seats, far more than in the 1994 cycle, when 29 incumbent House members in the party vacated their seats -- and Democrats lost 22 of those spots. Incumbents stand a far better chance of hanging on in a political storm than do newcomers. In addition, Mr. Obama, for all his recent troubles, hasn't slumped in popularity as far as President Bill Clinton did then, at least so far. And while Democrats' fund-raising lead has slipped in recent weeks, they have built up an advantage in campaign cash.

Perhaps as important, Democratic leaders have warned lawmakers earlier this time to start preparing for a tough fight; in 1994, by contrast, even some prominent Democrats didn't realize until late in the game that they were in trouble.

No one has less room for complacency than the 49 House Democrats who won their seats in 2008 in districts carried by Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain -- 12 of them freshmen who next fall will defend their seats for the first time.

Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia, for example, won his seat last November by a mere 727 votes. In his district, Mr. McCain beat Mr. Obama by more than 7,000 votes.

Eight Republicans are considering challenging Mr. Perriello, who is leaving nothing to chance. While some lawmakers shied away from the sometimes-raucous town-hall meetings in August lest they got caught up in fevered debates over health care, Mr. Perriello spent more than 100 hours in such gatherings.

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, says Mr. Perriello's decision to attend August's town-hall meetings got him a lot of attention in the district.

"He got knocked around some, but basically people were impressed that he did it," says Mr. Sabato. Still, Mr. Sabato says, the congressman faces a tough election, particularly if Republicans recruit the candidate they're most eager to see in the race, Robert Hurt, a popular state senator with a long history in the district.

Rep. Perriello says that for vulnerable young Democrats such as him, the key factor is something only partly within their control. "The reality is that the economy is going to trump everything else, even the issues of the day," he says.

Going into the 2010 cycle, Democrats' margins are still large enough that it will be a tall order for Republicans to win back control of either chamber. At the moment, Democrats own a 256-177 majority in the House, with two seats vacant. In the Senate, the Democratic edge is 58 to 40, with two independents who normally vote with Democrats.

That means Republicans would have to pick up 41 seats in the House to take over, and 11 in the Senate. Over the past century, the opposition party has picked up an average of 28 seats in the House and two or three in the Senate in the first mid-term election after the inauguration of a new president.

So it's a steep climb back to control of Congress for Republicans -- though not as steep as it appeared six months ago, when some Democrats dared to think that, after two election cycles in which they added substantially to their contingent in Congress, they might be within reach of a long-term dominance of American politics, and Republicans worried they might be right.

Now the climate has changed so rapidly that the specter of 1994 is openly discussed at both party headquarters. Three factors make it hard to know how apt the comparison is: The first is the outcome of the current health debate; the second is the pace of the economic recovery; and the third is how popular President Obama will be by the middle of next year. Democrats suffered mightily as President Clinton's job approval slumped to 44% just before Election Day in 1994. In the latest Journal/NBC News poll, Mr. Obama's job-approval rating appears to have stabilized at 51%.

For Democrats, that news is offset by some other, more sobering findings. The share of people who say they want next year's elections to produce a Democratic Congress has slipped to 43%. That's still above the 40% who say they want a Republican Congress, but the Democratic advantage there has eroded since July.

Conversations with voters suggest the outcome of the health debate is particularly important. Carolee Doneski is a political independent who lives south of Baltimore, in the congressional district of Frank Kratovil, one of the freshman Democrats who won in a district carried by Mr. McCain. Mrs. Doneski has a disabled husband with medical problems, but the couple has escaped big bills because of Medicare and a "very good" supplementary-insurance policy. She voted Democratic last year, and says she is generally pleased with the Democratic Congress. But she also calls the health debate confusing and will wait to see its outcome before deciding where her vote heads next year.

Officials at the National Republican Campaign Committee now count between 70 and 80 House seats on their "watch list," the list of races where they think they have a fighting chance of taking a seat away from Democrats. In some districts, Republicans have already snared their top-choice candidates, but they acknowledge that in others, they have yet to find the right person for the job.

"We wanted to look not at who would run, but who should run," says Guy Harrison, executive director of the Republicans' House campaign committee, of the searches so far. He cites Frank Guinta, the mayor of Manchester, N.H., who won his current job by defeating a Democratic incumbent in 2005. He's recently agreed to run against Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, who carried just 52% of the vote last year in a typically swing district.

Democrats say that they have an edge over 1994 by being well prepared early in the cycle. One central element in their effort is the "Frontline" program, in which the party gives tactical advice and financial help to House Democrats who are considered to be under threat in their re-election campaigns.

"It's a very different environment from 1994 to now," says Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who runs the program. "We are strategically and financially much more prepared and much more nimble now."

Part of the Frontline program, Rep. Walt Minnick of Idaho is a freshman and the first Democrat that state has sent to Congress since 1992. Rep. Minnick has an unconventional profile for a first-time lawmaker: He's a 67-year-old Harvard law graduate and former Republican who quit the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal. He subsequently became chief executive officer of T.J. International, a wood-products business. He won his seat in 2008 with 50.6% of the vote.

Now Mr. Minnick thinks his unconventional profile will help him retain his seat in a climate where Republicans are attacking Democrats as big spenders. "I am by nature very fiscally conservative," he says. "My experience is that you live within your means. I intend to talk to those issues."

Like other candidates under threat, he is positioning himself in the center of the political spectrum. He voted against the economic-stimulus package earlier this year, and says he wants to establish an image as a lawmaker interested in solving problems "in a bipartisan way."

Rep. Minnick has two strong opponents already. One is state Rep. Ken Roberts, who has rounded up support from some fellow Republican officials in the state. The other is an Iraq war veteran named Vaughn Ward, who national Republicans leaders say they're most excited about. Mr. Ward is an Idaho native who worked as a staff member in Congress, joined the Marines, later became an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency serving in Afghanistan, and ultimately returned to active duty with the Marines in Iraq.

Mr. Ward says that, in a recent series of small group meetings with voters, many expressed concern about the federal deficit. "They can't even conceptualize, nor can I, what a $1 trillion deficit is," he says. "They're afraid just like I am." Increasingly, he says, deficit concerns are giving way to worries about health care.

Mr. Ward made some waves in the district by bringing in Sarah Palin's father and father-in-law to campaign for him earlier this month. Last year, he worked on Mr. McCain's presidential campaign.

He's the kind of candidate who could appeal to Carol Logan of Melba, Idaho, who says national security remains her main issue. "If our national security is compromised, what difference will health care make?" she asks. The 68-year-old retiree voted for Mr. McCain for president but says she had some hopes for Mr. Obama. Now, she's disillusioned with the president -- "I don't like the way Obama has shifted and changed," she says -- and is dismayed at the health bills Democrats are pushing in Congress.

But she also says she hasn't yet heard of Mr. Ward, who faces a challenge earning name recognition in a congressional district that stretches more than 400 miles.

Factoring in the competition, Mr. Minnick has already started building his war chest. Helped in part by his own fortune, he had more than double the money of his Republican opponents for the 2008 campaign, and is working toward having $1 million for his re-election before the year is out.

Money may turn out to be an important Democratic advantage nationally. Fueled by the fund-raising appeal of Mr. Obama, the Democratic national party and its committees in charge of helping Senate and House candidates have out-raised Republicans $159.6 million to $148.9 million since the election cycle began last November, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks campaign contributions.

Individual Democratic candidates have built even bigger war chests on their own. The center's figures indicate that Democratic House and Senate candidates have raised $97.4 million so far this cycle, compared with $59.5 million for Republicans, and have about $62.4 million more cash on hand. Still, one positive sign for Republicans emerged on the money front in recent weeks: The party's national committees out-raised Democratic committees by $1.6 million in the month of August.

The single biggest bulwark Democrats have is the simple fact that, largely because congressional districts increasingly are drawn to be friendly to one party or the other, it remains extremely difficult to unseat incumbent members of Congress. In the past four election cycles, the re-election rate for incumbents of both parties in House races has been 94.3%, 94.1%, 97.8% and 96%. In Senate races, the rate has been 83.3%, 79.3%, 96.2% and 85.7%. While 34 Democratic incumbents lost in 1994, a mere 10 Democratic House incumbents were defeated in the dozen years from 1996 to 2008.

Which is why it's so important to Democrats that today, unlike in 1994, they aren't facing a rash of retirements that would open up seats to potential Republican takeovers.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, it's the Republicans who face the retirement-induced crater. Seven incumbent Republican Senators are leaving their seats, meaning they won't be around to defend their seats, and five of those retirements come in states where it's Democrats who have a chance of picking up the seat.