WASHINGTON — On the eve of midterm elections, Democrats criticized Republicans as stewards of a stale status quo while President Bush campaigned into the evening in a drive to preserve GOP control in Congress.

“They can’t run anything right,” President Clinton said, taunting Republicans about the war in Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and even the scandal involving the House page program that complicated GOP efforts to win two more years in power.

Mr. Bush made no mention of the evident snub in public, but not so his aides.”Let’s see how many people show up in Palm Beach on 24 hours notice, versus 8,000 or 9,000 people” expected for the president’s speech, the White House’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, said. Democrats steadfastly refused to say so in public, but some Republicans signaled privately that they expected to lose more than 15 seats, and control of the House with them.

Democrats also boasted of several election targets in New York, where Senator Clinton and the Democratic candidate for governor, Eliot Spitzer, were expected to win landslides at the top of the ticket.

In contrast, only a few Democratic incumbents appeared in jeopardy, including Reps. John Barrow of Georgia; Melissa Bean of Illinois, and — in a race that bore no impact on the broader party struggle — William Jefferson of Louisiana. Mr. Jefferson, ensnared in a federal corruption investigation, faced a likely runoff on December 9, possibly against fellow Democrat Karen Carter.

Democrats needed to gain six seats to win control of the Senate. Senators DeWine of Ohio and Santorum of Pennsylvania, both Republicans, appeared in deepest trouble, Senators Chafee of Rhode Island and Burns of Montana somewhat less so.

Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Clinton, the president and ex-president, was on today’s ballot, but both campaigned energetically toward the finish line.

Campaigning in Missouri, Democratic senatorial candidate Claire McCaskill said it wasn’t so. She was in a supermarket meeting voters when one shopper asked her whether she wanted to raise taxes.

“There’s nothing to that allegation,” she replied. “We’re going to cut taxes for the middle class.”

She added that previous tax cuts “that just help the very wealthy should be retargeted to the middle class.”

As he has repeatedly, the president attacked Democrats for their position on Iraq. “Oh, they’ve got some ideas. Some of them say, ‘Get out right now.’ Some of them say, ‘Get out at a fixed date,’ even though the job hasn’t been done. One of them said, ‘Let’s move our troops to an island some 5,000 away.'”

Mr. Clinton provided the rebuttal to that charge from a stage in Rochester, N.Y. “On this ‘stay the course in Iraq’ deal, they say we’re the cut-and-run crowd,” he said. “These people don’t look like cut-and-run to me,” he said, gesturing at a House candidate and Navy veteran, Eric Massa, and a former senator, Max Cleland, who is a triple amputee from war wounds suffered in Vietnam a generation ago.