Elections are stories. They have beginnings, middles, and ends, and like stories, they have narratives. In the middle of the story it’s often hard to know how the tale is going to conclude. But a good storyteller seeds his tales with hints, and the discerning reader or listener picks them up along the way.

So we’re in the middle of a story right now. We know it began with a controversial war, with an unpredictable economy, with bitter social issues swirling in the background, with control of the House and the Senate at stake at a time when the majority party also controlled the two other branches of government, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

That’s how it started. How it ends is still uncertain, though the Republican impulse — learned behavior, for it was perfected a generation ago by their rivals, the Democrats — to summon a firing squad and then to array it in a circle gravely endangers the GOP’s control of Washington and its new claim as the natural party of governance. Here, as we mark the midpoint of the general-election season, are the seeds that have been planted in this story:

Worries about the war. These worries are everywhere, among Republicans (whose instincts are to support the president in Iraq) and Democrats (whose instincts are to oppose him and to plan for a withdrawal). The new dynamic in American politics is that it seems easier to express doubts about the war than to support it. This is a dangerous development for Republicans, even though many Democrats supported the war in its early days.

And now an old flashpoint has returned for a second act this autumn — the debate over Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Seizing on it has become a way for skittish Republicans to voice concern about the war without exactly opposing it. Bob Woodward’s new book makes it clear that important forces within the Bush White House, including onetime chief of staff Andrew Card and presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson, wanted Mr. Rumsfeld out, thereby legitimizing the Republican rush to criticize the defense chief. Last Sunday, Senator DeWine of Ohio, facing a tough re-election battle, went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and declared: “I don’t have confidence in Don Rumsfeld.” Advantage: Democrats.

The resilient economy.The most important economic news of the election season is reaching voters’ mailboxes this week. It’s not, as some political professionals believe, the tax bill. It’s the quarterly report for 401(k) plans and other investments, no longer a matter of concern for a slender, Republican-oriented slice of the electorate. With more than half of Americans involved in the stock market in one way or another, the third-quarter report is a critical and largely ignored factor in the voting dynamic.

This year these reports, churned out even before the Dow Jones Industrial Average broke a psychological barrier last week, will bring a sigh of relief. The average American bond fund grew 3.1% in the third quarter, and the average American stock fund grew 2%. Some economists may be worrying about a “hard landing” for the economy in 2007, but people are feeling pretty good right now, as long as they don’t invite an appraiser to have a look at their house. This upbeat market news comes at a time when average gasoline prices, earlier this year heading to the $3 per gallon level, are now headed toward the $2 per gallon level. Advantage: Republicans.

The ethical morass.Washington has an unhappy tendency to get dragged into ethical marshes in the sixth year of a presidential term. This curse spares neither party. Some recent examples: Watergate (Nixon), Iran-Contra (Reagan), Monica Lewinsky (Clinton), Jack Abramoff (George Bush).

So the ethical debate raging in Washington and on cable is normal. So, in a way, is the sort of uproar that surrounds a onetime party star, Republican Senator Allen of Virginia, whose ethical problems have involved ethnic issues, threatening his reelection and eliminating his chances for a presidential campaign in 2008. Ethics woes often, though not always, hurt the party that possesses the White House. Also normal.

But now, in the past 10 days, the Republicans have endured a new scandal that has thrown the 2006 election into total upheaval.

The furor surrounding Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, who resigned following the release of inappropriate e-mails to congressional pages, has created a full-blown Republican Party crisis that endangers not only Republican prospects in November collectively, but also the survival of House Republicans, including prominent GOP leaders, individually.

The incendiary element in this furor is the social-issue debate about homosexuality — a factor that is prompting one of the strongest strains in the Republican coalition, the social conservatives, to turn on the Republican leadership, to blame it for not moving more swiftly to address the Foley matter, and to accuse it of having contempt for conservative values by tolerating Mr. Foley’s gay entreaties for weeks. This fire shows no signs of extinguishing itself. Advantage: Democrats.

General party profile at the midpoint. Here neither party has much to brag about. Consider the views of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, no friend of the Democrats: “The 109th Congress has gone home to fight for re-election, and the best testament to its accomplishments is that very few Republicans are running on them.”

So the Republicans, warning against the danger to the nation posed by Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ speaker-in-waiting, have put on what the Journal’s editorialists call “the liberal fright mask,” while the Democrats, stoking the Foley fires with a quiet but unseemly Schadenfreude, are offering little more than broad moral objections to a party that only two years ago won the endorsement of the American people.

That’s a heck of a situation for a democracy at a time when the country is fighting to establish democracy far away in a foreign land. The next weeks are sure to be filled with invective and negative advertisements, all designed to demonstrate how demonic are the men and women who are seeking office and holding office at this time of national challenge. Advantage: Nobody.