Washington ? Even with the holiday cheer on the radio and the colorful displays in the store windows, a dark, wintry gloom is settling on the Democratic Party. Poll results show strikingly positive ratings for the Republicans. President Bush retains strong support.

But the gravest indicator of the Democrats’ plight isn’t in the public opinion polls. It’s in the Senate, which in recent years has become a far more competitive political arena than the House, the body that the framers intended to track the whims of public opinion more closely.

Nearly a quarter-century ago, when the first modern Republican earthquake rumbled through the Senate, the GOP elected a group of ephemeral lawmakers to the chamber. The Ronald Reagan landslide of 1980 brought a few enduring figures to the Senate — Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire and Slade Gorton of Washington, for example — but most of their freshmen classmates are already long forgotten. Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa has developed into a stolid figure, and Dan Quayle served a term as vice president, but James Abdnor of South Dakota, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, Steven D. Symms of Idaho, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, Mack Mattingly of Georgia, John P. East of North Carolina and Paula Hawkins of Florida are all long gone. Most of them are remembered, if at all, only as figures of ridicule.

Compare that crowd with the freshmen of 2003. There is Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who has held two Cabinet positions, served as president of the American Red Cross and has run for president. There is Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who has served as governor, university president and Cabinet secretary and has run for president two times. There is John Cornyn of Texas, a former state supreme court justice and state attorney general. These are not transitory figures.

The younger members of the new freshman class are also not political neophytes. There is John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, a serious-minded lawmaker who is only 38 years old but whose experience in the budget and appropriations committees in the House arm him to have immediate impact in the Senate. There is Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, who at 47 already has served four terms in the House and was a prominent figure — an oddity, a young Republican with doubts about the GOP’s strategy — in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. And there is Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who at 53 defeated former Vice President Walter F. Mondale and who has eight years’ experience as mayor of St. Paul.

The Democrats who gathered in January 1981 to lick their wounds and to serve in the minority for the first time in their lifetimes were comforted by the conviction that many of the Republicans swept into office in the Reagan wave were accidental senators. Indeed, within months, Denton, East and Hawkins were more prominent as punchlines on late-night television cabarets than they were in committee markups and in floor debates.

By 1986, when that class of senatorial freshmen was up for re-election, East had decided not to run again; on June 29 he committed suicide. Symms and Kasten were re-elected (and destined to play minimal roles in the chamber), but five of the others were defeated. If you need symbols of the weakness of that GOP freshman class, consider two Democrats — Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle of South Dakota and Sen. Bob Graham, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. They both won their seats by defeating feckless Republicans in 1986.

The Democrats harbor no such hopes as their new colleagues prepare to be sworn in a month from now. Only two new Republican senators are on shaky ground. They are Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, a state that is partial to one-term senators, and James M. Talent of Missouri, who has been in politics since he was 28 years old but who lost a statewide race (for governor) only two years ago.

Of the two new Democratic senators, one, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, appears to be on the cusp of a long political career; as a state attorney general with a father who was a governor and senator, he has great statewide visibility. But the other, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, will be 79 years old next month and already has walked away from the Senate once before; he was recruited out of retirement by the state’s Democrats to replace Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, whose ethical problems endangered his re-election. Lautenberg almost certainly won’t run again — and there’s no guarantee the Democrats will be able to hold that seat.

So as the new senators prepare their offices and gird to take their oaths, both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge that the new members are likely to be around for quite a while. That suggests that in the Senate, the body that has been the most volatile in American politics in recent years, Republican rule this time may be no fluke — and no temporary condition.

David Shribman is a columnist for the Boston Globe.