2 years ago
Among the most frequently cited observations about politics — along with “it all comes down to turnout” and “a week is a lifetime” — is this factoid about midterm elections: “Since World War II, the party holding the White House has suffered an average loss of 26 House seats and four Senate seats.”
This is correct, but it’s not right — at least not as an accurate measure of what has happened in the last several dozen midterms. It’s misleading in the same way it would be to put Bill Gates in a room with nine indigents and conclude that their average worth was $13 billion.
The more accurate way to look at midterms is that there is no good way to summarize them. True, only two elections have seen the White House’s party actually gain seats, but there are several where the losses have been minimal, or non-existent, or where each house of Congress has produced different results. The problem for Joe Biden is that this more nuanced history provides almost no encouraging news. If Democrats are to survive November with their congressional majorities intact, they’re going to have to pray Republicans really step in it in a few key races.
The most memorable midterms are those that featured huge losses for the party occupying the White House:
- 1946, when the discontent with the tumultuous post-war environment swept the Republicans into power in both houses of Congress
- 1958, when Democrats won 49 House seats and 15 Senate seats amid a nasty recession, giving them control that lasted for 22 years in the Senate and 36 years in the House
- 1974, when voters punished the Republican Party for Watergate, giving Democrats 49 new House seats and four in the Senate
- 1994, when the collapse of the Clinton health plan gave Republicans both houses of Congress with 54 House and four Senate seats
- 2006, when the Iraq quagmire and a series of GOP corruption scandals turned both houses over to Democrats
- 2010, when the slow pace of recovery from the Great Recession and a clumsy start to Obamacare gave the Republicans 63 seats and control of the House
- 2014, when nine Democratic Senate seats — and control of the body — fell to Republicans (thus giving Barack Obama the dubious distinction of being the only two-term president in living memory to suffer two midterm disasters).
Much less well remembered are the midterms where the president’s party escaped serious damage. There are, of course, the two elections where they actually gained seats — 1998, thanks to a booming economy and Republican impeachment overreach, and 2002, when the post-9/11 “rally round the flag” sentiment was still high. But many other midterms were effectively a wash.
In 1962, just weeks after the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy’s Democratic Party only lost four House seats and gained four Senate seats. In 1970, with dissent over the Vietnam War, and with Vice President Spiro Agnew denouncing “radical liberals” and a biased news media, the GOP lost 12 House seats while the Democrats lost three Senate seats — one to Conservative Party New Yorker James Buckley. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter saw Democrats lose 15 House seats and three Senate seats. Meanwhile, 1990 provided the “Seinfeld midterms” where more or less nothing happened. George H.W. Bush’s Republicans lost only seven seats in the House and one in the Senate.
What unites all of these contests is not only the relatively small change in the lineups, but also the fact that none of these elections changed control of either chamber of Congress. This is where Democrats can take little if any comfort from the midterm elections where the president’s party took only political flesh wounds.
Not that long ago, that 1990 result would have been cause for celebration in a White House. This November, however, the net loss of seven House seats and a single Senate seat would turn both chambers over to Republicans. Beyond the numbers, however, it’s hard to see in current surveys or in the underlying political terrain anything that history says aids the Democrats.
In 1998, even Clinton’s full-blown sex scandal was not enough to inflict political damage on his party: The economy was producing full employment, low inflation, real wage growth and enormous budget surpluses. Today, low unemployment and solid wage growth is overshadowed by inflation. The relative unity George W. Bush enjoyed among the public in 2002 — with the memory of 9/11 fresh and before the Iraq War had begun — is almost wholly absent today. Republicans may be divided between those who charge that Biden’s weakness provoked Putin and those who think him a neocon warmonger, but few are standing behind the president. The backlash over campus and urban disorder that kept GOP losses relatively small in 1970 has been replaced now by cultural matters — over race, crime, classroom teaching — that threaten Democrats with further erosion of the white working-class vote. And a sour national mood, after two years of a pandemic, has helped drive Biden’s approval ratings down to about 40 percent — a presidential approval number that has in the past foretold midterm disaster.
It’s true, as Democrats keep reminding each other, that the picture can change; maybe by autumn we’ll be back to normal. Maybe inflation will ease.
But the more plausible gleam of hope for Democrats rests not with those factors, nor with shaper “messaging,” but with the opposition. In past midterms, Republicans have done serious damage to themselves by nominating candidates who lost eminently winnable elections.
Most notable was the 2010 Delaware Senate race, where Republican Mike Castle seemed headed for a coronation after having won 10 statewide races for governor and the at-large House seat. But with the backing of Tea Party forces, perennial candidate Christine O’Donnell beat Castle in the GOP primary. Her fall campaign, filled with charges that she had misrepresented her education and her finances, and highlighted by a comment that she had “dabbled in witchcraft,” sent her to a landslide defeat by Chris Coons. (Had Castle won that primary and that Senate seat, the Republicans would likely now control the U.S. Senate.)
It’s not the only state where zealous party members helped outliers upset more established candidates, only to lose in November. Think of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, and reports of his former fondness for teenage girls; or Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri with their head-scratching notions about abortion. This year, the possibility of Republicans nominating credibly accused abusers in Georgia and Missouri, and a TV doctor with quackish tendencies in Pennsylvania offer Democrats tempting targets in those key states. Other Democrats hope bad memories of former President Donald Trump will give them a boost.
All this is thin gruel for a party facing headwinds as daunting as any in recent campaign seasons. And sometimes the terrain is simply too treacherous to navigate. Before Obama’s inaugural in early 2009, the transition team heard a briefing from their economic gurus explaining how slow and weak the recovery from the Great Recession would likely be. Said Obama adviser David Axelrod: “We’re gonna get our asses kicked in the midterms.” It would be wholly unsurprising if similar posterior concerns were overheard in the West Wing on a daily basis.
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