Most pollsters, pundits and other prognosticators predict possible Democratic flips
Elving’s review found that every other decade over the last 100 years produced at least one midterm that made a big difference in Congress and national politics. The 2020s have yet to produce a midterm of that kind, and Nov. 3 is the last date on which that can change. Past big-impact midterms have often come in presidents’ second terms, when their popularity and political energy may be waning. Elving said each president’s detractors have seen midterms as an opportunity while supporters have often been complacent or less motivated. He said the party perceived as being in power is exposed and pays a price when voters believe it has lost its mandate or momentum.
Midterms attract less voter participation and less voter interest than presidential elections. When the White House is not at stake, low-propensity voters tend to tune out, and overall vote totals fall by about one-third compared with presidential years. Midterm voters nevertheless elect just as many members of Congress and fill just as many state legislative seats as voters in presidential years, and determine about two-thirds of the nation’s governorships. Elving said the current cycle combines economic concerns, including energy prices, and negative stories about incumbents in various offices, just as in the previous 10 midterm cycles. Those conditions contribute to a general expectation that Nov. 3 will be important and perhaps momentous.
The 2020s contain three presidential cycles — 2020, 2024 and 2028 — and therefore only two midterms. One occurred in 2022. Some observers then expected a “big red wave” to remove then-President Biden’s congressional majorities, but Democrats held on in the Senate and the House shifted from barely Democratic to barely Republican. The result ended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s second and last turn with the gavel, after which the GOP struggled for much of the next two years to unite behind a speaker of its own. Elving described the outcome as far short of the big midterms that at times rivaled presidential elections, responded to the mood of the times and rearranged the landscape.
Those larger swings have often changed control of Congress itself. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, the financial panic set off the Great Depression and ended an era of Republican dominance in Washington. The November 1930 midterms cost the GOP eight Senate seats and 52 House seats. Republicans initially retained small majorities in both chambers but lost the House after special elections in early 1931. The Senate remained formally Republican while operating with a working majority of Democrats and progressive Republicans; Democrats took control outright in 1932 and held it through World War II. Following the war, the midterms of 1946 ended the period of Democratic hegemony under Franklin Roosevelt as Republicans regained both chambers in one cycle, despite Republican House representation having fallen below 100 in the 435-seat chamber during the FDR years.
Elving described midterms as political regulators in later decades. Dwight Eisenhower won two landslide presidential elections in the 1950s but lost the House in 1954 and needed the vice president to break Senate ties. In his second term, Elving said, Eisenhower did not control Capitol Hill; in the 1958 midterms his party fell to 35 Senate seats. The Democrats first elected in 1958 formed a critical mass that later drove the bipartisan supermajorities needed to break the filibuster and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the same era, Democrats in Congress enacted a raft of social programs that became part of the political language, including Medicare and Medicaid. The programs were all part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program.
Changes in Southern electoral power came into view in 1966. By then, Elving said, much of the energy from Lyndon Johnson’s landslide election in 1964 had been expended and more had been siphoned off by his escalation of the war in Vietnam. Democrats’ Senate losses were limited, but they lost 47 House seats to the GOP. Elving said the GOP result gave the party “a new lease on life” and encouraged its new emphasis on winning in the South. That redirection would guide the party’s 1968 presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, and remained a focus for the onetime “Party of Lincoln” for decades to come. In that same election, a first-time candidate named Ronald Reagan won the California governorship as people started using the term “Sunbelt.”
The 1974 midterms largely took back what 1966 had given the GOP. Nixon had been elected president in 1968 while pursuing what was called the Southern Strategy and was reelected in a resounding 49-state landslide in 1972. By 1974, the Watergate scandals had emerged from his 1972 campaign’s use of burglary and electronic surveillance, and an effort to cover it up forced him to resign on the brink of impeachment in August, three months before the midterm for his second term. Republicans lost 48 House seats and several Senate seats, while Democrats already had more than 60 votes. Elving cautioned against attributing the losses to Nixon’s downfall alone, noting that the country had to some extent rallied behind his vice president and successor, Gerald R. Ford.
Elving identified the GOP’s underlying vulnerability as the state of the economy, which was suffering from inflation and the effects of the 1973 oil embargo by Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. He described the embargo as a side effect of the Arab-Israeli “Yom Kippur War” of 1973; it temporarily raised the price of crude oil from $3 to $12 and introduced Americans to the phrases “oil shock” and “energy crisis.”
Elving described Reagan as the dominant political personality of the 1980s after his 1980 victory over incumbent President Jimmy Carter and a 49-state landslide reelection in 1984. Reagan gave Republicans a Senate majority and a working House majority with the aid of conservative Democrats. The 1982 midterms restrained Reagan only marginally, Elving said, and he began his second term in a strong position. As he neared his second midterm, Democrats were advancing nationally and restoring their strength in the more populous Southern states. In 1986, Democrats defeated six GOP senators elected with Reagan in 1980; an eight-seat net gain produced a 55-45 Senate majority. The Senate then overrode Reagan’s veto of a highway bill and rejected his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Elving concluded that Reagan “was a spent force.”
Reagan was able to see his vice president, George H.W. Bush, take the White House in 1988, but Republican hopes for momentum into the 1990 midterms went largely unfulfilled. The presidency was lost in 1992, when Democrat Bill Clinton won a three-way race with 43% of the popular vote, defeating Bush and independent candidate H. Ross Perot. Clinton’s lack of a majority and his list of frustrations in his first term set the stage for the bruising first midterm election of 1994. Republicans then gained a net 54 seats in the House for their first majority in 40 years and recaptured the Senate with eight new seats.
Newt Gingrich of Georgia became speaker. Elving described him as a hard-driving partisan who had portrayed the chamber as a “House of Ill Repute,” also the title of a book he and other House Republicans had published. The “Contract with America” promised lower taxes, less corruption and a healthier economy in a compact agenda that Elving said also had voter appeal. Gingrich explicitly rejected the “go-along-get-along” attitude of previous GOP leaders in the House and advocated confrontation. Elving said the strategy proved less fruitful once Gingrich had the gavel. Gingrich spent much of his time as speaker making deals with Clinton, and internal dissatisfaction forced him out late in 1998.
Elving described parties as prospering when their presidential candidate wins and then giving ground in the midterms. George W. Bush was an exception after the terror attacks of September 2001. In his first midterm the following year, the GOP made gains across the board. Bush initially gained popularity with his “War on Terror” and won a second term, but Elving described the Iraq invasion as an albatross afterward. In 2006, Bush took what he called “a thumpin’” in elections at all levels and lost both party majorities in the House and Senate. The new House majority made Nancy Pelosi the first woman speaker in history.
That result created an atmosphere of optimism among Democrats, who elected Barack Obama president in 2008 and gave him majorities in the House and Senate, with the Senate majority briefly reaching 60 seats. As Clinton had, Obama felt the sting of the midterms early. Republicans in 2010 capitalized on an economy still experiencing the recession that aided Obama’s 2008 victory and on fears and confusion surrounding the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.” Obama called the setback “a shellacking” and settled in to work with a much diminished Senate majority and a Republican-dominated House under Speaker John Boehner. Obama won a second term in 2012 while the House remained Republican, and the Senate followed in 2014. Elving said the 2014 result revealed continuing Republican strength across the South and Midwest and, to some degree, augured the Electoral College majorities that would make Donald J. Trump president in 2016 and 2024.
Elving said that if the 2020s are to have a midterm with the kind of impact others have had, roughly once a decade over the last century, Nov. 3 is the last opportunity. He argued that the pressure for a meaningful midterm ought to be building substantially. And he said most pollsters, pundits and other prognosticators now predict Democrats could flip control of the House and even the Senate. The last 100 years of results show swings in both directions, Elving said, while the party perceived as being in power remains exposed to voters who think it has lost its mandate or momentum.