New speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., holds the gavel during the opening session of the 116th Congress at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 3, 2019.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Given all that’s happened in American politics since 2019, it may be hard to believe there’s been anything missing.
But the decade of the 2020s has yet to see a midterm that mattered much — or that ranked among the impact midterms of past decades.
That sets the 2020s apart, as every other decade over the past hundred years has produced at least one midterm that made a big difference in Congress and in national politics more broadly.
These big-impact midterms have also shifted power in the statehouses, often signaling changes in state and national political landscapes that have mattered and lasted.
Midterms do not attract the same level of voter participation or voter interest as presidential elections. When the White House is not at stake, “low propensity voters” tend to tune out. Overall vote totals slide by about one-third.
But those voters who show up for midterms elect just as many members of Congress and fill just as many state legislative seats as voters in presidential years. Moreover, midterm voters determine about two-thirds of the nation’s governorships.
The big midterms have tended to come in presidents’ second terms, when their popularity and political energy may be waning. And just because a president is not on the ballot does not mean he’s irrelevant. Historically, each president’s detractors have seen midterms as an opportunity, while his supporters have often been complacent — or at least less motivated.
All this contributes to the general expectation that the midterms arriving Nov. 3 will be important, and perhaps momentous.
Flexing midterm muscles
Because this is a decade with three presidential cycles (2020, 2024 and 2028), it is also a decade with just two midterms. One went by in 2022. Some expected at the time that a “big red wave” would sweep then-President Biden’s majorities out of Congress.
It did not happen. Democrats held on in the Senate, and the House shifted from barely Democratic to barely Republican. That did bring an end to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s second (and last) turn with the Big Gavel. But the GOP would spend much of the next two years struggling to unite behind a speaker of their own.
That’s a far cry from the big midterms that have at times rivaled presidential elections for responding to the mood of the times and rearranging the landscape.
If we take the last hundred years as our sample, we can start with the midterms that followed the Wall Street “Crash of 1929.” That financial panic set off a sequence of events that would be called the Great Depression, and the collateral damage included the closing of an era of Republican dominance in Washington.
That era ended with the midterms of 1930, which cost the GOP eight Senate seats and 52 seats in the House in November 1930. Although the GOP initially retained small majorities in both chambers, they lost it in the House with the results of a few special elections early in 1931.
The “Democratic New Year’s Eve Cheer” cartoon from Dec. 31, 1931, reflects the Democrats’ win of the House that year after special elections.
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The Senate remained nominally Republican but featured a working majority of Democrats and progressive Republicans. A page had been turned, and Democrats would take control outright in 1932 and hold that majority through World War II.
After that war had ended, the period of Democratic hegemony under President Franklin Roosevelt also ended, and abruptly, with the results of the midterm of 1946.
Pendulum swings both ways
Republican numbers in Congress had fallen so far in the FDR years (below 100 at one point in the 435-seat House) that it seemed impossible for them to return to power. But in 1946 they stormed back to majority control of both House and Senate in a single midterm cycle.
Midterms have continued to serve as political regulators in the generations since. Dwight Eisenhower won two landslide elections as president in the 1950s, but he lost the House in 1954 and needed the vice president to break ties in the Senate.
In his second term, the re-elected “Ike” did not control Capitol Hill, and in the 1958 midterms saw his party drop to just 35 seats in the Senate.
The Senate Democrats first elected in 1958 established a critical mass that would later drive the bipartisan super-majorities 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 would become part of the language, such as Medicare and Medicaid. It was all part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program.
What goes up …
Demonstrators carrying signs against the war in Vietnam march in front of the White House in April 1965 in Washington, D.C.
AFP via Getty Images/AFP
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AFP via Getty Images/AFP
But by the midterm year of 1966, much of the energy from LBJ’s landslide election in 1964 had been expended — and much more had been siphoned off by his escalation of the war in Vietnam.
Right on time, the midterm arrived, and while the Democrats only took a haircut in the Senate elections they lost a painful 47 seats to the GOP in the House. It gave the party a new lease on life and encouraged its new emphasis on winning in the South. The redirection would guide the party’s 1968 presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, and remain a focus for the onetime “Party of Lincoln” for decades to come.
Also in the midterm of 1966, out on the West Coast, a first-time candidate named Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California. People were starting to use the term “Sunbelt.”
Yet another midterm correction
But what the midterms of 1966 gave the GOP, the midterms of 1974 would largely take away. Nixon had been elected president in 1968, pursuing what was called a Southern Strategy, and was reelected in a resounding 49-state landslide in 1972.
But by 1974 it had all gone the other way for Nixon. The “Watergate” scandals emerged from his 1972 campaign’s use of burglary and electronic surveillance among other unsavory tactics. An attempt to cover it all up blew back on the White House and forced Nixon to resign on the brink of impeachment in August of 1974 – just three months before the midterm for his second term.
The result was a crushing defeat for the GOP, the loss of 48 seats in the House and several more in the Senate (where the Democrats already had more than 60 votes).
While it is tempting to attribute these losses to Nixon’s downfall, the country had — to some extent — rallied behind his vice president and successor, Gerald R. Ford. The underlying vulnerability of the GOP was the state of the economy, which was suffering from inflation and the hangover from the oil embargo of 1973 by Arab members of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
That embargo, a side effect of the Arab-Israeli “Yom Kippur War” of 1973, temporarily raised the price of crude oil from $3 to $12 and introduced Americans to the phrases “oil shock” and “energy crisis.”
Reagan rises and falls
President Ronald Reagan waves beside his wife, Nancy Reagan, after being sworn in as 40th president of the United States by Chief Justice Warren Burger on Jan. 20, 1981, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Consolidated News Pictures/AFP via Getty Images
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Consolidated News Pictures/AFP via Getty Images
Reagan became the dominant political personality of the 1980s, defeating incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and winning a 49-state landslide reelection in 1984. He was able to carry in a majority for Republicans in the Senate and establish a kind of working majority in the House with the aid of conservative Democrats in that chamber.
On the strength of those elections, restrained only marginally by the midterm elections of 1982, Reagan began his second term on top of the world. But he soon learned how hard that height can be to hold. As he neared his second midterm, Democrats were on the march nationally and restoring their strength in the more populous Southern states.
In 1986, Democrats defeated six GOP senators who had been elected with Reagan in 1980. The net gain of eight Senate seats gave them a 55-45 majority. In the session of Congress that followed, the Senate would override Reagan’s veto of a highway bill and reject his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Reagan was a spent force.
Yet more dramatic reversals to come
Reagan was able to see his vice president, George H.W. Bush, take the White House in 1988, but the party’s hopes for momentum into the 1990 midterms were largely unfulfilled. The presidency was also lost in 1992, when Democrat Bill Clinton won a three-way race with just 43% of the popular vote, defeating Bush and independent candidate H. Ross Perot.
Clinton’s lack of a majority and list of frustrations in his first term set the stage for a bruising first midterm election in 1994. But what came was beyond bruising. Republicans stormed to their first majority in the House (54 seats net) in 40 years and recaptured the Senate with eight new seats there as well.
The new GOP speaker, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, was a hard-driving partisan who had portrayed the chamber as a House of Ill Repute, the title of a book he and other House Republicans had published.
The use of a “Contract with America” theme promised lower taxes, less corruption and a healthier economy in a compact agenda that had voter appeal as well.
Gingrich explicitly rejected the go-along-get-along attitude of previous GOP leaders in the House and advocated confrontation. The strategy proved less fruitful once he had the Big Gavel, however, and Gingrich spent much of his time as speaker making deals with Clinton. Internal dissatisfaction with him forced him out late in 1998.
Mood swings in the 2000s
In the new century that followed, parties have continued to prosper when their presidential candidates win and give ground in the midterms. George W. Bush was an exception as the president after the terror attacks of September 2001. In his first midterm the following year, theGOP made gains across the board.
But the larger dynamic caught up to him in 2006, when he and his party took what he called “a thumpin'” in elections at all levels. Bush had initially gained popularity with his “War on Terror” and won a second term. But thereafter, his invasion of Iraq had become an albatross. And in 2006 he paid the historic price, losing both his party majorities in the House and Senate. The new majority in the House made Pelosi the first woman speaker in history.
That created an atmosphere of optimism for Democrats, who elected Barack Obama president in 2008 and gave him majorities in the House and Senate (the latter briefly reaching 60 seats). But Obama felt the sting of the midterms early — much as Clinton had. Republicans in 2010 capitalized on an economy still experiencing the recession that had aided Obama’s win in 2008. The GOP also capitalized on fears and confusion surrounding the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” in 2010.
Echoing his predecessor, Obama called this setback “a shellacking,” and settled in to work with a much diminished Senate majority and a Republican-dominated House under Speaker John Boehner.
President Barack Obama is greeted by House Speaker John Boehner and Vice President Joe Biden prior to delivering his State of the Union address in January 2011 at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
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Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Obama managed to thread the needle well enough to win a second term for himself in 2012, but the House remained Republican and the Senate followed suit in Obama’s second midterm election in 2014.
That second midterm revealed continuing GOP 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.
If the 2020s are to have a midterm with the kind of impact others have had, roughly once a decade for a century, the last opportunity for that to happen is Nov. 3.
If the once-a-decade rhythm has any rationale, in fact, the pressure for a meaningful midterm ought to be building substantially. And in fact most pollsters, pundits and other prognosticators now predict Democrats could flip control of the House and even the Senate as well.
Just as in the previous 10 cycles, the current cycle combines economic concerns (including energy prices) and negative stories about incumbents in various offices. It is the party perceived as being in power that is exposed in a midterm, and it pays a price when voters perceive that party to have lost its mandate — or at least its momentum.
This story originally appeared on NPR
