Democrat leaders can at least take solace from one aspect of their legislative losses this week: they’re largely following an historical trend.
Since 1934, U.S. voters have more often than not substantially pared back the number of people representing the president’s party in the U.S. legislature.
Sometimes, as seems the case this year with popular opinions against the White House handling of the economy, it is a protest against presidential policies.
Just as often, it seems to be a self-correction, with voters almost intent on making sure that no one party controls both the executive and the legislative, forcing politicians to ultimately compromise and make laws with broad appeal.
“American voters followed the pattern of midterm elections with gusto by repudiating the president’s party. When the economy is stagnant and there’s little expectation of improvement in the near future the party in power will be blamed. That’s what happened to the Democrats on Tuesday,” David Mark, a senior editor at Politico, a political news website, said.
Of course, some years are more dramatic than others. This year’s election will go down as the biggest shift in power in the lower body, the House of Representatives, in 70 years, with at least 59 members of President Barack Obama’s Democrat party making way for the more conservative Republicans.
But even that is not the whole story, since Democrats are slated to lose no more than eight seats in the upper house, or Senate.
That’s still short of the 13 seats the Republican party lost in 1958 when Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House, according to the American Presidency Project.
And, overall, it’s still better than 1938, when Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt lost 71 House members and six senators.
Changes in recent years have generally been protest votes. In 1994, president Bill Clinton saw 52 fellow Democrats ousted from the House - with another eight leaving the Senate - largely to protest his attempts at health care reform. This year’s results are largely seen as a similar reaction to Obama’s successful effort to pass a health care overhaul.
“There’s a big concern among voters about government spending and the Democratic majority played into their worst fears,” said Mr. Mark.
Republican president George W. Bush lost 30 representatives and 6 senators in 2006, in what many saw as a rebuff of his policies on Iraq and Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan also saw 26 of his cohorts ejected from the House (but saw a one-seat Senate gain) in 1982 as American dismayed about the U.S. economy.
Another big loss year was 1974, when Republican Gerald Ford saw 48 House members and five senators depart. But historians note this was months after both the Watergate scandal and Ford’s presidential pardon of Nixon, who had to step down over the scandal, clearing the way for Ford to become president in the first place.
As for the big losses suffered by Roosevelt and his Democratic successor Harry Truman in the 1930s and 1940s, some historians see this as a simple reversal after Democrats had built up massive majorities in both chambers and also due to voter exhaustion with Roosevelt’s interventionist New Deal policies.
