Home » A walk through presidential first-term midterms election history of the last 100 years

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A walk through presidential first-term midterms election history of the last 100 years — 21 Comments

  1. Ten days post election & they still can’t call Kiley in CA 03 or Valadao in CA 22. 61% and 75% of the vote counted.

  2. So, an oft repeated lie, or common journalistic ignorance? Maybe a combination of both.
    Costanza rule applies.

  3. Posts like this are why I come here. The media tells you all kinds of things that are not only false, but easily shown to be false with a few hours’ work.

    We used to hear about the taller candidate winning the Presidential election, but it had no real predictive value, it was true until it wasn’t.

  4. The most amazing part is this supposed ‘historical fact’ didn’t even happen the last mid term in 2018.

    So many of the journalists reporting on this just skipped right over that.

    Political moods are way more complicated than this easy ‘fact’ implies.

    Any trend that exists is very weak and not very consistent.

  5. Thank you for making a strong case of likely fraud. Popular presidents who were perceived as doing a good job didn’t get punished. Presidents who were unpopular and doing horrible jobs got hurt. That’s what your breakdown very clearly shows.

    Which applies to Biden?

    The results are unprecedented on an extraordinary level.

  6. Responding to stan (5:19 pm) . . .

    But we need to bear in mind that the visceral venom hurled at Trump was, I think, unprecedented, at least in part due to the sophisticated state of the omnipresent media, who were very, very happy to deliver and reinforce the venom (over and over . . .).

    The 2022 vote still featured the odiferous impetus of voting against the hated Trump.

    (No, I am in no way suggesting that the above was the *sole* explanation for the 2022 midterm results.)

  7. stan:

    I don’t see it that way. What I see is a trend from domination of Congress by one party or another (but mostly domination by Democrats, and often very strong domination by Democrats) to a situation where in recent years the split between the 2 parties is much more even and also relatively stable. After that, you don’t see strong party majorities from either party.

    In Coolidge and Hoover’s time it was consistent Republican domination, with ups and downs in the manner you describe tracking in sync with the presidents’ popularity. Then beginning with FDR, there was a lengthy period of tremendous and consistent Democrat domination (tracking in sync with presidents’ popularity). This trend to a strong Democrat majority was only interrupted one short time during Truman’s presidency (with a Republican majority that was not only brief but small) and a somewhat even split during the Eisenhower years. Then with Kennedy’s election it goes back to a tremendous Democrat majority again (with the usual ups and downs tracking presidential popularity) and this Democrat skew lasts till the Reagan years.

    With George W. Bush, however, we enter what I consider a new pattern, which is the fairly even split. This pattern has persisted with some ups and downs. And even those smaller ups and downs don’t track presidential popularity quite as well as they did in the past. For example, Trump gained seats during his first-term midterm even though his popularity as measured by polls was low at the time. It is especially relevant to the discussion of 2022 because he was the most recent president prior to Biden.

    That’s for the Senate. The House is different because all its members are elected every two years, among other reasons. However, it generally follows a somewhat similar pattern over the last 100 years – that is, strong majorities (mostly Democrat ones) yielding to closer splits on average in more recent years. Joe Biden’s tenure has featured particularly close splits, with an eight-seat Democrat advantage giving way this time to what will probably be something even smaller for Republicans.

    I don’t think these trends have as much to do with presidential coattails as they used to. I think they have taken on a life of their own and represent a very fundamental and more or less even split.

    Another trend I’ve noticed is that presidents no longer enjoy high approval ratings for as much of their terms. More sustained times of high approval used to be more common, and although there certainly were also times in which a president had low approval, it was usually not for a large portion of their tenure and often came towards the end of it (Truman, LBJ, Nixon). Now, both Trump and Biden have had low approval most of the time they were president, and even Obama – who started out very popular and finished up somewhat popular – had popularity ratings in the 40s most of the time. So that is another change.

    Therefore I think it’s a mistake to think that the figures in this post prove fraud. Nor do they disprove it. Because of the change in recent patterns, I don’t think they tell us all that much about fraud.

    Fraud vs. no fraud was not the thrust of my post, of course. The point of the post was to disprove the commonly-heard statement about first-term midterms.

  8. This is good analysis. I think we’ve had big midterm rebukes recently because we’ve had highly unusual and even radical presidencies. Take away Obama’s two rebukes in 2010 and 2014 and there’s barely a pattern.

    But that leaves us with Biden this year. If you’re judging in terms of radicalism, he richly deserved a 2010 or 2014 level defeat.

    I think one of the reasons that didn’t happen is people judged “stop the steal” to be more radical that Biden and the Democrats. I think a lot of people on the right who are concerned (rightly) about eletion integrity fail to recognize just how radical and destructive their rhetoric can sound. For example, Doug Mastriano promised that, if elected governor of PA, he would not certify the 2024 presidential election for PA unless the Republican won. FWIW, I doubt that he would have carried through on that promise if the Demcorat’s nominee won a clear victory, but that’s what the man said.

    What is more radical? Illegally preventing renters from getting kicked out of their homes, illegally “forgiving” hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, or promising to ignore the results of future elections if they don’t go your way.

    That’s not to apologize for Biden or excuse him in any way, but just put yourself in the shoes of a non-partisan voter and ask which of those things is more radical and more of a threat?

  9. The Democrats did an amazing job of tilting the voting playing field through efforts fair and foul.

    Census “reapportionment” mistake was impressive skullduggery. Oh, I’m “sure” it was an honest mistake…

    And interestingly no challenges were done to it.

    And the GOP dropped the ball in many areas. Deliberate incompetence? The Gop needs to up its game.

  10. One other factor is that this was a bad year for Republican Senate incumbents. Republicans had to defend a lot more seats this year and 2024 is a much friendlier map for the Republicans.

    And to further connect that point to the midterms the 2024 Senate races are the same ones that happened in Trump’s midterm year of 2018 when he defied the ‘conventional wisdom’.

    What seats are up for election also has a big impact on all of this which further makes this a shaky ‘trend’.

  11. Thanks for doing all the homework. It was not so much the history as the expectation that a president doing as badly as Biden is would have to lose a lot of seats. People filled in the history afterwards based on watershed elections they remember (1994, 2010). As I remember it though, it’s often in the sixth year, rather than the second year, of a party’s tenure in the White House that voter boredom or impatience or disgust sinks in (1938, 1946 (six years after FDR’s 1940 win), 1958, 1966, 1974, 1986, 2006). Call it the Sixth Year Itch. Clinton 1998 was something of an exception. His party had already had a big loss four years before, the country wasn’t in bad shape, and voters were as tired of impeachment as they were of him.

    What made this election different is that the Democrats have such support and control in their states that it was impossible to dislodge even incompetent incumbents even when an incompetent Democratic administration is making a mess of the country. Abortion had a lot to do with it. So did Trump — more the mere existence of Trump, rather than anything he said or did this year. But I have to wonder if this is the future for the Blue States. Have they all become Massachusetts?

  12. Democrats were probably also able to hold on to three seats they could have lost due to census overcounting in NY, RI, and MN. Add to that that some states didn’t have a reapportionment plan approved until it was too late to be applied to this election.

  13. some compared to 1970, the dems lost some seats, but some of the ones like lowell weicker, good grief he was terrible, back then buckleys brother actually won in new york,

  14. Abraxas:

    I think you are quite correct about how people filter their memories. Thing is, some of these people are pundits/authors who are supposed to be experts in history.

    I think that many incumbents have long been difficult to dislodge no matter what they do.

  15. Too many bad candidates for Senate and Trump and his giant ego and enormous mouth frankly should step aside.

  16. I noted this earlier, I believe, but it’s a good commentary on why the “Red Wave” did not happen, yet the Dems do need to very much fear for 2024…

    And this year may not have been what was hoped for but was a very bad sign for Dems going forward.

    Mark Levin:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fhkvbocrmk

    Take from it what you will.

  17. I think Victor Davis Hanson has correctly identified seven reasons why the midterms were a disappointment. Here are some of them:

    “…Five, this time the silent and undercounted voters were not disillusioned MAGA supporters who hung up on pollsters’ calls.

    Instead, pollsters missed the 70% of those under 30, along with single women, who voted straight Democratic tickets.

    Mannered Republicans may have scoffed at how Biden and the Left demagogued the abortion issue, or slandered Republicans as semi-fascists and un-American insurrectionists. They shrugged at Biden’s hokey efforts at buying off young voters with amnesties for marijuana convictions and student loans or offering slightly cheaper gas by draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

    But all those low-minded strategies resulted in high left-wing enthusiasm and turnout.

    Six, usually reliable conservative pollsters forecast a huge Republican victory. Apparently, they oversampled conservative voters, reasoning that left-leaning pollsters usually undersampled them.

    They were not just wrong, but way off. And the ensuing hubris of certain victory led to nemesis as Republicans let up the last few weeks. Thousands of conservative voters may have passed at the chance to go to the polls deeming their votes superfluous.

    Seven, the Left smeared conservatives as democracy destroyers and violent insurrectionists. So, when the Republicans offered nonstop negative appraisals of Biden’s failed policies without commensurate alternative positive agendas, they unknowingly fed into the Democrats’ false narrative of cranky nihilists.

    Could not Republicans have offered an upbeat and coherent contract with America that offered uplifting, concrete solutions to each of Biden’s messes?…”

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