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“Everything changes everything” – Late Baltimore Orioles’ Hall of Fame Manager Earl Weaver
Determining the political landscape for next year’s midterm elections may prove to be impossible.
At least right now.
Midterms have become increasingly challenging to decipher in recent cycles. A learned, Democratic Capitol Hill hand told me after the historic, 63-seat bloodletting by House Democrats in 2010 that the election was “un-modellable.”
Midterms are usually a problem for the party of the president.
NEW RNC CHAIR JOE GRUTERS VOWS TO ‘RIDE THE PRESIDENT ALL THE WAY TO VICTORY’ IN MIDTERMS
That said, Democrats only lost a few House seats in 1962 – immediately following the Cuban Missile Crisis – which nearly brought the U.S. and Soviet Union to nuclear blows.
Democrats lost a staggering 47 House seats in 1966 – the first and only midterm of late President Lyndon Johnson. But the electoral rapture barely dented the robust House majority. Democrats controlled 295 House seats before the 1966 midterms, 248 seats afterwards. Still a comfortable margin.
Very few political observers expected Democrats to lose control of the House in the legendary 1994 midterms – mainly because the party held the House for 40 consecutive years. It was nearly unthinkable that Democrats could lose the House – simply because it had not happened in decades. Democrats and other political observers excoriated the brilliant Michael Barone when he was the lone commentator to forecast that a Republican flip of the House could be in the offing come the fall of 1994.
Barone was right, as Republicans collected 54 seats.
Republicans nearly lost control of the House in the 1998 midterms – after they impeached former President Clinton. Republicans then bested the historic norms in 2002 and held the House, boosted by pro-GOP sentiment following 9/11.
Democrats managed to win back the House in 2018 – following a similar playbook they deployed in…
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