Presidents Almost Always Lose Power In Congress In Mid-Term Elections
By John J. Duncan Jr.
In the summer of 1964, I started working as a bagboy at an A & P Grocery Store on Asheville Highway. I was making $1.10 an hour, and I sent my first paycheck ($19 plus a few cents) as a contribution to the Barry Goldwater for President campaign.
The race for the White House that year was the first election that I became really interested in, even excited about, other than my father’s 1963 race for re-election as mayor of Knoxville.
Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Johnson, who got 61.1% of the vote, and anything over 60% has traditionally been classified as a landslide.
My Dad was running for Congress for the first time in 1964, and he won, but most Republicans, including our friend Howard Baker, who was running for the Senate, lost that year.
So many Republicans were defeated that in January of 1965 at the swearing-in ceremony, there were 295 Democrats to only 140 Republicans in the House.
There were not even enough seats for all the Democrats on the Democratic side. The Republicans had so many empty seats that my father got to have me, my brother Joe, and my Iowa grandfather, Dr. J. A. Swisher, stand with him on the House Floor when he was sworn in.
President Johnson quickly became very unpopular, and in the elections in 1966, the Republicans picked up 47 seats in the House, six in the Senate, including Howard Baker, and eight new governors.
This has happened so often in American politics that it is now almost a shock if the president’s party does not lose seats in mid-term elections for Congress.
The president’s party picked up seats in only three mid-term elections since 1862. And in one of those years, 1902, the president’s Republican Party picked up nine seats in the House, but the Democrats added 25, because many new seats were added after the 1900 census.
Some more examples:
Republicans took control of both the House and Senate after President Dwight Eisenhower’s big victory in 1952. However, he lost control of Congress in 1954, and Democrats had majorities in both the House and Senate for the remaining six years he was in the White House. Eisenhower dealt with a Democratic Congress by issuing 181 vetoes, only two of which were overridden. Genial and likable, Ike was much tougher than most people realized.
President Bill Clinton won in 1992, but his unpopularity gave Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In January 1995, Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, and I became chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee. Republicans had controlled the House for just four of the 64 years from 1930 to 1994 (after the 1946 mid-terms and 1952 elections).
President Barack Obama won in 2008, but the Republicans took back control of the Congress in 2010. John Boehner was the new speaker. I became chairman of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee.
The non-partisan Ballotpedia organization reported that “during President Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats lost a net of 948 state legislative seats, the largest loss of Democratic seats during any presidency since at least 1921.
President Trump is well aware of the trend. Republicans lost 40 seats in the House during the 2018 mid-terms. Thus, it will be very difficult (maybe even very unlikely) to improve on the razor-thin majority he has in the new House and the 53 to 47 majority the Republicans have in the Senate.
After a lifetime in politics, the only certain thing I can tell you is that the pendulum swings both ways – sometimes for you and sometimes against you.
Sometimes even “sure” winners are unexpectedly defeated. At one point, Eric Cantor was the only Jewish Republican in the House. He was able to raise a lot of money from all over the country. Because of this, he was moved up very quickly and was made majority leader, the second-highest position in the Republican Conference.
In 2014, a very unusual year because of a nationwide group called the Tea Party, unknown professor Dave Brat ran against Cantor in the Republican primary with very little money.
Brat had made illegal immigration and protecting our borders the theme of his campaign. Cantor was supported by extremely big business and favored open borders.
Cantor was told by his professional pollster the day before the primary that he was more than 30 points ahead of Brat. Brat won by more than 10 points and everyone was shocked. Cantor had become the first-ever sitting majority leader, in either party, to lose a primary election.
Of course, I was also in the House in 1994 when Tom Foley, the Democrat speaker of the House, lost his November general election in Washington State. That same year, the ABC national news reported one week before the election that Mario Cuomo was 16 points ahead in his race to be re-elected as governor of New York. He lost by five points.
