Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of United States Midterm Elections

Starting point is 00:00:00 Every four years, Americans go to polling places where they do not decide who will be president of the United States. These elections usually aren't given as much historical attention as presidential elections. Nonetheless, they can be extremely important and can influence a president's agenda. Learn more about the history of midterm elections and how they have influenced U.S. history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time. to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

Starting point is 00:00:50 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thulein podcast from NPR. In a parliamentary system, elections can be held at almost any time. When a parliamentary election is held, everything is on the ballot all at once. Every member of parliament is up for election, and then by extension, the prime minister and all the cabinet positions will be determined. as well. Other than perhaps local or district elections, there's no such thing as an election between the elections. In the American system, national elections are set according to the calendar.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Moreover, members of the House of Representatives have a two-year term, the president has a four-year term, and senators have a six-year term. The result of these staggered term lengths is that every four years you have a major election where the president is not up for election, but every member of the House and a third of the Senate is up for election. These elections, which take place in the middle of a presidential term, are known as midterm elections. Midterm elections traditionally don't get the same amount of attention as elections that take place during a presidential year. This is true for both historians and voters. Voter turnout during a presidential election year has traditionally hovered around 60%, whereas

Starting point is 00:02:05 the turnout in a midterm election is usually traditionally only about 40%. Because the president is not in the ballot, midterm elections have largely been considered a referendum on whoever the sitting president is. Since the country was founded, there have been 109 midterm elections. As the results for the 109th election aren't in yet, as I'm recording this episode, I'm going to focus on the first 108 midterm elections. The history of midterm elections can broadly be broken up into two periods. The first period consists of the nine elections which took place between 1790 and 1822.

Starting point is 00:02:41 The second period consists of 1826 to the present. If you remember back to my episode on the six political eras in American history, the first period of midterm elections corresponds to the first political era when the federalist and Democratic Republicans were the two major parties. There were nine midterm elections held during this first period. What makes these first nine midterms different is the fact that in eight of the nine elections, the party of the sitting president picked up seats in the House of Representatives. Also, in eight of the nine elections, the party of the president gained or at least didn't lose. Seats in the Senate. The only time the President's Party lost seats in the House of Representatives was the election of 1794, when George Washington's Federalist lost four seats in the House. Likewise, in 1814, the midterm election during James Madison's second term, the Democrat Republicans

Starting point is 00:03:32 lost three seats in the Senate. A special note are the elections of 1802 and 1822. In the 1802 election, the first term of Thomas Jefferson, his party gained 35 seats in the House. In the 1812, In 1822 election, the second term of James Monroe, his party gained 34 seats. In the case of the 1822 election, this was in the middle of the era of good feelings, where the country was basically a one-party state because the Federalist Party had fallen apart. The 34 seats gained in 1822 was the largest ever for a midterm election. After the election of 1822, midterm elections forever changed. This was the beginning of the second political era which ushered in a new era of partisanship.

Starting point is 00:04:15 The defining characteristic of the 100 elections held since 1826 is that the party of the sitting president has lost seats in the House of Representatives in 94 of those elections. And in one of those six elections, it was a draw. This doesn't mean that control of the House changed necessarily, but it does mean that the power of the sitting president's party decreased. If midterm elections are a referendum on the sitting president, it means that support for the president decreased 94% of the time. What were the six elections where a president's party did not lose seats in the House?

Starting point is 00:04:49 The first was in 1834, during the second Andrew Jackson administration, where he neither gained nor lost any seats. This is the only time this has happened in U.S. history. The next time a president's party gained seats was in 1866 during the very unpopular Andrew Johnson administration. This was a unique case because Johnson assumed the presidency when Lincoln died, yet he was a Democrat, whereas Lincoln was a Republican. So you could think, of Johnson's nine-seat increase as really being a nine-seat decrease for Lincoln. The next time a president's party gained seats was in 1902 during the first Theodore Roosevelt administration. The Republicans gained nine seats with no change in the Senate. The fourth time it

Starting point is 00:05:31 happened was in 1934 during the first administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Here too, he gained only nine seats in the House, but a huge nine seats in the Senate. The fifth time was in 1998, when during the second Bill Clinton administration, the Democrats picked up four seats in the House, and the last time it happened was in 2002 when Republicans picked up nine seats in the House in the first George W. Bush administration. So even in the few times that a president's party didn't lose seats, the number they picked up was so small that they could be counted on your fingers. The same trends don't quite hold as well with the Senate. Because only a third of the Senate is up for election, and because for most of U.S. history, senators weren't popularly elected, there were more

Starting point is 00:06:12 elections where the President's Party would pick up seats in the Senate. Since the end of the Second World War, the sitting President's Party has, on average, lost 26 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate. While losing seats is the norm in a midterm election, what have been the biggest drubbings in history. The most lopsided midterm defeat was one which I previously mentioned in my episode on the panic of 1893. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland's Democrats lost 127 seats in the House of Representatives. and four seats in the Senate. The election represented a major political realignment in the United States, which resulted in the McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft administrations which were to follow.

Starting point is 00:06:53 One of the ironic things about the midterm election of 1894 is that the midterm election just before that in 1890 was the second biggest drubbing for an incumbent presidential party. This time it was the other way around. President Benjamin Harrison's Republican Party lost 93 seats to the Democrats. This was also due to a a recession, the panic of 1890, which was not nearly as bad as the panic of 1893, but the timing of it with the election had maximum impact. Perhaps the biggest repudiation of a president in a midterm election took place in 1874 in the second Ulysses S. Grant administration. The Republicans that year also suffered a 93-seat loss in the House and a 10-seat loss in the Senate. The grant administration was notoriously corrupt, and with the Democrat-leaning Southern States admitted back

Starting point is 00:07:40 to the union, it was an inevitable backlash to the Republican hegemony from after the Civil War. Both of those numbers of seat losses are the second largest total ever. But in 1874, both the House and the Senate were much smaller due to fewer states being in the Union. That makes the midterm election of 1874 the worst midterm election in terms of the percentage of seats lost. The 20th century hasn't seen any midterm election as bad as those in the 19th century. There have been six midterm elections. since 1900, where the President's Party lost more than 50 House seats. William Tafts Republicans lost 56 seats in 1919.

Starting point is 00:08:18 Woodrow Wilson's Democrats lost 61 seats in 1914. Warren Harding's Republicans lost 77 seats in 22. Herbert Hoover's Republicans lost 52 seats in 1930. Franklin and Roosevelt's Democrats lost 72 seats in 1938. Harry Truman's Democrats lost 54 seats in 1946. Bill Clinton's Democrats lost 54 seats in 1994. and Barack Obama's Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010. There were also two 48-seat drops by Republicans in 1958 under Dwight Eisenhower and in 1978

Starting point is 00:08:50 under Gerald Ford. In addition to the party of the sitting president losing seats in Congress, the effect is usually more pronounced during a president's second term and has been dubbed the six-year itch. With 94% of all midterm elections over the last 200 years resulting in a loss of seats for the party of the sitting president, the mid-term effect is one of the surest things in American politics. Even in the few cases where it didn't happen, the effect was very slight in the opposite direction. I don't know who the president of the United States will be in the year 24, or what political party they will belong to. However, I'd be willing

Starting point is 00:09:27 to bet money right now that their party will probably lose seats in Congress in 2046. Everything Everywhere Daily is an airwave media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of United States Midterm Elections

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