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How Big A Congressional Win?

BPSCG

Penultimate Amazing
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Someone may want to fact-check this for me, since I got it from Ann Coulter - who we all know is a pathological liar - but it appears on the face of it that there was nothing particularly historic or sweeping about this week's results:

In Franklin D. Roosevelt's sixth year in 1938, Democrats lost 71 seats in the House and six in the Senate.

In Dwight Eisenhower's sixth year in 1958, Republicans lost 47 House seats, 13 in the Senate.

In John F. Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson's sixth year, Democrats lost 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate.

In Richard Nixon/Gerald Ford's sixth year in office in 1974, Republicans lost 43 House seats and three Senate seats.

Even America's greatest president, Ronald Reagan, lost five House seats and eight Senate seats in his sixth year in office.

But in the middle of what the media tell us is a massively unpopular war, the Democrats picked up about 30 House seats and five to six Senate seats in a sixth-year election, with lots of seats still too close to call.

(...snip...)

During eight years of Clinton — the man Democrats tell us was the greatest campaigner ever, a political genius, a heartthrob, Elvis! — Republicans picked up a total of 49 House seats and nine Senate seats in two midterm elections.
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She leaves out 1950 (Truman) for some reason; I couldn't quickly find the actual Senate numbers, but the Dems appear to have lost Senate seats that year, and the GOP picked up 30 seats in the House (the Dems did continue to hold both houses, though).

So the Democratic wins this time are nothing unusual.

But it occurs to me that both parties have refined the art of gerrymandering to an unprecedented degree, so there are very few truly competetive districts any more. So a House pickup of 30 seats today may be much more impressive than one fifty years ago.

Or may not. Because, on the other hand, a switch of six Senate seats today truly is comparable to switches in past years, since you can't gerrymander an entire state (not that the politicians wouldn't try it if they could).

Thoughts? Is this truly a historic change? Or is it an utterly typical U.S. election cycle, where the sixth year of a presidency has been, historically, the worst?
 
Just read an article on Slate about this exact issue this morning.

Enjoy

http://www.slate.com/id/2153281/?nav=tap3

The Myth of the Six-Year Itch
The laws of history didn't doom the Republicans.
By David Greenberg
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006, at 5:33 PM ET
Whenever the party in power takes a hit in the midterms, it takes refuge in the past. Since the governing party almost always loses seats in off-year races, the president is said merely to have fallen prey to the ineluctable tides of history—much in the way that presidents who face economic depressions disown any blame by fingering the all-powerful "business cycle."

In particular, parties that incur setbacks in their presidents' second terms like to hide behind the "six-year itch," to use an ungainly term favored by political scientists. Typically a president's second-term off-year losses outstrip his first-term losses, and it's tempting to imagine some iron law of history at work—a structural force that has afflicted even popular presidents, such as Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 and Ronald Reagan in 1986. George Will, for one, made this argument on ABC last night.

But plans to invoke the six-year itch ought to be scratched. Politics has no iron laws: As circumstances change, so does political behavior. (Significantly, Bush in 2002 and Bill Clinton in 1998 both defied the trends, suggesting that gerrymandering, microtargeting, polarization, or other factors have scrambled historical patterns.) What's more, there have been too few sixth-year elections to be statistically meaningful. Most important, the variables in any given election—wars, recessions, scandals, social crises—matter more than tendencies built in to the system. On inspection, the six-year itch resembles less a chronic disease than a phantom illness on the order of chronic fatigue syndrome.
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BPSCG said:
Thoughts? Is this truly a historic change? Or is it an utterly typical U.S. election cycle, where the sixth year of a presidency has been, historically, the worst?
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The latter.

Each of us likes to think that what we are doing, and the time we are doing it in, is the most important. It is a natural feeling. Also, with the hype machines going 24/7, there needs to be grist for the mill.

What I want to see, and it will take time to see this, is whether or not some of the Dems recently elected get coopted by the lefto Demos, or if there is a move toward the center based on who is arriving. Heath Shuler? James Webb? Neither of them strikes me as a lefto liberal.

The test of a Senator, per JFK's fine "Profiles in Courage" is in balancing the unholy trinity of demands on his loyalty: party, constituency, nation by adherence to Constitutional principles. We shall see if anyone in the Senate tries to achieve that standard, I haven't seen a lot of Sam Houston style courage lately.

DR
 
Also can someone explain why they keep saying the Dems picked up 30 seats?

The latest numbers I saw have the house at 230 -198 with 7 seats still being decides for argument sake if we give them all to the republicans it would be a 230-205 giving the dems a 25 seat majority. I may have the facts wrong but weren’t they a 15 seat minority going into the election. From my math that is a 40 seat swing already. With potential with those undecided districts to be a bit higher.

Can someone please let me know if I have my figures wrong? Just looking for clarification.

Edit:

Finally found the hard numbers:

Current Congress:

229 Republicans
201 Democrats
1 Independent

So the math is a 30 seat pick up but about a 60 member swing. That was my confusion; please ignore the ramblings above.
 
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Anyone else notice how Coulter slyly changed her method of counting when it came to Clinton? LOL! I wonder why that is? ;)

Lurker
 
BPSCG said:
She leaves out 1950 (Truman) for some reason; Thoughts? Is this truly a historic change?
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I notice that in none of her examples did the party in power lose control of both houses of congress. (Yet leaves out 1946 when they did)
 
But plans to invoke the six-year itch ought to be scratched.
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If the war had gone well, the Repubs wouldn't have lost many seats.

This is an unusual period with a war going on (but, sadly, not that unusual.)

Without such a thing, people get discontent with the government's economic policy, which, in turn, relies on the probably fraudulent theory that the government can do as much to improve the economy as it can to harm it (via regulation and taxation.) Yet if the latter is much "easier" to accomplish (the economy happily tanks even if a law has the bestestest of intentions) voters will think somebody else pulling the strings'll do a better job.
 
Rule of thumb: If someone claims that Reagan was "America's greatest president", it's pretty likely they're full of crap.
 
Tony said:
Rule of thumb: If someone claims that Reagan was "America's greatest president", it's pretty likely they're full of crap.
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Nothing substantive to say (again), despite my invitation
...to fact-check this for me, since I got it from Ann Coulter...
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Why am I not surprised?

Lurker at least went to the trouble of suggesting the "six-year rule" didn't hold for Clinton (anyone got the 1998 numbers?), though IIRC, he did lose a bunch of seats while getting elected in 1992.

Anyway, I've seen some observations that second terms go bad for a number of reasons: 1) You get elected, you address the issues you said you would address, then you run out of gas; 2) Meanwhile, a whole bunch of new issues come up that you hadn't figured on dealing with, and also meanwhile, 3) Your first team that came in full of energy and ideas and ambition, has gotten tired and either retired to write their memoirs, or has simply, also, run out of gas, and you've replaced them with people who you evidently didn't think were good enough to be the first team when you came in.
 
BPSCG said:
Nothing substantive to say (again), despite my invitation Why am I not surprised?
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You and coulter don't deserve it. Sorry, I've lost patience for right-wing extremists.
 
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BPSCG said:
Nothing substantive to say (again), despite my invitation Why am I not surprised?

Lurker at least went to the trouble of suggesting the "six-year rule" didn't hold for Clinton (anyone got the 1998 numbers?), though IIRC, he did lose a bunch of seats while getting elected in 1992.

Anyway, I've seen some observations that second terms go bad for a number of reasons: 1) You get elected, you address the issues you said you would address, then you run out of gas; 2) Meanwhile, a whole bunch of new issues come up that you hadn't figured on dealing with, and also meanwhile, 3) Your first team that came in full of energy and ideas and ambition, has gotten tired and either retired to write their memoirs, or has simply, also, run out of gas, and you've replaced them with people who you evidently didn't think were good enough to be the first team when you came in.
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Theoretically, I can think of an option 4) You get elected, you don't address the issues you said you would address.
 
Tony said:
You and coulter don't deserve it. Sorry, I've lost patience for right-wing extremists.
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Well, since the OP was about neither me nor Coulter, but an invitation to discuss how significant Tuesday's results were, historically, you could have addressed that. Really, if you have nothing to say, you don't have to actually put up a post that says, "I have nothing to say, but here's some invective."
 
Lurker said:
Anyone else notice how Coulter slyly changed her method of counting when it came to Clinton? LOL! I wonder why that is? ;)
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I know this was a rhetorical question but I wanted to look up the facts. It turns out that in Clinton's sixth year, the Democrats actually picked up five seats. That's gotta sting.
 
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