Markos (aka Kos), the boss of this site, is a really smart guy. He wrote something today, House is within reach in 2014. Really. and I agree with most of what he said. I especially agree with the idea that we can win the House in 2014. This diary started as a short reply to his essay and then I wrote more and more and it got longer and longer, so I’m posting it as a separate diary. More below the Orange Julius Muus (I‘ll explain that reference if anyone cares).
I want to focus on two paragraphs that Markos wrote in his diary:
Conventional wisdom holds that the Republicans will hold the House in 2014, and there is nothing unreasonable with that view. Democrats won the House national popular vote by one point in 2012, and yet still suffer a 32-seat minority. In fact, Republicans have been so effective at gerrymandering the House, that estimates suggest Democrats would have to win the House generic popular vote by 7-8 points to get the 17 seats they'd need for the majority. Crazy, huh?
That's not all. The president's party has averaged a loss of 26 seats in the House in the sixth year of his term since WWII, and of course, Democratic base groups are far less likely to turn out in an off-year election. So while conventional wisdom can be misguided, in this case, it's the safe bet for next year's elections.
So the President’s party loses an average of 26 votes in the House in year six of his or her administration? Here are the numbers. Prepare yourself...
Results of House elections (with numbers!)
In case anyone is interested, here‘s how the sitting President‘s party did in year number six of the President‘s administration (numbers from Wikipedia, so they might be off by one or two). The asterisks are special cases.
2006 (GW Bush) R -30 seats
1998 (Clinton) D +5
-- GHW Bush wasn‘t re-elected, so he had no second term.
1986 (Reagan) R -5
-- Carter wasn‘t re-elected, so he had no second term.
* 1974 (Nixon/Ford) R -48
* 1966 LBJ, middle of first full term, D -47
-- JFK was assassinated, so he had no second term.
1958 Eisenhower R -48
* 1950 Truman, middle of first full term, D -28
*
Notes about the special cases, each of which is unique: Nixon resigned in August 1974, three months before the mid-term elections of his sixth year -- so lots of Republicans lost that year. LBJ became president after JFK’s death, then was elected to a full term in 1964 (but his losses in 1966 could be attributed to the southern reaction to civil rights legislation and to liberal reaction against escalation of the war in Viet Nam). Truman became president after FDR’s death, then was elected to a full term in 1948. So none of these, technically, was year #6, but you could consider them the equivalent of year #6.
GW Bush’s party sucked in year 6. Clinton and Reagan didn’t do so bad. And before that there are lots of asterisks.
I have several thoughts rolling around in my head:
The Democratic Demographics
In the upcoming 2014 election, the demographics can work for us or they can work against us.
The demographics favor us because older rich white men tend to vote Republican, but lots of groups (young people, poor people, non-whites, and women) tend to be more Democratic. We have a bigger base and it’s growing bigger every year as those old rich white guys die off.
But demographics are against us, to some degree, because voter turnout is significantly lower in non-presidential years. Here’s the problem: The people who don’t vote in off years tend to be younger and poorer and more low-information (maybe they have an opinion about who should be president, but don’t know who their representative is, so they don‘t vote in the midterms). In addition, people who dislike the current president, of whatever political party, are more motivated to vote in midterms.
From 1972 on (when 18-year-olds got the vote), about 53% of U.S. adults aged 18+ voted in presidential years, while only 38% voted in off years. So voting drops by about a third. This statistic includes all adults -- including people who aren’t registered to vote for whatever reason, felons who can‘t vote, old people who are too sick or too weak to vote, and resident non-citizens who might be living in the country legally or not. (I have many of these numbers at hand because I wrote this Dkos diary back in 2009: Looking at Midterm Elections). If Democrats can get out the vote in 2014, we will do well. Plus, if there are nasty primary fights between Rich Republicans and Libertarians and Teabaggers, people might decide to vote for the Democrat (because Democrats usually act like they’re relatively sane).
--
If you have big coat tails in a presidential year, you might lose more in the off year
Another factor is backlash. If a president has big coattails in the presidential year it can lead to big losses in the midterms.
Consider this: when Truman was barely elected President in 1948, the Dems gained 75 seats in the House (which astounds me). Losing 28 Democrats in the 1950 midterms doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect; it‘s still an overall gain of 49.
When LBJ was elected in the 1964 landslide against Goldwater, Dems gained 36 in the House and then they lost 47 in the 1966 midterms, so the Democrats were down only 11 overall.
And look at Reagan -- Republicans in the House gained 34, lost 26, gained 16, lost 5 (always gains in presidential election years and always losses in off years).
The second Bush had no Presidential coattails to speak of in presidential election years (the House lost 2 Republicans in 2000 and gained 3 Republicans in 2004 -- so the election of Bush2 as President had virtually no effect on the House). Then he lost 30 Republicans in year six.
--
A couple more things and then I‘m done
One second to last (penultimate) thing that bothers me a lot is this: In 2010 (the year of the Tea Party), a lot of state legislatures turned Republican. Then the 2010 census led to redistricting plans and gerrymandering to favor Republicans in some states (by Republican legislatures). I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet the Republicans have some significant advantage there. It’s not a level playing field.
A final comment: In recent years there have been numerous voter-suppression laws, all of which are an bald-faced attempt to rig elections, almost exclusively by Republicans, who invoke various bullshit justifications for limiting the right of voters to vote. I bet I could name a dozen ways they’re attempting to prevent Democrats from voting, including fewer voting machines in Democratic areas (in Ohio and elsewhere, which means longer lines, so people in Democratic areas just go home and don’t vote because it‘s taking too long to vote), limiting hours for voting or pre-election voting (in Florida), draconian voter-ID laws (everywhere), various residency rules to prevent college students from voting (in North Dakota and elsewhere -- in ND, the legislature tried to change the residency requirement from 30 days to 90 days, which means a college kid who arrives at college at the beginning of September can‘t vote in November because of the 90-day residency rule), computerized purges of voter registration lists (in Florida), stationing people at polling places to challenge voters (everywhere), trying to eliminate same-day voter registration (in Minnesota), and so on. Republicans want to discourage people from voting by making it harder to vote. Then they'll win. By preventing citizens from voting.
And that’s the end of my rant. Thanks, Markos, for spurring me to write this.