The Six-Year Itch
Democrats may take Congress, but will it matter in the long run?
BY MICHAEL BARONE
Tuesday, October 31, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
As Democrats begin, in George W. Bush's words, "measuring the drapes" in the offices of the House speaker and Senate majority leader, it's worth looking back on the history of sixth-year-of-the-presidency off-year elections. Have big gains for the out party been a harbinger of future voting patterns? And have opposition victories in those elections resulted in significant public policy changes? History gives us clear answers to those questions. They are: sometimes yes and sometimes no.
Sometimes yes: In the post-Civil War years, there were two big sixth-year victories for the out party. The first was in 1874, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, when the opposition Democrats converted a 194-92 deficit in the House to a 169-109 majority. Historians writing in the backwash of the New Deal tended to ascribe this reverse to the Panic of 1873. But my reading of history tells me that this was a revolt against Grant's policy of stationing troops in the South to enforce civil rights for blacks. Americans had been growing weary of this strife (as they may be growing weary of the strife today in Iraq) and wanted the troops sent home. They were, and Democrats held the House for 16 of the next 20 years--and Southern blacks were left to the mercies of segregation laws and lynch mobs.
There was another great reversal 20 years later--the greatest in American electoral history. Amid a depression deeper than any except that of the 1930s, with violent labor strikes and low farm prices, the House flipped to 244-105 Republican from 218-127 Democratic. This was the beginning of the McKinley Republican majority (said to be the model of Karl Rove) which prevailed for most of the time till the '30s. The laissez-faire policies of Democratic President Grover Cleveland were rejected, even by his own party, and the era of Progressive government interventionism--and Republican majorities--followed. This sixth-term off-year election was consequential indeed.
The 20th century presents more of a mixed bag. In 1938 FDR's Democrats had been flying high for six years. In 1936 they won the popular vote for the House by 56%-40%. But in 1938 the popular vote was only 49%-47% Democratic and Republicans gained 75 seats. For most of the next 20 years Congress was dominated by an anti-New Deal coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, much to the fury of liberal political scientists who argued that every Democrat should somehow be compelled to vote for Roosevelt-type programs. FDR's Third New Deal, as Alan Brinkley chronicled, was stopped in its tracks. The field was set for talented maneuverers like the (in 1938) freshman Congressman Lyndon Johnson to manipulate the system for his conservative and Democratic confreres.
The 1946 elections looked like another landscape-altering reversal. Republicans won the House races by a 53%-44% popular vote majority and got a 245-188 majority. "Had enough?" was their slogan, and they promptly set about repealing wartime wage and price controls, reducing wartime tax rates and passing the Taft-Hartley Act, which reduced the power of labor unions (1946 saw the largest number of strikes in American history). They also supported Harry Truman's Cold War aid to Turkey and Greece and the Marshall Plan. This 80th Congress, which Harry Truman labeled "do nothing," and in which Richard Nixon and John Kennedy served as freshmen, made major changes in public policy. But the Republicans' work having been done, the voters pitched them out in 1948. Republicans never again had such a large House majority.
The next big change came in President Eisenhower's sixth year, 1958. It was a recession year, at a time when most voters still feared that the Depression of the 1930s might be returning. Democrats gained 15 seats in the Senate and 50 in the House. This was the first Congress in which a majority believed in FDR's New Deal, 13 years after his death. Their numbers were winnowed a bit in 1960 and 1962 but were augmented in 1964, enough to produce the votes for LBJ's Great Society measures and, with support from most Republicans, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Less consequential for changes in public policy were the Republican gains in the Kennedy-Johnson sixth year, 1966, when Republicans won more House votes than Democrats outside the South; the feat was accomplished again in 1968, when Nixon was elected president. This was a reaction against the Great Society, against riots in the streets of the big cities and uprisings on campuses. But under Nixon, Congress ratified the expansion of government--through wage and price controls, the creation of OSHA and EPA, racial quotas and preferences. Thwarted in his drive for Republican majorities in 1970, he campaigned in 1972 in tandem with conservative Democrats like John Connally. He evidently supposed that Southern Democrats would stick with him on big issues. But when Watergate became an issue, Sam Ervin and other longtime opponents of civil rights let him down. The War Powers and Budget Acts were passed despite Nixon's opposition. The sixth-year election produced neither a Republican majority nor conservative public policies.
Similarly, the big Democratic gains in the Nixon-Ford year of 1974 did not produce policy gains or lasting partisan gains for the out party. The new 2-to-1 Democratic majority in the House did stifle attempts to come to the relief of Saigon. But under Gerald Ford and his successor Jimmy Carter domestic policy did not move far left. Deregulation of transportation and communications proceeded, and a 2-to-1 Democratic House passed a tax bill that cut the capital gains tax and included the great generator of individual investment accounts, Section 401(k).
Under Ronald Reagan, the House, with reduced Democratic majorities, and the Senate, with a Republican majority produced by narrow victories in 1980, cut tax rates and refused to cripple the policies by which Reagan defeated communism and won the Cold War. More consequential were the Republicans' big gains in 1994, in Bill Clinton's second (not his sixth) year. These gains resulted in welfare reform, a balanced budget and the Bush tax cuts, and a Republican trend that has lasted 12 years. But a lot of conservatives now are asking the old political question, what have you done for me lately?
All of which leaves me with the conclusion that ideas are more important than partisan vote counts. Democrats could not go beyond the New Deal from 1938 to 1958, because they had not persuaded most Americans to go Roosevelt's way until 13 years after his death. Similarly, Republicans never had reliable majorities for Reagan's polices until 1994, six years after he left office. Democratic gains in 1974 made the House the most left-leaning branch of government for 20 years--in vivid contrast to the prognostication of '60s liberals, who said it would always be the most conservative--and Republican gains in 1994 made it the most conservative-leaning. Those majorities affected public policy, but not always in ways their partisans liked.
If the Democrats are justified in preparing to change the drapes today, the questions to ask are: How enduring will be such a partisan switch? How much change in public policy will it accomplish? To the first question, the likelihood of an enduring partisan switch is not high--if you believe the polls showing the leading Republicans, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, walloping the best-known Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Al Gore, in 2008. Changes in public policy? Well, the lead item on the Democrats' wish list is to raise the minimum wage, a law first passed in 1938. Not exactly a new idea.
I don't know what the results of the midterm elections of 2006 will be. But I doubt that they will have the sweeping partisan or policy consequences of the midterm elections of 1874 and 1894, or 1938 and 1994.
Mr. Barone is a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and coauthor of "The Almanac of American Politics" (National Journal Group).
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