Recent polls tell me that the Democratic Party is in the worst shape I have seen during my 50 years of following politics closely. ~Michael Barone

Yes, but what does common sense tell you? It should be telling all of us that the Democratic Party is in much better shape than it has been since before 1980, and it would also tell us that the Democrats have been in far worse shape in many other election years (e.g., 1950, 1952, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1994). What we see is a majority party that has won at least 52% of the vote in the last two elections, and the party has a President who was elected with almost 53% of the vote. Such a party is not likely to suffer a massive wipeout and lose its majority status in the very next election. By just about any important measure (i.e., presidential approval, unemployment rate, economic growth), the Democratic Party today is in better shape than the Republicans were in 1982, and even in 1982 with a less popular President (who had been elected with a smaller share of the popular vote) and higher unemployment the presidential party only lost 27 seats in the House. Yet Barone would have us believe solely on the basis of the generic ballot poll and some negative views of unions that things are worse for them now than they have been at any time since 1960. This still seems strained and not very credible.

One important factor in the 1946 elections that Barone keeps citing as his comparison was the long period of unified Democratic rule that preceded it. Democrats had controlled the House since 1931, and Democrats won every national election that followed until ’46. Wartime ruling parties in Britain and the U.S. that had been in power for over a decade were voted out once the war was over, and part of this was simply anti-incumbency sentiment and a backlash against a long period of unified government. The similarities between the 1910 and 1946 midterms make clear how different this election is from both of them. These were midterms when the non-presidential party won majorities in one or both houses after defeats in at least the last two cycles. What sets them apart and makes them very different from this midterm election is the extremely long period of unified government by the other party. We already had this sort of midterm election in the recent past, and this was in 2006.

The 1910 example is interesting for another reason. It marked the beginning of eight years of a House Democratic majority and inaugurated a period that saw a number of significant, enduring progressive measures enacted. These measures did not result in the loss of their majority. Looking at the elections that followed it, we see that the Republicans did not regain control of the House until the 1918 elections. Like the 1950 backlash against Truman, 1918 was partly a product of dissatisfaction with a foreign war that the public had not wanted and which was not yet over on Election Day. It was also the sixth-year election during Wilson’s Presidency. Based on this comparison, and barring unforeseen catastrophes, it seems plausible that the GOP might not regain the majority until 2014 at the earliest.

Of course, we are almost a hundred years removed from the political landscape that led to those results, and these comparisons are necessarily always very rough, but this should help give us some idea of how long it takes for a party to recover from losing majority status and successfuly regain that status. It takes time for the electorate to forget why they repudiated the old majority party, and it also takes time for voters to grow frustrated and disgusted with the new majority party. Even after we take into account the rise of many new forms of media and the constant stream of news and information that might speed up this process, it seems hard to believe that the electorate will shrink enough and tilt enough to put Republicans in power just four years after they were thrown out. Barone proposes that there has been a second sea-change in public sentiment very shortly after the first, and there doesn’t seem to be a compelling example from past U.S. House elections to support this claim.