Last week, our NBC/WSJ poll showed President Bush at his lowest approval rating since taking office — 29 percent. It just got lower. A Newsweek poll out today shows that just 26 percent of all Americans – only about one in four — approves of the job Bush is doing; 65 percent disapprove, including a third of all Republicans. ~MSNBC

After I had noted that Mr. Bush’s ratings have plummeted below the Truman Line, I happened on an old item from before the midterms that seems even more relevant now:

In the midterm elections of 1950, the president’s party, the Democrats, lost 29 House seats and six Senate seats. Eerily, those numbers are in the plausible upper reaches of the Beltway consensus about the amount [sic] of seats Republicans will lose on Nov. 7.

Those numbers are eerily similar to the 31 House seats and 6 Senate seats that changed hands in ’06.  That lends a little more support to the idea that this upcoming election is going to be more like 1952 than it will be like 1968.  Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency, indeed. 

1952 was obviously a win in the presidential election for the non-incumbent party, but what does another 1952 portend for Congressional elections?  In 1952, the Republicans gained 22 seats in the House and two seats in the Senate.  If the Democrats were to duplicate that next year, they would have 255 in the House and 53 in the Senate.  However, there is good reason to think that ’08 is going to be more of a bloodbath for the Congressional GOP than 1952 was for the Democrats.

Since Bush’s ratings are now potentially on the verge of going into the sub-Nixon basement, a place so dark and dank that no one still alive knows what it might mean for the upcoming election, 1974 seems more and more plausible as a point of comparison.  Taking into account all of the normal caveats (gerrymandering is worse, incumbency is harder to overcome, etc.), a 1974-like 48-seat loss by the GOP would certainly push them back towards late 1970s-era numbers in the House (154).  The GOP lost 3 Senate seats that year as well, which seems like a more reasonable number of Democratic pickups next year between the open Colorado seat and vulnerable moderate Republicans all over the map.