But if the election were held today, the numbers tell me that Democrats would fare worse than they have in any election since 1946. ~Michael Barone

I’m not sure why Barone keeps escalating his unrealistic predictions to ever-more ridiculous levels. The numbers say nothing of the kind. Notice that Barone leans very heavily on the generic ballot poll and ignores entirely the President’s approval rating. The generic ballot poll is certainly relevant, but Barone reads far too much into the modest Republican lead here. A couple weeks ago after Brown’s victory, Barone said we were on the verge of another 1974 (with the parties’ positions reversed), and now he says this year is worse than anything for the Democrats since the ’46 blowout. The ’74 comparison was very wrong, as I have explained before, but Barone has apparently decided that it did not go far enough. A reasonable case can be made for a Republican pick-up of eight seats in the Senate and perhaps at most 28 House seats. I think the House numbers should be closer to half that number and there will probably be no more than seven seats lost in the Senate, but we could possibly see the Congressional results of the 2008 election undone in the fall.

How bad were things for the Democrats in 1946? Democrats were tied to a deeply unpopular President. Truman had an approval rating of 32%. Barring a major disaster, Obama’s approval rating is not going to be anywhere near that low at any point during the year. In 2006, Bush and the GOP lost 30 House seats and six in the Senate, and Bush had an approval rating close to Truman’s rating in 1946. Even if the Democrats saw all their 2006 gains reversed on par with losses in 1950, they would retain comfortable majorities in both houses. That would still be a far better showing for them than they had in 1994, and it would not be anything like a 1974-style collapse of the presidential party. The 1946 election came at the end of 14 years of unified Democratic government. This fall the public will be reacting to a mere two years of the same. The Democrats are nowhere near experiencing a defeat that remotely approaches 1946.

In the 1946 elections, the GOP won 55 House seats and 13 Senate seats. This was one of the five worst midterm losses by a presidential party in the 20th century. Only 1910, 1914, 1920 and 1938 were worse. 1946 remains the worst midterm election for the President’s party since the war. It is far-fetched enough to imagine electoral defeats on the scale of 1974 or 1994, but to propose that this year will be even worse is simply absurd.