Loss of House would be less than historic for Democrats
Published 3:31 am Tuesday, October 25, 2022
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in Portland on Sept. 6, where she rejected the idea that Democrats will lose control of their slim majority in the U.S. House. History shows that a flip to Republicans would be a disappointment, but far short of the historic cataclysms of earlier changes in party power.
House Republicans need to flip fewer than 10 seats nationwide to take control of the chamber.
Just a handful of key seats could catapult U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., into the speakership currently occupied by U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
While Democrats would be disappointed at the outcome and a party switch would hamstring President Joe Biden’s political agenda, the projected losses in 2022 are far from the worst drubbing a party has taken in an election for Congress.
Following the Panic of 1893, Democrats lost 125 of their 218 seats in 1894, at a time when the U.S. House totaled 356 members.
Since the number of U.S. House members was fixed at 435 after World War II, the biggest drop for Democrats was 64 seats in 2010, two years after the election of President Barack Obama.
But the watershed was in 1994 when Republicans led by Newt Gingrich won 54 seats following the 1992 election of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
That election allowed the GOP to take control of the House from Democrats for the first time in 40 years. The GOP has had the majority for 20 of the following 28 years since, with Democrats holding power for two four-year periods.
The longest stretch of a Republican majority in the House was three different periods of 16 years between the Civil War in the 1860s and the beginning of the Great Depression in the late 1920s.
No party has held a two-thirds supermajority required to override a presidential veto since 1976. Voters swept Jimmy Carter into the White House and Democrats into overwhelming control of the U.S. House.
It was the first election since President Gerald Ford, a Republican, had pardoned former President Richard Nixon following his resignation over the Watergate scandal.
Republicans have not held a two-thirds majority in the U.S. House since the post-World War I landslide of 1920 resulted in the GOP holding 303 seats.
Since the modern era of political parties took shape in the mid-1850s, the U.S. House has changed majorities in a midterm election more than one-third of the time.
Of the 18 House majority changes more than three-quarters have occurred during a midterm.
