The Myth of the Six Year Itch
The “six year itch” is the commonly held belief that the President’s party always loses big in the sixth year of a Presidency, and in midterm elections in general. This was repeated endlessly on TV on election night by Republicans and reporters alike. This supposed axiom of US politics considers the results of midterm elections as some sort of celestial event, fixed in the stars, somehow unrelated to the record of the incumbent party. Many have tried to minimize the significance of Tuesday’s Democratic victories by arguing that the number of seats they gained is below the historical average for 6th year elections (see, for example Charles Krauthammer’s latest column).
Looking at the numbers since WWII, two things are apparent. One is that the supposed “six year itch” has not applied to the most recent pair of two term Presidents prior to Bush: the Republicans lost only a handful of seats in ‘86 under Reagan, and the Democrats gained seats in ‘98 under Clinton. The other is that gains and losses in the House for the President’s party in midterm elections appear more related to Presidential popularity than anything else. In cases where Presidents had popularity ratings in the 60% range, the losses were minor, or they even experienced gains. It’s when you see Presidential popularity in the 40% range that significant losses occur for his party in the House. Eisenhower is one exception - in 1958 the Republicans lost big because of a deep recession and foreign policy concerns (mainly the Soviet launch of Sputnik and civil war in Cuba). Eisenhower, with his iconic status from WWII, maintained his personal popularity despite these concerns, but his party did not. Ford is another exception, but the ‘74 election was in the wake of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, which is clearly an unusual situation.
Looking at recent history, the generalization you can make about midterm elections is that the results for the President’s party are usually associated with the popularity of the President. Major sixth year losses are not a foregone conclusion governed by some divine rule of politics beyond mortal control. With the exceptionally low approval ratings of Bush and the Republican-led Congress going into the election, their subsequent losses are a clear rebuke of Bush and Republican policies.
If anything, the election results understate the public mood: with the aid of sophisticated computer modeling and marketing data, and unprecedented redistricting between census reports, the Republican House had the most gerrymandered districts since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 (the Act outlawed purely racially based gerrymandering, but not partisan gerrymandering). Gerrymandering serves as a bulwark against shifts in public sentiment, so it was actually remarkable to see as much House turnover as we did on Tuesday.
