Posts Made By: Maurice Clark

Originally Posted by James Brown

Yes, funny - but don’t forget how the Democrats were written off as dead forever after getting shellacked a mere 24 months ago.

Originally Posted by James Brown

Hi James - last Tuesday was certainly an enormous wipe-out for the Republicans, and I too have read pundits calling it the biggest victory in 50 years.  

I can't resist semantic quibbling at times.     Also, the "half a century" hyperbole gives us a chance to put the 2026 midterms into some historical perspective, which is important and obviously not easy for partisan pundits in the press to do, at the best of times.   

In 2010 Obama lost 64 seats in the house, and 6 Senate seats.  This is quantitatively slightly worse/about the same as Tuesday, but the D's still held a 1 seat majority in the Senate.  So maybe 2010 was objectively not quite the butt kicking of 2026, but it's close.

In 2024, a mere two years ago, the Republicans held and bolstered their 2023 era razor-thin lead in the House, flipped the Senate, and gained the Presidency.  And the Ds lost to Donald Trump!  I recall many pundits calling this a complete generational collapse of the Democratic coalition - never to be redeemed in our lifetimes.  Those comments did not age well either.  I think 2024 and 2026 are about equal in emotional impact for the winning party and emotional anguish for the losers.  I think 2024 was a bigger butt-kicking as far as the balance of power goes since it included the presidency.

In 1994 and 2006 both the House and Senate flipped in a single election, the numbers were comparable or worse for the losers than the 2026 numbers.  In 1994 The Rs picked up 55 house seats and 8 Senate seats!  This was indisputably as big a midterm wipeout as 2026.

These recent examples are nothing compared to Reagans' incredible landslide in 1980, less than "half a century" ago, although it may not seem like it.  Reagan won by an electoral vote count of 489 to 49, including flipping several ever-blue states which were at least as astonishing as Texas last week.  The Republicans picked up 35 seats in the house, but still did not have a majority!  That had to wait for the Republican "Contract with America" to break a D stranglehold on the House existing since 1954.