Balance of power in the House since 1900, measured using both party affiliation and ideology.
Putting the Republicans’ gains in perspective
Since Republicans won a sweeping victory in last week’s midterms, historical comparisons have abounded: NRCC Chairman Greg Walden referred to a “hundred-year majority” while media outlets have placed 2014 alongside historic Republican waves in 1946 and 1928. On the face, this seems logical: pending the results of recounts in Arizona and California, Republicans are primed to hold 247 House seats in the 114th Congress, more than any since 1928, when they won 270 seats. If Rep. Ron Barber (D) pulls ahead in a recount in AZ-02, they will have 246, matching the 1946 wave.
But this systematically ignores an important fact: throughout most of the 20th century, Republicans didn’t compete in the South. As we noted in our Election Night recap, Democrats won 103 of 105 House seats in the former Confederacy in the 1946 wave. Many of these Democrats were hardly liberal. In fact, they broke with the left on key issues—for instance, more than half of Democrats voted to override President Truman’s veto of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act. Some of today’s Republicans would undoubtedly have been among the conservative Southern Democrats, including Sen. Richard Shelby (AL) and Rep. Walter Jones (NC) who became Republicans in the 1990s and 2000s. Try to imagine over one hundred House Democrats joining together to override President Obama’s veto on a major piece of domestic legislation, and you can start to understand how much more dominant the Republicans’ 1946 majority was than their 2014 one will be.
Fortunately, we have a tool to more empirically compare the upcoming Congress to past conservative congressional majorities: Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE system, which uses ideal-point analysis of roll call votes in the House and Senate to give “ideology scores” to congressmen throughout history.
With the ideological polarization that we’ve seen develop over the past twenty years, we can comfortably assert that all 247 Republicans will all be conservative (DW-NOMINATE > 0) and all 188 Democrats will all be liberal (DW < 0), giving conservatives a 14% edge in the upcoming Congress. We can also remove “moderates”, with |DW| < 0.2, of whom there were seven returning Democrats and one returning Republican from the last Congress. Perhaps some new congressmen (Rep.-elect Gwen Graham (D, FL-02), for instance) will also be in this moderate space, but we will ignore that possibility and assume that there will be 246 conservatives and 181 liberals, excluding moderates, giving conservatives a 15% edge.
Compare those figures to the massive 32% edge for conservatives (21% excluding moderates) in 1946, despite the same 14% edge in party affiliation. This was driven by a whopping 44 right-of-center Democrats compared to just three left-of-center Republicans. Even in 1952, when the Republicans won a bare nine-seat majority and lost the national popular vote, conservatives held a larger majority in the House than they will in January.
So, through a historical lens (see chart), January’s majority looks a hell of a lot more like the conservative majorities of the 1990s and 2010 than the conservative-dominated Congresses of 1928 and 1946. In fact, the difference between today and 1994 and 2010 are small enough, compared to 2014, that they could be explained away by redistricting. In short, Republicans won big, but we’ve already seen this show twice in the past twenty years. It’s not historic.