We are barely into the two-year term for the current House of Representatives, but you can be sure that the 2010 contests have already begun. That is especially true for members of the House who are in two-party competitive districts. For them, it is a permanent campaign.
Relatively few incumbents have challengers out-and-about already. So unlike our recent profiles of 2010 Senate races and Governorship battles, we will be focusing more on the districts likely to see good match-ups.
2010 is a midterm election, of course, and traditionally, voters use elections at the midpoint of a president’s term to send him a message–sometimes of approval, usually of disapproval. The degree of disapproval varies widely from election to election. In Republican President Benjamin Harrison’s one midterm election (1890), the electorate gave Democrats an additional 75 seats, so dissatisfied were they with Harrison’s stewardship. Former President Grover Cleveland (D), who had lost a close election to Harrison in 1888, roared back to defeat his nemesis in 1892. But what goes around, comes around. The economic Panic of ’93 produced an electoral disaster for Democrats in the midterm year of 1894, with Cleveland’s party losing 116 seats. Never before or since has a governing party seen such a collapse of support in a single House election.
To simplify our task here, let’s take a look only at the post-World War II midterm House elections–though, generally speaking, many of the same trends were observed throughout American history.