Ranking The Eight Midterm Elections of My Lifetime

A large percentage of American voters can only be bothered to pay attention to Presidential elections.  They have little patience for or interest in midterm cycles where Governors, Senators, and legislatures are decided.  Believe it or not, I used to be one of them, but in my defense, that only lasted into my mid-teens.  My engagement in midterm cycles was modest at best as a boy.  That's probably true of most children, but given my reflexive fascination with partisan elections as far back as I can remember, it's a bit surprising that I hardly remember anything about the 1986 midterms and my engagement in the 1990 midterms wasn't high enough to justify inclusion on this list.  The surprise election of Senator Paul Wellstone on November 6, 1990, was a big of catalyst as anything in propelling me into downballot election fascination, but it was more the planting of a seed than instantaneous jubilation at the result.

Even four years later, I was caught napping by the consequential midterm cycle that for all intents and purposes ushered in the combative culture of contemporary politics.  I would never again ignore or downplay midterm election cycles and, in many ways, have grown to like them as much as Presidential election cycles.  Let's take a look back at the eight midterm cycles that got me there.  

#8.  1994

Before the Internet era had begun, I lacked the information to measure the country's political temperature the way that I can now.  I was a junior in high school in the fall of 1994 and had other things going on in my life than a midterm election cycle, but I was picking up on murmurs that a Republican wave was building.  Some evening news broadcasts teased momentum for the GOP, fronted by Newt Gingrich, in backlash to single-party Democratic control and particularly to President Clinton's failed health care reform plan and passage of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement.  The week before the election, some talking head broke down a poll in which voters indicated their party preferences on a wide range of policies, and Republicans had the edge on issue after issue.

Things didn't look good, but I was still in denial.  When friends and classmates asked me if I thought Republicans would win control of Congress on November 8, 1994, I expressed with confidence that the Senate might fall but I couldn't imagine the GOP would be able to win enough seats to dislodge the Democrats' seemingly impenetrable hold on the House.

Clearly, I was insufficiently plugged in to the pending geographic realignment that had been simmering for quite some time.  Millions of conservative Americans in conservative jurisdictions had been casting ballots for Democrats out of muscle memory for a generation but the party was no longer their natural home.  What's astonishing looking back is that this realignment still managed to play out in phases, and even in 1994, plenty of Democratic Congressman held on in places that became Republican strongholds in the 30 years to come.  In other words, 1994 could have been much, much worse for Democrats.

I was nonetheless awakened about the tectonic impact of midterm cycles and had a tough night watching so much territory turn red, including Minnesota.  Democratic figures as iconic as Ann Richards, Mario Cuomo, and Speaker of the House Tom Foley were getting felled in front of my eyes and it felt like I was getting hit by a freight train.  It certainly gave me a good lesson about what painful election nights from hell feel like, and also set the stage for the brand of vicious, brinksmanship politics that kept escalating to its natural conclusion:  a sociopath and street fighter as President who is as adept in bringing out the worst in people as any other figure in geopolitical history. 

#7.  2002

The high of the exciting 2000 Presidential election loomed large as the next midterm cycle approached, but the marquee race of the 2002 midterm was poised to be the Minnesota Senate race.  The death of Paul Wellstone was like a pin to my balloon, taking all of the fun out of the final weeks of the campaign.  And that was before the electoral drubbing that followed....

In retrospect, it was pretty remarkable how elastic the electorate still was in 2002, despite the cycle's reputation for being realigning.  Far as I can tell, that realignment was limited to Georgia.  Beyond that, most Blue Dog Democrats held on to their Congressional seats, and in some cases even picked seats up such as Lincoln Davis in Middle Tennessee.  Democrats were winning open gubernatorial races in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming, while Republicans were finding ways to win gubernatorial races in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Hawaii.  And the South Dakota Senate race was one of the all-time greatest cliffhangers I ever experienced.  In that sense, 2002 was kind of an interesting cycle, but the cycle still stuck in my craw for two primary reasons.

First, the Democrats lost control of the U.S. Senate, yielding full control of the federal government to the architects of the Iraq war.  Second, one of the reasons Democrats lost the Senate was the state of Minnesota, where Paul Wellstone enthusiasts got one final kick in the teeth surrendering his Senate seat to Norm Coleman.  This cycle was the peak of the GOP's suburban surge in the Gopher State, where it appeared as though Minnesota might be poised to realign as a red state.  The degree to which this was backlash to the overreach of Paul Wellstone's memorial service is debatable, and I just might do a deep dive into that in a coming entry on this site, but whatever the case, Minnesota's outsized role in the country's shift still further to the right made November 5, 2002, a particularly dark night at my residence.

#6.  2010

There were a few distinct differences between the Democratic wipeout of 1994 and its follow-up 16 years later.  By 2010, I was old enough and plugged in enough to see the Republican tsunami coming months ahead of schedule.  I sounded the alarm on Democratic websites when most people were still whistling past graveyards and predicted a much larger disaster than actually materialized.  By the time November 2, 2010, came around, I was actually kind of relieved that things didn't end up worse.

There was a lot of Democratic driftwood from 2008 like Frank Kratovil, Bobby Bright, and Walt Minnick who I always knew wouldn't be long for this world.  It hurt more to see a lot of the class of 2006 wiped out, or humiliated with disastrous runs for the Senate like Brad Ellsworth and Paul Hodes, but much of the class of 2006 still managed to hang on, including high-profile names like Tim Walz, Bruce Braley, and Gabby Giffords (we won't talk about what happened next with Giffords).  But the biggest sigh of relief in 2010 was how well the Democrats held up in the Senate, keeping West Virginia while re-electing Harry Reid and Michael Bennet when both were underdogs to survive.  I went into the night expecting Republicans would have between 49 and 51 Senate seats, so holding them to 47 wasn't a bad outcome at all.

It was a split decision in my home state and adopted home state.  Democrats won an open-seat Governor's race and held all statewide offices while somehow managing to lose legislative supermajorities in Minnesota.  They also turned out long-time Democratic Congressman Jim Oberstar and replaced him with a grifter, which I credit myself as being the first to see coming.  It was also a less than comprehensive Republican wave in Iowa, with Democrats hanging onto the state Senate and all three Democratic House members narrowly winning reelection.

A rough night to be sure, but one that was entirely foreseeable to anybody who understands the laws of political gravity.  And again, a night that could have been and by all historical metrics should have been worse.  It had the additional benefit of setting up a foil for Obama and improving his chances for re-election. 

#5.  2014

I was wavering back and forth on whether to rate 2010 or 2014 as the worse midterm election.  Both were sub-optimal for Democrats, and in many ways 2014 was worse.  Absolutely abysmal turnout nationally led to some shock defeats and a number of near-defeats by heavy hitters like Mark Warner and Louise Slaughter.  Democrats lost nine Senate seats, an outcome worse than even the most pessimistic prognosticators predicted and boxing them out of any hopes of controlling the upper body for the foreseeable future.  And, of course, it was a preview of regional realignment heading into the Trump era, with states like Iowa, Ohio, and Maine coming in a darker shade of red than anticipated.

I almost talked myself out of placing 2014 ahead of 2010 as I wrote that, and I'll explain the thin reed for which I didn't after a bit more reflection.  I recall the odd lack of media engagement in the weeks leading up to the 2014 midterms.  In late September and early October, the usually elections-heavy Sunday morning shows like "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation" weren't discussing the elections as the front-and-center topic.  That should have been a red flag, particularly since they were instead talking about the surge of illegal border crossings and doom-trolling about "Ebola".  The mirage of a steady environment where the Democrats might incur only modest losses held until the last couple of weeks when the polls turned against them.

And the mirage of even manageable losses in that year's challenging battleground was quickly felled on November 4, 2014, as the results came in with flashing red trouble signs in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.  The Obama coalition had sat on its hands while angry, old white guys came out in droves to ensure Obama would spend his last two years in office as a lame duck.  Nonetheless, the 2014 Republican wave bypassed plenty of places, and that's why my memories aren't entirely bleak about the cycle.

I could hardly have asked for a better year for Democrats in Minnesota.  Mark Dayton and Al Franken were comfortably re-elected.  Three additional statewide offices remained in Democratic hands even if Steve Simon got a close shave in his first run for Secretary of State.  And Collin Peterson decisively held off his first top-tier GOP challenger while Rick Nolan somewhat unexpectedly prevailed next door.  Even in Minnesota, there were a couple of warning signs though as Tim Walz was held to single-digits by a third-rate challenger and the state House flipped to the GOP with some geographic canaries in the coal mine among the lost seats.  Still, this was the last time my beloved DFL coalition of yore held in Minnesota before the 2016 realignment, and I will always cherish that I got one last hurrah.  That alone keeps 2014 from rating beneath 2010.

#4.  2018

I've never understood why so many Democrats look back upon 2018 as such a spectacular cycle.  If you're judging 2018 entirely by how many House seats Democrats were able to pick up, then the cycle does seem pretty good.  But even accounting for the impressive 41 Democratic House pickups, the most promising newcomers like Kendra Horn, Abbey Finkenauer, Joe Cunningham, and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell were wiped out the very next time voters stood in judgment of them. Our 2018 legacy is mostly grifters and troublemakers like Jeff Van Drew, Katie Porter, and AOC, who hurt the party's reputation and narrowed its coalition.

The news was mixed at best elsewhere on the ballot.  The Democrats picked up some needed statehouses such as Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and (narrowly) Wisconsin, but failed to pick them up in key states like Ohio, Georgia, and Florida where they could have averted redistricting disasters. 

The state of play was much worse in the Senate, where Democrats were defending a tough map and held on to some key states but still saw four incumbents get felled, including two of my favorites, Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp. None of these four were perceived to be particularly endangered at the beginning of the 2018 cycle when it was expected that there would be a more uniform backlash to Trump. You don't get to call it a "wave election" when you lose four incumbent Senators, particularly when it ultimately costs you control of the Supreme Court for a generation.  The Democrats' perception of redemption quickly pivoted to eternal damnation.  Most weren't able to hear the siren call at the time and still don't seem to identify 2018 as their requiem seven years later.

In other words, 2018 doesn't hold up well at all, but compared to the other midterms cited thus far on this list, it at least felt kinda-sorta good that night to be piling on some wins.  Still, a darkness loomed under the surface.  While Democratic inroads in upscale suburbia played out as expected, I was more interested to see if their losses in rural areas and small industrial cities would continue.  For the most part, they did, foreshadowing a more durable realignment of downscale voters into the GOP column that would ultimately prove to be a much bigger and more impactful story than the suburban shift as we progressed into the 2020s.

#3.   2022

It's really rare to go into an election cycle expecting an ugly wipeout but ending the night with an outcome closely resembling neutrality.  The last thing I expected going into November 8, 2022, was to walk away thinking that it didn't go badly at all, and that's what made it the most satisfying election night since 2012.

The Republicans did a pretty masterful job of pregame spin this cycle, leaking chatter about internal polls showing alleged battleground races as Republican blowouts and alleged safe Democratic races being the real battlegrounds.  My anticipation was that the first couple hours of the night would be headlined by Herschel Walker getting the 50% needed to avoid a runoff in Georgia, Don Bolduc unseating Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, and double-digit wins for Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio in Florida.  Only one of these things happened, but even as a number of things started to go the Democrats' way as the night progressed, I still wouldn't have imagined Democrats would net a Senate seat, hold the new Republican House majority to a handful of seats, win governing trifectas in Minnesota and Michigan, and keep just about every nutjob election denier away from the reins of power in swing states.

As I find is often the case, my original instinct was right all along...that Democrats were positioned for a wipeout but were saved by juiced turnout from young women incensed about the repeal of Roe vs. Wade.  The fact that low-propensity MAGA voters stayed home in droves created a perfect storm limiting Democratic losses, but it also taught Democrats the wrong lessons and gave them undue confidence heading into the Presidential cycle.

Democrats wrote Trump's obituary on November 8, 2022, and decreed Ron DeSantis the new leader of the Republican Party, completely misjudging the sleeping lion that was MAGA still poised to return to the prowl.  They continued to self-immolate on the border, assuming voters didn't care and dragged their feet on fixing their bottomless asylum policy.  And most damagingly, they decided that abortion rights needed to be the centerpiece of their 2024 campaign after having success litigating the issue in 2022.  So while November 8, 2022, turned out to be a pretty good night for Democrats, it set them up to go into 2024 clueless and tone-deaf, underestimating their opponent and having no idea what was making the American voter tick.

Still, it had been a decade since I went through an election night that didn't hurt, so I enjoyed it while it lasted.

#2.  1998

The midterm cycle where I was most pleasantly surprised by the result was 2022, but a close second was Bill Clinton's second midterm in 1998.  And ultimately, November 3, 1998, was more satisfying because it felt like a rejection of the Gingrich Congress and the dark shadow of Donald Trump was nowhere in sight compared to 2022 where it still unmistakably lingered.  Plus, I was still in college, so the cyclical nature of elections had not yet hardened me.  It genuinely felt like the country was embracing my political ideology and that brighter days were ahead, quite possibly in a straight line.

In the weeks leading up to the 1998 midterms, I watched CNN's afternoon politics show almost daily and was far more engaged about the electoral landscape than I had been in any previous midterm.  There was a fair amount of ambiguity but the general consensus was that Democrats were facing headwinds and in a perfect storm Republicans could gain two dozen House seats and get a veto-proof majority in the Senate.  But as election day approached, it seemed as though things were starting to break the Democrats way more places than not and my Republican-leaning college roommate predicted the Dems were gonna do okay.

He was right.  And it didn't take long into the evening to appreciate that Democrats were outperforming expectations and vastly outperforming the fundamentals of the incumbent party in the second midterm cycle.  By 7 p.m. central, the Kentucky Senate race was neck and neck while Democrats were scoring several wins in Deep South battlegrounds, be it gubernatorial races in South Carolina and Alabama or the Senate races in North Carolina and South Carolina.  The Senate race I was most invested in was Wisconsin, but if John Edwards and Fritz Hollings were pulling out wins in their states, I was much more confident that Russ Feingold would hold on for a second term, which he did.  It hadn't even occurred to me that Democrats wouldn't lose a single seat and would actually gain a handful of House seats in Clinton's second midterm, but that's exactly what happened.

But the two races that rocked my world the most in 1998, in different directions, were the gubernatorial races in my home state of Minnesota and my adopted home state of Iowa.  It was genuinely surprising that Democrat Tom Vilsack came from behind to win in Iowa, even though his momentum in the final week was undeniable.  But the most surreal result was in Minnesota, where late momentum for Jesse Ventura was also undeniable, but it was still hard to fully process that the Gopher State elected a mercurial former pro wrestler as Governor.  It was a better outcome than a Governor Norm Coleman, but it was nonetheless the only complication to an otherwise unconditional positive night, one where my shouts of delight at every called race echoed down the hallway of my college dorm building.

Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me at the time that voters had simply punted their judgment on Bill Clinton for another two years. 

#1.  2006 

And now we get to the sweet spot....the midterm masterclass of my lifetime.  I mentioned in my review of the Presidential elections that 2004 was my first "online" election and that I was crushed when it ended badly.  It took a while to recover, but by the fall of 2005 I had election fever again and plenty of indicators were pointing to a very good midterm ahead for Democrats with Senate races in particular starting to shape up favorably.  I dove into the new cycle right around the dawn of this blog's formation in late 2005 and stayed highly engaged for the next year amidst the "Culture of Corruption" backdrop and the rise of Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel as national figures.

Having been beaten down by three consecutive ugly election night outcomes, I was long overdue for a win on November 7, 2006.  There were times when I was cynical that the country would do the right thing but they mostly delivered with sweeping Democratic wins in all corners of the country.  Most satisfying, Democrats picked up the six seats they needed to take control of the U.S. Senate, giving rise to some of my favorite Senators of the last generation, including Sherrod Brown, Claire McCaskill, Jon Tester, and Jim Webb.  

Interestingly, when I look back at the 30 seats the Democrats gained in the House, my reaction is:  that was it?!?  Given how dominating the Democratic performance was in so many gubernatorial and Senate races, and even in downballot legislative races, it just felt like the number of House pickups should have been higher.  Of course, there were quite a few near misses and the majority of the seats narrowly lost in 2006 went the Democrats' way two years later. 

But the 2006 midterm was about more for me than just stacking up impressive Democratic wins.  It was about a version of the Democratic Party being exactly as I prefer it to be and wish it still was.  The Democratic Party of 2006 was an ideologically diverse national party with compelling, charismatic figures from the left, center, and even the center-right capable of winning elections in just about any zip code.  Urban liberals and people of color were voting the same way as rural, white conservatives in southern Ohio, Middle Tennessee, and southeastern Oklahoma, all while the last remaining redoubt of the Republican Party could be found in the upscale suburbs in almost every city and state.  Again, this partisan breakdown will always be my comfort zone.

The nation was governable with the Democrats being the coalition party that it was in 2006, and it makes me sad that I'm not likely to ever see another election like it or be a member of a political party that brought together such a diverse faction of people to govern our states and the country.  A generation removed from 2006, it's hard to ignore the extent of the rot that has emerged since this coalition has disbanded.

 

It just hit me as I was writing this that "Mark My Words!" is 20 years old.  I can't say that I would have been surprised in November 2005 to discover that I'd still be submitting posts to this site a generation later, but its a benchmark that merits citation.  I'm also not surprised that the electoral culture and partisan coalitions have evolved much more than I evolved in the last 20 years, regrettably not in a way that pleases me.  Still, thanks to those who have joined me for any part or the duration of my two decades of blogging.  With luck, I'll still be around and still posting here 20 years from now and have something to say that somebody considers worth paying attention to.