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The pendulum of power is swinging more and more frequently in the United States.
In the 100 years between 1900 and 2000, control of the House, Senate or White House changed hands in Washington with relative infrequency and never in more than two elections in a row.
In the 25 years since 2000, the party controlling the White House and/or at least one chamber of Congress changed in all but two US elections.
It is an unprecedented period of political turnover in which voters have pulled the lever for some kind of change – either picking a president from a new party or flipping the majority in the House or Senate – nearly every time they’re given the chance in recent years.
At least one lever of power has flipped between Republicans and Democrats in Washington in each of the last six elections, the most consecutive power changes going back to before the Civil War.
In five of the last seven presidential elections, voters opted for a president from the other party. In the same time period, voters elected a new Senate majority five times and picked a new House majority four times.
The only elections this century in which the House, Senate and White House all remained under control of the same party were the only two successful presidential reelection campaigns, for George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012. Those are also the only times the same party held on to the White House this century.
Today’s politicians have come to expect frequent shifts in power.
The last four presidents have all assumed office with unified control of Washington and worked as quickly as possible to exploit it. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Trump again in his second term all utilized reconciliation to get around the roadblock of the filibuster in the Senate and pass some sort of sweeping agenda item without help from the other party.
For Obama, it was the Affordable Care Act. For Trump, it was tax cuts in his first term; in his second, it was a sweeping tax cut and agenda bill that pared back social safety net spending. For Biden, it was the Inflation Reduction Act, which had a lot more to do with clean energy and climate change than it did with reducing inflation.
We’ll see if Trump breaks this mold — something he is desperately trying to do by redrawing congressional maps in search of more Republican seats. But each of those other three administrations immediately lost the House.
President George W. Bush defied political gravity and picked up House seats after his first two years in office, but that had a lot to do with his popularity after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Bush lost the House four years later, after his reelection, when the public had turned on the wars.
Bill Clinton lost the House in his first midterm, the 1994 Republican revolution. It was the first time Republicans had gained control of the House since the 1950s. They’ve lost and regained the House twice in the years since.
Clinton picked up seats in the 1998 midterm, when the country turned against Republican efforts to impeach him.
Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said these elections change the balance of power, but a better way to view them is as “nationalized elections.”
Voters are less frequently splitting their tickets between a senator or representative from one party and a president from the other as they tend more often to stick with one national party.
“We’ve had nationalized elections, but we didn’t have them back to back to back all the time,” Binder said.
The closes corollary to today is probably the late 19th century, Binder said.
“It was similarly a period of high partisanship and ideological disagreement,” she explained, but today there is the added element of much slimmer majorities — even in presidential elections. Trump, Bush and Clinton all won the White House without winning a majority of the popular vote in their first term.
Not all power changes are equal, but they all affect how things work in the US government.
If Democrats can wrest control of the House from Republicans next year – which is more likely than the chance they could flip the Senate – it will allow them to stand in the way of Trump’s legislative agenda, investigate his administration and gain more power in spending debates.
The general indicator for how a president’s party will do in a midterm election is the president’s own approval rating. Trump’s, as it has been, is underwater.
Only twice in the past 20 midterm elections going back to 1938 – for W. Bush in 2002 and Clinton in 1998 – has the president’s party not lost seats in a midterm. In both cases, the president had approval ratings over 60%. Today, Trump’s is under 50%.
This year, Republicans are trying to change the map to draw more Republican seats. They’ve already changed the map in Texas to create five new seats to win, although it’s a strategy that might not pay off if groups like Hispanic voters don’t vote with the party in the same way they did in 2024.
Republicans are also looking to redraw maps in Missouri and Ohio. Democrats are stymied by laws and state constitutional obstructions to such shenanigans in many states they control, but they are trying to find seats in California.
Democrats of the 1970s and 1980s routinely had 80-plus-seat majorities. In the most recent elections, House majorities were determined by a handful of the 435 voting members.
So while the power changes are happening more frequently, they’re not accompanied by large swings in the size of majorities. Trump’s Republicans lost 40 seats after the 2018 midterm and ceded control of the House. Biden’s Democrats lost just 9 seats after the 2022 midterm, but they also ceded control of the House.
The margins in the House are tight enough that in a close midterm, Republicans’ redistricting efforts could pay off and allow them to maintain control of the House. But if there’s a riptide against President Donald Trump and his policies, no amount of gerrymandering is likely to save Republicans’ House majority.
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