House 2018: Less Than a Year Out, Race for Control Is a Coin Flip
In the aftermath of the 2014 midterm election, when the party that didn’t hold the White House (the Republicans) gained ground in the House for the 36th time in 39 midterms since the Civil War, I wrote the following in the Center for Politics’ postmortem on the election, The Surge: Practically speaking, though, House Democrats might have to root for the other party in the 2016 presidential race. Why? Because given what we know about midterm elections almost always going against the president’s party in the House, perhaps the next best chance for the Democrats to win the House will be in 2018 — if a Republican is in the White House. We didn’t see many House Democrats rooting for Donald Trump to win the general election in 2016, but the simple fact of his election made a Democratic House takeover much more likely in the 2018 midterm just because of the longstanding trend for the presidential party to lose ground in the House. The electorate often uses the midterm to put a check on the executive, particularly if that executive is unpopular. “The midterm election pattern,” writes Andrew Busch in his study of midterm elections, Horses in Midstream, “virtually