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A ‘Non-election’ in America? Predicting the Results of the 1970 Mid-term Election for the U.S. House of Representatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Mark N. Franklin
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Extract

One of the reasons for paying attention to the results of American mid-term elections is the hope that they will tell us something about the standing of the President's party with the electorate. But the electoral verdict is notoriously hard to interpret. Since the President is not himself standing for re-election, the verdict has to be inferred from the results of House and Senate races in which the national mood of the electorate may be obscured by local and temporary factors. This will be especially true in Senate races, with only some 33 seats at risk; but even in House elections, with some 435 seats at risk, a grave problem arises when one comes to compare the results with those of the preceding Presidential election. In every mid-term election since that of 1934, the party of the President, whether it be Republican or Democratic, has lost some of the seats it had won at the previous Presidential election. The net loss has been as low as four seats in 1962 and as high as seventy-one seats in 1938, but it has always occurred. Some loss to the President's party is considered to be ‘normal’ at mid term, and it is only to the extent that the actual loss diverges from the normal loss that implications can be drawn to the President's standing with the electorate.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , October 1971 , pp. 508 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

1 Two important variables that find no place in our model are marginality and incumbency. It is evident that marginal districts are more likely to change hands than are safe districts, and it has been shown persuasively that incumbent congressmen have a considerable advantage over their challengers when they are up for re-election. See Cummings, Milton C. Jr, Congressmen and the Electorate; Elections for the U.S. House and the President (New York: Free Press, 1966), pp. 56–87.Google Scholar But while these variables are clearly crucial to an evaluation of the prospects for any individual constituency, they appear to cancel out over the nation as a whole.

2 For classic statements of the effect see Bean, Louis H., The Mid-Term Battle (Washington, 1950)Google Scholar, and Moos, Malcolm, Politics, Presidents and Coattails (Baltimore, 1952).Google Scholar For a modern interpretation see Cummings, , Congressmen and The Electorate, pp. 199–201.Google Scholar Cf. Miller, Warren, ‘Presidential Coattails: A Study of Political Myth and Methodology’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 19, 1955.Google Scholar

3 Thus one can distinguish two sources of additional support for Congressional candidates in Presidential elections. The distinction corresponds quite closely to that made by Philip Converse between two sources of deviation from normal voting patterns: ‘forces of stimulation (which act to increase turnout) and partisan forces (which are pro-Democratic or pro-Republican in varying degrees of strength)’. Converse, Philip E., ‘The Concept of a Normal Vote’, in Campbell, A. et al. , Elections and the Political Order (New York: John Wiley, 1966), pp. 9–39.Google Scholar It is, however, unlikely that the first of these sources of deviant behaviour has much effect on the outcome of congressional races, since recent research has shown, as Converse suggested, that the effect is only marked in non-marginal districts. See Kabarker, Harvey M., ‘Estimating the Normal Vote in Congressional Elections’, Midwest Journal of Political Science, 13 (1969), 58–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Hinkley, Barbara, ‘Interpreting House Midterm Elections: Towards a Measurement of the In-Party's “Expected” Loss of Seats’, American Political Science Review, LXI (1967), 694–700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The proportions are derived by averaging the proportions presented in her Table 1, p. 697. These in turn were derived from an analysis of all districts carried by the President's party in 1952 and 1956, and those districts carried by the President's party in 1960 which were not subjected to boundary changes before 1962.

5 The two displacement coefficients sum to –2·8.

6 The figures are taken from the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1952 to 1967. Figures are not available before this period since no breakdown of the Presidential vote to the level of the Congressional district was made before 1952. In 1952 and 1954 the President's relative vote strength is determined by comparing the percentages cast for President and House candidate, as in the case of Hinkley's comparisons, since absolute vote figures are not given. In other years the comparison is of the absolute level of the vote for President and congressman in each district.

7 The returns for the election of 1970 are not yet official.

8 The only other mid-term result in which all the divergence was concentrated in a single category was that of 1954, when President Eisenhower's party lost thirteen fewer of the WPA seats than would have been expected.