Are this week’s midterms a sign of the end of the Trump Presidency?
We’re still awaiting the last handful of results for the midterm elections, but we know that Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years, while the Republicans have increased their majority in the Senate.
Both parties will be able to look at one house or the other and use it to argue that President Trump will win/lose his re-election bid in 2020. But how good are the midterms in predicting the president’s re-election bid?
To answer this, I looked back at nearly every US President since World War II (excluding those who didn’t serve the entirety of their first term), to see how well their party did in the midterms, and how they did in their re-election bids. (Note: for the purposes of midterm elections, I will be referring specifically to the House of Representatives, as the Senate being elected in thirds does not allow the kind of like-for-like comparisons that are important.)
The Curse of Midterms Past
It’s pretty common knowledge that an incumbent President’s party will lose ground in midterms. Of the nine Presidents that are the subject of this piece, President Bush Jr. was the only one whose party gained ground in the House of Representatives between his election in 2000 and his first midterms in 2002.
Based on the results in as of this writing, President Trump was precisely middle of the road when it came to how much ground his party lost during his first midterm. The swing of 2.83% against the GOP was enough for them to lose control of the House, but it pales in comparison to the red wave we saw during President Obama’s first midterm. However, all four Presidents whose parties did worse than Trump’s managed to win re-election.
Re-Election Bids
Only two US Presidents since World War II have lost their re-election bids (not including President Ford, who wasn’t elected in the first place). President Bush Sr. had the largest swing against him in his re-election bid, despite his midterm results being steady for his party. President Obama, on the other hand, only had a relatively small swing against him in his re-election bid despite having the largest midterm swing against his party since WWII.
When you compare these two sets of swings side by side, it’s easy to see that there is no correlation between how a President does in the midterms and how they do in their re-election bids. Presidents who have done worse in the midterms have won re-election with ease, while those who have done better in the midterms lost their re-election bids. President Trump’s re-election bid in 2020 will therefore come down primarily to how well he gets on with the new Congress — and who the public will blame when they don’t.
