On Tuesday, Americans head to the polls for the United States midterm elections, held halfway through a president’s four-year term. Voters will choose all 435 members of the US House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats. The voting will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years.
Although the president’s name won’t appear on the ballot, the vote is widely seen as a verdict on the presidency, and the president’s party almost always pays the price. In 18 of the 20 midterms held from 1946 to 2022, voters took House seats away from the party in control of the White House. The average loss was 26 seats.
Only Bill Clinton’s Democrats in 1998 and George W Bush’s Republicans in 2002 bucked the trend. Political scientists call this the “presidential penalty”, or the “midterm penalty”. The president’s party tends to lose seats simply because it holds power as voters use the midterms to put a check on the White House.
The chart below shows how many House seats the president’s party has won or lost in each midterm since 1946 from Harry S Truman to Joe Biden. Democratic presidents have suffered the biggest midterm defeats since 1946. On average, their party has lost about 29 House seats in a midterm, compared with about 23 under Republican presidents.
The largest loss came in 2010, two years after Barack Obama became the first African American elected president, when Democrats lost 64 House seats and Republicans took control of the chamber. The Democrats under Truman lost 56 seats in 1946, and under Clinton, they lost 54 in 1994, each time losing control of the House. The worst Republican defeats came under Dwight D Eisenhower when the party lost 50 seats in 1958 and Gerald Ford when it lost 48 in 1974.
Donald Trump’s first midterm in 2018 cost Republicans 42 seats and control of the House. Big losses often cost the president’s party its majority. In seven of the 20 midterms since 1946 (1946, 1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022), the House changed hands.
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