One way to review previous political realignments is to look at the numbers by party of the House of Representatives in each Congress throughout U.S. history. Because congressional elections occur every two years, you will be able to isolate the shock elections where a huge number of seats changed hands. But shock elections can be brought on by singular events, and they can fade quickly. A better way of judging the history of political realignments is to look at the history of the numbers by party in the Senate. Because only a third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years, it usually take two successive shock elections to make a fundamental change in the makeup of the chamber. In 2006, the Democrats picked up six seats. This year the Democrats will probably pickup six or more additional seats.
Looking at the 20th Century, we can see that the Republicans dominated the upper chamber until 1910. The 1910 and 1912 elections were both huge Democratic landslides, and starting in 1913 the Democrats had control of the Senate. They maintained that control until the election of 1918 swung it back to the Republicans. From that point until the Great Depression, the Republicans ran the Senate with large majorities. They also controlled the White House and the House of Representatives. The Great Depression ended a long period of Republican domination extending back all the way to the Civil War. You can see what happened here:
71st Congress (1929-1931)
Majority Party: Republican (56 seats)
Minority Party: Democrat (39 seats)
Other Parties: 1 Farmer-Labor
Total Seats: 96
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72nd Congress (1931-1933)
Majority Party: Republican (48 seats)
Minority Party: Democrat (47 seats)
Other Parties: 1 Farmer-Labor
Total Seats: 96
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73rd Congress (1933-1935)
Majority Party: Democrat (59 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (36 seats)
Other Parties: 1 Farmer-Labor
Total Seats: 96
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74th Congress (1935-1937)
Majority Party: Democrat (69 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (25 seats)
Other Parties: 1 Farmer-Labor; 1 Progressive
Total Seats: 96
The Democrats reached the zenith of their power in the 75th Congress:
75th Congress (1937-1939)
Majority Party: Democrat (76 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (16 seats)
Other Parties: 2 Farmer-Labor; 1 Progressive; 1 Independent
Total Seats: 96
House of Representatives
75th (1937-1939)
Members: 435
Democrats: 334
Republicans: 88
Progressives: 8
Farmer-Labor: 5
From this high water mark, the Democrats would maintain control of the senate for the great majority of the remainder of the century. The exceptions being 1947-1949, 1953-55, 1981-1987, and 1995-2001. With the exception of 1947-1949, the House remained in the Democrats’ hands until 1995. There are a variety of reasons why the Democrats became the dominant party of the last two-thirds of the 20th-Century. But the single biggest reason was the Republican Party’s opposition to the Welfare State. The Democrats’ congressional majorities took occasional hits, for example…after post-war doubts emerged about Harry S. Truman’s capabilities (1946), or over the Korean (1952) and Vietnam Wars (1966). But, with the exception of the last, those were one-time shock elections. In 1965, when the Vietnam War began in earnest, the Democrats had 68 Senators and 295 Reps. When it ended in 1975, the Dems still had 60 senators and 291 reps. The war created fissures in the party that would rip it apart in 1980, but during the war there was no realignment.
It wasn’t until the economic and foreign policy disasters of the Carter administration that the New Deal coalition was truly challengable as the ruling party of the country. And we are all more or less familiar with post-1980 politics. But because post-1980 politics represents the majority of most of our lives, we have a hard time envisioning a period of sustained liberal dominance. But there are two reasons why we are about to see a second round of it. George W. Bush’s second-term has been at least as disastrous as Harry Truman’s second-term, and its been more disastrous than Jimmy Carter’s single-term. There’s no question that we about to see the second shock election in a row. We might worry that the Republicans will quickly recover, as the Democrats did after the shock elections of 1946 and 1952. But what’s really happening is an ideological collapse of the Republican’s rationale for being.
In a country with a popular welfare state (however underdeveloped) the Republicans are more or less a permanent minority party. By 1980, the Welfare State had developed enough to allow for some downsizing and this provided a window for Republican dominance. But that window really closed during the Clinton administration and the first Bush/Cheney term, when unpopular programs were shrunk, reformed, or eliminated. When Bush moved to privatize Social Security the Republicans had reached the end of their viability. They had nothing politically sustainable left to do, and they started challenging the very structure of the Welfare State as we have known it since FDR.
In many ways, the same thing can be said about the Bush administration’s radical moves on the Unitary Executive and the powers of Congress. The American people will accept reforms and occasional downsizing of the Welfare State, but they do not support fundamental changes that betray over a half-century, if not more, of settled ways of doing things. The Democrats will restore the state to the way it was before Bush came to power. The bigger question is whether they will do more. And a lot of that depends on the size and culture of the Class of ’08, and on Barack Obama.