Obama’s Midterm Loss Record Could Make History 
 
 By Stuart Rothenberg 
 
 President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row. 
 
 In fact, Obama is likely to have the worst midterm numbers of any two-term president going back to Democrat Harry S. Truman. 
 
 Truman lost a total of 83 House seats during his two midterms (55 seats in 1946 and 28 seats in 1950), while Republican Dwight Eisenhower lost a combined 66 House seats in the 1954 and 1958 midterms. 
 
 Obama had one midterm where his party lost 63 House seats, and Democrats are expected to lose another 5 to possibly 12 House seats (or more), taking the sitting president’s total midterm House loses to the 68 seat to 75 seat range. 
 
 (Join us on Election Night: Live Stream With Analysis, Results and More at RollCall.com) 
 
 Most recent presidents have one disastrous midterm and another midterm that was not terrible. 
 
 The GOP lost 30 House seats in George W. Bush’s second midterm, but gained 8 seats in his first midterm for a net loss of 22 seats. The party lost 26 seats in Ronald Reagan’s first midterm, but a mere 5 seats in his second midterm for a net loss of 31 seats. 
 
 Democrats got shellacked in 1994, losing 54 seats in Bill Clinton’s first midterm, but the party gained 5 House seats in 1998, Clinton’s six-year-itch election, for a net Clinton loss of 49 House seats. (The figures don’t include special elections during a president’s term.) 
 
 Looking at Senate losses, Republicans lost a net of 5 seats in George W. Bush’s two midterms, while Republicans lost a net of 7 seats during Ronald Reagan’s two midterms and Democrats lost a net of 8 seats during Bill Clinton’s two midterms. (Again, these numbers do not reflect party switches or special elections.) 
 
 Democrats have a chance to tie the number of Senate losses that Republicans suffered during the midterms of Eisenhower, when the GOP lost a net of 13 Senate seats (12 in 1958 and only one in 1954). 
 
 Democrats lost 6 Senate seats in 2010 and seem likely to lose from 5 to as many as 10 seats next week. That would add up to Obama midterm Senate losses of from 11 seats to as many as 16 seats. 
 
 Democrats will likely not exceed the number of Senate losses they incurred during the two Truman midterms, in 1946 and 1950, when the party lost a remarkable net of 17 seats. 
 
 (Interactive: How Much Is Your Member of Congress Worth?) 
 
 Are the Democrats’ losses due to the increasingly partisan nature of our elections and the makeup of the past two Senate classes, or is the president at least partially to blame because he failed to show leadership on key issues and never successfully moved to the political center? 
 
 The answer, most obviously, is, “Yes.” 
 
 Correction, 10:15 a.m. A previous version of this story misstated the year in which the Democrats lost 6 Senate seats during President Barack Obama’s tenure. 
 
 Related: 
 
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 Roll Call Election Map: Race Ratings for Every Seat 
 
 Get breaking news alerts and more from Roll Call in your inbox or on your iPhone. ||||| House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in August. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) 
 
 One of the longest-running streaks on Capitol Hill seems poised to keep going strong when all the ballots are counted after Tuesday’s elections. 
 
 Not since 1952, when Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower swept into the presidency and brought with him a Republican-controlled House, has the majority changed hands when Americans also elect a president. Instead, ever since, the House majority has only changed parties during midterm elections, beginning two years after Eisenhower’s victory, with the Democrats’ wave in 1954 that gave them a majority until the historic 1994 Republican wave during Bill Clinton’s first midterm election. The other party-changing moments, 2006 and 2010, also came in midterms. 
 
 And despite the most volatile presidential election in decades, the outcome in the House increasingly looks as if it will leave House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) with a slightly more narrow majority to navigate. 
 
 The two most trusted, independent analysts — the Cook Political Report and the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report — have estimated that more than enough Republican-held seats are in play to give Democrats a chance at the majority. Cook’s analysis, overseen by David Wasserman, rates 40 Republican seats as competitive. Nathan Gonzales, running the Rothenberg analysis, puts about 35 Republican seats in play. 
 
 [House wave still looking like a ripple for Democrats] 
 
 Democrats need a 30-seat gain for the majority, and if this were truly a wave election year, it wouldn’t be a stretch for them to win nearly every competitive race along with a few unexpected seats and claim the majority — that’s what happens in political waves. 
 
 But Wasserman and Gonzales conclude that the political undertow of Donald Trump’s candidacy is mostly unique to his own brand. “The presidential race may be inducing whiplash, but the House battleground remains relatively stable in the final week,” Wasserman wrote. He gives Democrats a top level of netting 20 additional seats — but also an equal chance of just single-digit gains. 
 
 Gonzalez’s last report gave Democrats a chance at gaining 15 seats, but also suggested single-digit gains were just as likely. (Gonzalez’s former partner, Stuart Rothenberg, founded that report and now writes for The Washington Post.) 
 
 If these predictions hold up, House Republicans will end up in roughly the same shape as four years ago, when their 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, presented a much more appealing figure in key swing districts than Trump does today. Back then, the GOP ended up with 234 seats. 
 
 There are plenty of factors behind the Republican resiliency in these House races, but the biggest factor might just be an odd quirk among swing voters: They only tend to break sharply against one party’s congressional incumbents if the lawmakers are directly tied to an unpopular president. 
 
 That’s why midterm elections, over the last 25 years, have produced the biggest swings from one party to the other, like the 30 seats Democrats gained in the “six-year itch” midterm of George W. Bush’s presidency. 
 
 [The House is not actually up for grabs, for the moment] 
 
 President Obama’s first election in 2008 produced a large Democratic gain, of 21 seats, but his party already held majority and was just running up the score. The more normal result is the eight-seat gain Democrats made in 2012, which still left them 17 seats shy of the majority. 
 
 In both 1996 and 2000 the minority leader, Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), thought he had a chance at claiming the speaker’s gavel, but in each instance Democrats picked up fewer than five seats. Most agonizing of all was 2000, when Gephardt needed to win just six more Democratic seats to win. His party gained just two more districts, leaving the Republicans with a 221-seat majority, the smallest majority since the mid-1950s. 
 
 The most likely scenario for the House majority to switch hands during a presidential cycle seems to be when the party holding the White House also runs Capitol Hill, and that party loses the top-of-the-ticket race and craters down-ballot races. That’s what happened in 1952 when Eisenhower’s Republicans took charge after 20 years of Roosevelt-Truman run in the Oval Office. 
 
 The Senate majority is only slightly less stable than the House, having changed hands once, in 1980, during a presidential year since the Eisenhower days. 
 
 Trump would seem to be the perfect presidential nominee for House Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) often calls him the “gift that keeps on giving” because of his intemperate remarks toward women and minorities as well as policy proposals that traditional Republicans consider dangerous. 
 
 Yet there seem to be limits to the gifts that Trump can give. Strategists in both parties privately say Democrats lack that dynamic today and that Trump’s sometimes outlandish statements make him so unique that it makes it more difficult to connect his views to others. Many Republican seats are also safe due to recent redistricting decisions regardless of who is at the top of the ticket. 
 
 The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made a concerted push to field as many candidates as possible in suburban districts with high education levels, because those voters have been the most offended by Trump’s candidacy. Strategists believe that the declining amount of ticket-splitting would give Democrats a chance to win in places that seemed previously out of reach. 
 
 It has worked in limited fashion. The DCCC has put longtime GOP incumbents, such as Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.) and John Mica (R), on the defensive like never before, in suburban districts that have turned away from Trump. 
 
 Meanwhile, younger Republicans in districts breaking heavily against Trump are still in the fight, such as Rep. Bob Dold (R), who represents the suburbs north of Chicago. Clinton is poised to win the district by more than 20 percentage points, according to both party estimates, maybe even 30 percentage points, but the DCCC has not put this race away and is spending feverishly down the stretch to win it. 
 
 The problem seems to be many of those well educated suburban voters don’t believe their representatives, such as Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) and Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), are the same as Trump. Democrats have run relentless ads linking those two Republicans to Trump, and some Democrats believe that Trump has been a gateway to get voters to pay attention to positions taken by these Republicans that are more conservative than these swing districts would normally support. 
 
 Republicans privately concede those Trump attacks have done some damage to their candidates, but it’s mostly just energized liberal voters there. The independent-minded voter working in the Dulles Corridor IT sector, or in the eastern suburbs of Denver, has yet to be convinced that voting for Comstock and Coffman is a vote for Trump. 
 
 This could be bad news for House Democrats. A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean a bad 2018 midterm for them, digging the party deeper into the minority. And, as history shows, the presidential year of 2020 isn’t likely to produce a new House majority either, making it possible that their next real shot at the majority could be six years away — if Republicans hold the Oval Office by then. ||||| The Republican Party will keep control of the House of Representatives, extinguishing Democrats’ hopes of a new progressive era in Washington. 
 
 Plenty of races still haven't been officially called, but the odds of the remaining Democrats running the table are so vanishingly small as to be practically impossible. Democrats needed to pick up 30 seats to regain a majority, but now it’s clear they’ll fall short of that goal. (Two news networks, ABC News and NBC News, have projected that the Republicans will keep the House.) 
 
 Failing to retake the House is a sign that liberals will have to somewhat temper their expectations after Election Day. With both branches of Congress and the White House, Democrats could have passed a cap-and-trade bill to combat climate change. They may have tried thrusting through immigration reform. There could have been a real chance at implementing a nationwide paid family leave program or universal pre-K. Perhaps there were enough congressional Democrats to dramatically raise the minimum wage, or pass campaign finance reform, or tackle any of the rest of the party's key agenda items. 
 
 All of that is now probably off the table. At the very least, the odds of any of those things happening are massively diminished. 
 
 From the conservative perspective, of course, this is great news. Republicans already fear the consequences of a Hillary Clinton administration. Having her totally unchecked by the legislative branch would allow an expansion of a federal government that they already think has grown far too big and does far too much. 
 
 But that's not the only reason keeping the House is such welcome news for Republicans. The GOP now has a foothold in the federal government even if Donald Trump loses and Democrats retake the Senate. Speaker Paul Ryan won’t just be able to effectively block any big-ticket legislation — he’s also poised to extract significant concessions from a Clinton White House. And all of the evidence suggests his power is only set to grow from here. 
 
 Why Democrats failed to retake the House: history, gerrymandering, poor recruitment, and a huge uphill climb 
 
 There was always little reason to believe Democrats could pull off the huge number of gains they needed. 
 
 For one, there have only been a handful of "wave elections" in modern American history in which a party wins that many seats or more — and they’re typically backlashes against an unpopular incumbent. Lyndon Johnson’s landslide reelection in 1964 is the only time since World War II that the incumbent president’s party gained as many House seats as Democrats need to secure a majority in 2016. That’s the feat Clinton and the Democrats were trying to pull off this year, and they didn’t do it. 
 
 They had a lot of factors working against them. Four of the best political science models built around the "fundamentals" in elections (things like GDP growth, the employment rate, and the president’s approval rating) all suggested Democrats were only on track to pick up between five and 15 seats. We still need to wait for the final tally to come in, but that’s more or less what looks likely to happen. 
 
 Making matters even more difficult was that the Democratic Party struggled in 2015 to recruit enough House candidates for what then looked like suicide missions. Trump’s wild unpopularity made a lot more House seats look winnable later on in the election, but Democrats were largely stuck with the candidates they had found earlier in the cycle — a beekeeper in California, an unemployed man with a checkered history of failed debt payments in New Jersey, and a Kansas commodities trader with no experience running for elected office. 
 
 All of those pale in comparison to what was the most important obstacle for Democrats: gerrymandering. Because of the extraordinarily safe seats in districts drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures in 2010, the GOP can receive millions fewer total House votes and still win a majority of seats. 
 
 It looks like that fortress was strong enough to withstand the Trump bulldozer. 
 
 In 2017, the House GOP is probably going to be even more opposed to Democrats 
 
 It is true that there will be more Democrats in the House in 2017 than there are right now. And in a theoretical sense, that should increase their bargaining power and influence in the legislative chambers. 
 
 But what’s not clear is if the House overall will be more willing to pass the kind of legislation progressives want. If anything, there’s reason to believe that Democrats will be dealing with an even more ferociously opposed opposition party in 2017. 
 
 The results are still being counted, but the House Republicans are likely to lose today among the most moderate members of their caucus. In turn, that will only increase the relative influence of the 15 or so “Freedom Caucus” hard-liners making up the Republicans’ most conservative faction, according to Georgetown political scientist Michele Swers. 
 
 “Let’s say the GOP loses 10 seats or 15 seats — that’s just 10 or 15 more Freedom Caucus votes Ryan is going to need to get his bills passed,” said Swers, a congressional expert, in an interview in October. “And the Freedom Caucus members are in safe seats, so they won’t be the Republicans who lose.” 
 
 Perhaps the growth of the Freedom Caucus will force Ryan to negotiate with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi because he’ll need Democrats to pass bills. After all, if Ryan wants to restore the Republican Party’s standing after Trump, maybe he’ll have an incentive to be a responsible steward of government — and reject some of the high-wire acts we saw from the GOP’s extreme right flank over the past few years. 
 
 But that seems like wishful thinking for liberals. Given that the House GOP caucus is both moving right and retaining power, the prospects for progressive legislation may be scarcely less bleak in January than they are right now. 
 
 And the long-term outlook for things to get is much worse. 
 
 Democrats have no good plan for winning back the House 
 
 As difficult as the map was for Democrats this year, 2016 still represented the best chance they had at winning back the House of Representatives for at least four years — and probably more. 
 
 There are a few reasons for that, but the most obvious one is that the party that controls the White House almost always gets “shellacked” — to use President Obama’s phrase from the 2010 elections — during the midterms. In fact, the president’s party has lost House seats in all but four midterm cycles dating all the way back to the 1860s, according to Roll Call. 
 
 “The most recent anomalies happened in 2002 and 1998, thanks in large part to unique circumstances,” said Kyle Trygstad of Roll Call. “But even those midterms in the wake of dramatic events produced just single-digit gains for the president’s party.” 
 
 Democrats already have a built-in structural disadvantage in midterm years. The party does better when turnout overall is high, but voter participation falls by as much as two-thirds when there’s no presidential race. That’s one reason Democrats have lost so badly in recent congressional elections, as Princeton professor Sam Wang wrote for the American Prospect in 2014. 
 
 Then there’s the fact that midterm elections often function as referenda on the sitting president. Hillary Clinton, who is already the second-least-popular presidential nominee in history, seems likely to be a millstone around the necks of many Democratic House candidates. 
 
 “When it comes to choosing candidates for Congress, it is opinions of the president’s performance that matter,” writes Alan Abramowitz, an Emory political scientist, looking at data from the Bush years. 
 
 It’s a grim picture for the Democrats. Republicans look almost certain to make big gains in the House in 2018. The path to big progressive legislation looks narrower now than it has in years.
– Most of the national attention in Tuesday's election is focused on GOP gains in the Senate, but Roll Call points out that Republicans also are poised to hand President Obama a milestone he'd rather avoid in the House. Consider that Democrats lost 63 seats in the 2010 midterms are expected to lose five to 12 (or maybe more) seats on Tuesday. No president has lost as many in back-to-back midterms since Harry Truman lost 83 in 1946 and 1950, writes Stuart Rothenberg. Dwight Eisenhower managed to lose a total of 66, but Obama seems on track to top him. More typical is the pattern of Bill Clinton, who lost 54 in 1994 but bounced back with a gain of five in 1998. Still, if Tuesday is shaping up to be a night of celebration for the GOP, Politico offers a reality check, at least in the Senate: Several first-term Republicans in vulnerable states will be up for re-election in 2016. So even if Republicans win a small majority this year, they might have to give it right back two years later.