There was no blue wave for Democrats in the 2018 elections, but the party’s pickups were a respectable swell by historic standards.
On the numbers alone, voters’ split decision Tuesday — Democratic House control offset by an expanded Republican Senate majority — doesn’t match up to GOP midterm triumphs over the past quarter-century. They look set to gain at least 29 House seats but appeared to be on course to lose a net two seats in the Senate.
Eight years ago, in 2010, House Republicans netted 63 seats, reversing big Democratic gains from the prior two election cycles, and six Senate seats. The results restored the Republican majority lost four years earlier, and were roundly seen as a rebuke to liberal overreach by the Democratic majority Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration. Republicans scored the largest House seat change since 1948 and the largest for any midterm election since 1938.
The GOP also scored the second-highest House gain in recent decades, during the 1994 Newt Gingrich-led “Republican revolution” that gave the party 53 seats. That was good enough to wrest a House majority from Democrats for the first time in 40 years. Set amid controversies and policy failures of the Bill Clinton administration during its first two years, Republicans fundamentally redrew that American political map in a way that endures today, making the South a GOP-dominated bastion and a formidable electoral hurdle for Democrats to overcome.
Democrats in 2018 needed a net gain of 23 House seats to seize back control of the House from Republicans. As of Wednesday morning, Democrats were on track to win at least 29 seats, with party candidates ahead in several contests still to be called in California, Utah, and elsewhere.
That puts Democrats in the neighborhood of their 2006 pickup of 31 seats, when they won back the House majority for the first time in a dozen years. Those 2006 Democratic triumphs, fed in part by an unpopular war in Iraq and foibles by President George W. Bush’s administration, were followed two years later by strong coattails from Obama’s election as president. In 2008 Democratic picked up an additional 21 seats.
When the 2018 electoral dust settles Democrats may only pick up about half as many seats as the largest electoral wave in recent history. But any election that flips House control — something that’s happened only four times over the past 64 years, has to be considered a decent swell, if not a wave.
