There are many parallels here. Worth discussing. You have to look really far downrange to get a clear picture.
The Demwit party is the Party of the Single Party state and inherently anti-democratic. It seems probable that both houses of Congress will revert to popular control, so the parallel with the massive losses in 1964 isn’t there, IMHO. The 1964 election is more like the 2008 election, with the Demwits shoving their agenda down the throat of the country and everyone who isn’t one of them. In 1966 the Pubbies picked up three seats in the Senate and the Demwits still had 2/3rds majority. The pickup in the House was 47 seats.
There was also “the Ev and Jerry Show”, in which Everett Dirksen and Jerry Ford held joint press conferences to promote the Republican positions on issues and just to remind everyone that the Pubbies were still around. It’s been said that Eisenhower ran as a Republican (the Demwits tried to recruit him as a candidate) because he was worried about the rise of a durable single party state — the very kind of gov’t WWII was fought against.
The Republican pickup in 1968 wasn’t great — net five in each house — but Nixon won a squeaker over the sanctimonious self-righteous little bitch, Hubert Humphrey, widely regarded as the weakest of the major Demwit candidates, not least because he was an insider from the Johnson administration, and Vietnam was considered Johnson’s War (and rightly so). 1970 saw a slide, 1972 saw a return to 1968 numbers in the House and another slide in the Senate, and 1974 saw a large erosion in large part due to Watergate.
The slide stopped dead in the Senate in 1976 and nearly so in the House. There were signs of life in 1978, similar to 1966, and in 1980 the Baker-led Republican majority in the Senate over the Byrd-led Demwit minority helped tip the scales toward conservatism following the Reagan landslide. The net change in the House was in the mid-30s.
The 1982 election was a backlash — but nothing on the order of what we should see in November 2010. Pelosi will of course not say anything like “the people have spoken” — she’ll immediately bash the Republican Party, conservatives, conservatism, the “right wing”, the “right”, Tea Partiers, etc etc, and of course the partisan media shills will assist her.
This is another parallel that had been drawn (by the left) — that the Obama ascendancy was analogous to that of Reagan; it wasn’t — it was more like Carter, and it got more and more like that all the time. Obama is even more like LBJ than like Carter, because LBJ wasn’t exactly an incumbent, but picked up the war policies of his predecessor, and was swept in with large majorities in both houses, making it possible to pass bloated legislation as quickly as it could come off the printer.
Those who love parallels will love this — if Obama is like LBJ, his failure to repudiate the policies of his predecessor will result — has resulted — in a cratering of his polling numbers, and will result in his refusal to seek the nomination for a second term.
Our job, after the November election, is to make sure we stay on the backs of the government, and keep pushing back against the media shills. The more of those we take out going forward, the healthier the country, and for that matter, the media will be.