Posted on 08/06/2010 7:07:52 PM PDT by Iam1ru1-2
Everybody, even White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, agrees that Republicans are going to pick up seats in the House and Senate elections this year. The disagreement is about how many.
Some compare 2010 to 1994, when Republicans picked up 52 House seats and won majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. That was a reaction to the big government programs of the firsttwo years of the Clinton administration.
Others compare this year to 1982, when Democrats picked up 26 House seats and recaptured effective control of the House two years after Ronald Reagan was elected president. That was a recession year, with unemployment evenhigher than now.
Let me put another off-year election on the table for comparison: 1966. Like 1994, this wasn't a year of hard economic times. But it was a year when a Democratic president's war in Asia was starting to cause unease and some opposition within his own party, as is happening now.
And it was a year of recoil against the big government programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The 89th Congress with two-to-one Democratic majorities had passed Medicare, federal aid to education, antipoverty and other landmark legislation.
Democrats only failed, as they have in this Congress, to pass organized labor's No. 1 priority: then repealing section 14(b), which allowed state right-to-work laws, now the card check bill to effectively eliminate the secret ballot in unionization elections.
In 1966, Republicans gained a net 47 seats in the House. That left Democrats with a 246-187 majority but without effective control. That's because 95 of those Democrats were from the South (defined as the 11 Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma), and almost all voted conservative on most issues.
Republicans actually won the popular vote for the House in the North (defined as the other 36 states) by a 51 percent to 48 percent majority. They have only done so since in three elections -- in 1968 (a virtual carbon copy of 1966 in House races), in their breakthrough year of 1994 and in the post-9/11 year of 2002.
Current polling data suggests that Republicans have a chance of doing so once again in 2010. The realclearpolitics.com's average of recent generic ballot polls -- which party's candidate for the House would you vote for? -- shows Republicans ahead by a historically unprecedented margin of 46 percent to 40 percent.
If those numbers hold, and if they turn out to underpredict Republican performance in the popular vote, as they have in the past, that could mean that Republicans would win a popular vote plurality or majority in the North. Those are two significant ifs, but they're possible.
There is not much doubt about which party will lead in the South. Back in 1966, the South elected only 29 Republican House members (including future President George H.W. Bush) to 95 Democrats. Democrats led in thepopular vote there by a 63 percent to 36 percent margin.
In 1992, as Bush was getting thumped in the presidential election, Republicans won a higher percentage of the House popular vote in the South than the North for the first time since Reconstruction. In 1994, they carried the popular vote in the South by 55 percent to 43 percent. They have carried it ever since, even in 2008, when Barack Obama broughtout unprecedented numbers of black voters in the South.
Republicans currently hold an 82-to-63 edge in Southern House seats, with eight Democratic-held seats rated likely or leaning Republican by realclearpolitics.com and another 11 Democratic-held Southern seats rated as toss-ups. And 15 more are in play, rated as likely or leaning Democratic.
So Republicans could easily gain 20 seats in the South. But they could gain even more in the North if current numbers hold up.
In 2008, Democrats won the popular vote in the North by 57 percent to 40 percent -- roughly comparable to their lead way back in 1964, the year of Lyndon Johnson's landslide.
If the popular vote in the North should turn out to go narrowly Republican, as it did in 1966, it could be disaster for Democrats. They lost a net 38 seats in the North that year, when they held just about as many seats Northern seats as now. Not a happy scenario for Democrats. But not out of the realm of possibility. _____________________________________________________ Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.
So before the election the balance was 293-140? Imagine if the Dem party then was as insane as it is now what a disaster that would be. We would have a full blown communist police state on our hands.
The US in 1966 was utterly different from the nightmare we live in now. The populace was homogenous with a single minority of about 10%, English was spoken by everyone, serious crime was unheard of in many places (we still did not lock our doors in a large city), mass immigration had not brought in 50 million aliens from grossly different cultures and political systems, and even Ted Kennedy was against abortion. In fact, pretty much everyone was.
Christmas was still a holiday where they actually mentioned the birth of some guy in a manger.
People said we were a Christian nation with a straight face.
They said things like "God Bless America" and they actually mean't it.
It's true that Vietnam demonstrations were getting going. It's true that Civil Rights demonstrations had been going for some time, and that laws had been passed along those lines.
But at that point, it was still the U.S., the leader of the Free World, a place where unemployment was a bad memory from the Depression, and a nation that had never lost a war, especially after Saving the World twice just in the last 50 years.
So how does a clown like Barone get off trying to compare then to now? The people and the place are utterly different, and he pretends that its still just Dims and Pubs, going at it same old same old.
Damn is THAT true. I shoulda used that as one of my points.
In 66, most people assumed the Dims were patriotic, just pro-Union guy.
NOT the screaming freak alien Maoist filth that now defines that "party".
Barone is the best political analyst in DC.
They were. You've heard of Medicare?
The Republicans of today would fit right in with the Democrats of 1966. The Democrats of today are insane.
....I know that nobody thinks that that will never happen, talk about shock and awe...
...Zer0's hair would turn from a "dignified" gray to white, and his voice would get shriller.
Always was a dreamer....strange things happen at the most unexpected places
AND
God works in mysterious ways....
That is a veto proof Conservative Congress, of course
One major difference. Democrats of the 1960s are not like the Democrats today. The ones today are flat out communists and socialists. The South is no different than the rest of the country in that, regardless of how “conservative” the media would like you to think they are.
2010 is the election on whether we want a capitalist state or a communist state. If you vote for ANYONE with a (D) after their names, you’re voting with the communists.
And that my friend is why “moderates” (aka RINOs) are doomed to fail. As the RATs lurched leftward, “Moderates” HAD to follow suit.
THIS: The Republicans of today would fit right in with the Democrats of 1966. The Democrats of today are insane.
This guy nails it
THIS: The Republicans of today would fit right in with the Democrats of 1966. The Democrats of today are insane.
This guy nails it
Thanks a lot man. Now I got to go back to therapy.
Then your brain is filled with happy talk gibberish.
Barone is Mr. Amnesty Neocon, makes Lindsey Graham look almost right wing.
Believe whatcha want, foo.
He lays it on the line,if it is ugly or not.
He is one of the few who called it correctly in 2000, and 2004.
That's exactly the point he was making. The people in the past had a grasp of morality that today's politicians don't have.
Your inability to grasp what he was saying cracks me up!
It's a different country, with different people. Utterly.
Maybe you're one of them! So you wouldn't know or remember.
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