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"In both 1918 and 1930, the Rs held the House. The one midterm election in this time period when the House changed hands and the Presidency did next election was 1910.

Just so we're clear, here are your original words in #520

Wrong. A Dem House will make a Dem PResident in 2008 more likely ... there is historical precedent. "

Let me be clear:
- we agree on 1910
- in 1918, the Rs *gained control of the House* that the Dems had in 1916 (bare D majority)
- in 1930 the Ds *gained control of the House* (after special elections) that the Rep had in 1928.

So, you only counted "1" in the category of House change in control leading to White House victory, I count 3.

You can quibble with the data, but that sort of historical precedent is what I was speaking of.
I was also speaking of cases like 1958 and 1974, but you dont want to count those blowout elections since there was no change of control.

My bottom line is this: Pretending that a bad year for the GOP in 2006 will mean a good year for the GOP in 2008 is utter folly.

OK, I didn't know that about 1916 and 1930. I was going just on the pluralities and gains, not special elections and third part coalitions. It's kind of silly to rely on outliers of that kind as indicators.

But, please, I'm not quibbling with the data, just trying to analyze the historical precendents. Since you've brought up large vs. small changes, I gathered some more numbers. I classified midterm elections into three kinds based on the House seat change, expressed as a percent, of the then President's party and correlated that to the Presidency changing parties. The categories of change are VU (Very Unfavorable - Pres's party loses 20% or more), SU (Somewhat Unfavorable - Pres's party loses less than 20% but more than 5%), and NU (Not Unfavorable - Pres's party loses nore more than 5% or gains). There are 8, 11 and 8 elections of those types resp. From the data (which I'll gladly share), those seemed reasonable partitions. Here are the numbers. (PC is Presidency Changed Parties and !PC is the complement).

    PC  !PC
VU   2    6
SU   5    6
NU   3    5

So again, it doesn't look to me that history bears out the claim that strong midterm swings against the President's party result in the President's party losing the Presidency.