The Democrats had an uninterrupted hold on the House from 1954ish until 1994. The next longest is about 8 years. What caused this anomaly?
Something that happened for thirty straight years doesn’t seem like an anomaly.
It’s probably due mostly to electoral inertia. Once a person is elected to Congress, he has an advantage on getting re-elected.
For one thing, the South was pretty solidly Democratic for most of that time even though they were quite conservative. Abolitionists and Lincoln were Republicans, and many Southerners didn’t want to be Republicans. This began to change after The Kennedy/Johnson years when the Democratically controlled Congress passed many civil rights laws. For more information Google "Southern Strategy, or look here:
We clearly remembered FDR, without Fox news" clouding the truth.
OldGuy: Democrats still held the House for a generation after Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy.
The Democrats were the dominant party from FDR to LBJ and continued to be the majority party, if not quite as dominant, until 1980. The Reagan Revolution SHOULD have ushered in a similar era of GOP dominance, but Republicans kept on screwing up and letting Democrats get back into the majority and/or the White House. So right now we have a 50-50 country. But it won’t always be that way. Both parties have an opportunity to grab that ring. Just takes a little competence.
It’s not an anomaly. They were genuinely dominant, and it’s easier to hold the House than the Senate because you can gerrymander. Gerrymandering isn’t the reason the Democrats held the House though, it just helped get them a few extra seats.
Back then, the Democrats won voters of all races, regions, and even social classes.
I hope the OP is not making the assumption that just because Democrats held the House for 40 years, that liberals held the House for 40 years.
Not really. What % pre-64 ish were “Dixiecrats”?
I’m also not sure how useful such labels are without understanding what was liberal and what was conservative back then.
In terms of government spending, Dixiecrats were reliable Democrats. It was mainly on social issues and foreign policy that they dragged the Democrats more to the right.
BTW, one good thing about one party dominance is better Congressional oversight. In a 50-50 country, when the party that controls the WHite House also controls Congress, Congress stops investigating the executive branch. Oversight was very robust during those 40 years of Democratic dominance, and it was fair, regardless of who was President. Nowadays the incentives are all screwed up. If Democrats uncovered a scandal in LBJ’s time, it meant problems for LBJ but few Congressional Democrats had anything to worry about. Nowadays if Congressional Democrats uncover an Obama administration scandal, it risks their own jobs as well. At the very least, it risks their majority. Same went for Republicans during the Bush years.
This may be instructive. On the 1964 Civil Rights Act votes in the House, Southern Democrats voted against by a margin of 7-87. Northern Democrats voted for it by a margin of 145-9. The Republican totals are also on the link.
adaher also makes a very good point about economic liberalism vs other types of social liberalism. West Virginia is a great example of a state with very strong records of electing Democrats who were strongly social conservatives, but also very pro-union and pro-government spending.
And if you want to find the most porky Republicans, you’ll find them mostly in the South. Sometimes I’m not sure the Democrats did us a favor by making the South competitive. The South’s politics are a bit toxic and tend to do a lot of harm to the party “fortunate” enough to win there.
My understanding is that that is nowhere near correct. The D/R balance (people who identify as one or the other) is more like 35%/25%, with nearly half the country fence-sitting or simply disgusted with the parties or politics in general. No party can really dominate in an environment like this, unless they can really cook the districts to their own advantage.
No, it takes more than competence. We have a 50-50 country in that the people are that closely divided, or nearly so (actually the picture is bit more complicated than that). The only thing that will change that ideological deadlock is demographic change – not ethnic, but generational. E.g., most aspects of social conservatism (with the possible exceptions of anti-abortion politics and gun-rights politics, but not, I think, with any other exceptions) will die out because the social conservatives are mostly old, and will not be replaced in commensurate numbers by younger generations of social conservatives.
You’re technically right. When I say 50-50, I mean that we’re so closely divided that power swings frequently in Congress, whereas during the period mentioned in the OP it was very stable. And the Presidential races tend to be closer too.
I think that we’ll see this trend end pretty soon though. Either one party will figure out how to govern well or we’ll settle into a sort of “dual dominance”, with Democrats dominating the White House and Republicans dominating Congress due to the geographic concentration of Democratic voters. But either party could avoid settling for that just by doing a better job of governing.
Ideology alone can’t break a deadlock, because parties can change their ideology to cater to the median voter. What creates longterm dominance is a good brand. FDR created a generation of loyal Democrats. Reagan did the same for Republicans and even stole away some of those old Democrats(which is why the old now vote Republican. Wasn’t always so.)
Doesn’t mean they will. Since the TP emerged, and really for some decades before that, the GOP has been moving away from the center. That trend shows no sign of reversing.
The Reaganites managed to redefine “center”. You may be old enough to remember that Jimmy Carter was viewed as a conservative before and during his tenure. Clinton and the DLC dragged the Ds to the right, Obama has done little/nothing to Change[sup]TM[/sup] that.
I don’t think that’s true at all, and I don’t even know what the basis is of such a statement. But it has been shown over and over again that various Tea Party positions are actually the opposite of what Reagan’s policies were: Reagan provided amnesty for undocumented aliens, signed gun control laws, negotiated with the enemy, increased deficit spending by gazillions, etc. BG is totally right to point that out.
Until there’s a real electoral consequence to that, it won’t change anything. 2014 will seem to vindicate the GOP’s rightward shift, but of course it does nothing of the sort. 2014 and 2010 were reactions against Democrats, not for Republicans.
2016 is where this will probably be settled once and for all. Losing three straight Presidential elections usually forces parties to truly reassess. The Democrats did after their 1980-1992 drought, and they moved to the right on issues where they’d been long out of step with the mainstream. Republicans will have to move to the left on such issues if they lose in 2016.
But 40-year dominance of Congress, that’s not going to happen just because ideologies change. What will be a game changer will be a popular, successful Presidency. Bill Clinton had one, and that really boosted the Democrats’ brand, but it failed to have long term benefits because Clinton wasn’t really challenging the Reagan Revolution. Clinton was to Democrats what Eisenhower was to Republicans: very successful yet didn’t change the course of history with their big ideas like an FDR or a Reagan. So we’re waiting for another FDR or Reagan to get us out of this political stalemate we’re in.