Normally I would put this in General Questions… but I venture that its not a straight away answer to this situation.
Why are Republicans dominant in both houses ? Was it gradual ? What caused this ? Or has this been the normal situation most of the time ?
Part of the answer is why haven't democrats managed better ?Someone will come along with a good cite giving you the historical data, but I believe in the post-war era, the Dems have been in control more than the Pubs. The recent stint harkens back to the 1994 elections (Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America).
Although not true of the Senate, the composition of the House has as much to do with how the districts inside states are drawn as anything else. Both parties try to “gerrymander” the districts in their favor. This time around we’ll see the Pubs gain quite a few House seats in Texas due to redistricting.
The Democrats held the House from 1931-1947, 1949-1953, and 1955-1995. The Republicans swept in like a tidal wave in the 1994 elections for several reasons.
Clinton’s unpopularity in his first two years.
Scandals involving checking accounts, pay raises, and ethics of Democratic leaders.
The mobilization of the “Christian Right”.
The collapse of the Democratic party in most of the South.
The Republicans are still comfortably in charge of the house, and I don’t know of anyone predicting a Democratic retaking of the House - even though the presidential election seems to be able to go either way right now.
One reason that was often given during the long period of Democratic dominance in the Congress was that Democrats often did better with “local” or domectic issues while Republicans often won presidential elections “national” issues. In the 1970s and 1980s many political people even said that the Democrats had a lock on the congress, and that the Republcians wouldn’t regain the House in decades. I suppose that “arrogance” of power was what caused them to collapse by 1994.
Also, for many years many of the Democrats in Congress were from the south, and were as far right - or maybe even more so - than the Republicans. So even when there were huge Democrat majorities, it was often closely divided on the big issues.
As far as the Senate is concerned, it was Democrat 1933-1947, 1949-1953, 1955-1981, and 1987-1995, and Democrat/Independent 2001-2003.
So the Senate fits the same general pattern, whith a few more swings.
I would submit that its more or less due to 9/11. After 9/11 the country rallied around Dubya and supported his party during the midterm elections. If you didn’t support the president, his party, and their war on terror, then you were an unpatriotic citizen who supported the terrorists. Google search Max Cleland, a former Democratic congressman from Georgia, to see what kind of dirty tricks went on in his campaign. He lost 3 limbs in Vietnam, but was painted as unpatriotic by his Republican challenger. People bought into it and voted in his challenger.
The 20th Century, particularly the latter half, was one of dominance of the Congress by the Democratic Party.
After swapping control around in the first part of the century, the Democrats roared into power in the 1932 elections, taking the presidency, the House and the Senate.
They lost the House in 1946, took it back in 1948, lost it again in 1952 due to Ike’s coattails, retook it in 1954 and held it for the next 40 years. They held the Senate for most of the history between 1932 and 1994 as well, with small bursts of Republican control in 1952 and during the early 1980s.
In 1994, a realigning election, in which the GOP perfectly played a hand that included great skepticism of the Clinton healthcare plan, the GOP took both the House and Senate. Though their margins narrowed election over election (aside from 2002, when the GOP gained in both chambers), they have held it for the next ten years (mostly… see below).
Why did the GOP hold the House? Because Clinton had no coattails. The margin of GOP control in 1995-1997 was so slim that a more successful reelection bid by Clinton, who didn’t get a majority of the popular vote in 1996, would have been sufficient to take back the Congress. However, that didn’t happen, though the Democrats came close to taking back the Senate in the late 1990s.
In 2000, the Senate split 50-50, giving the GOP organizational and effective control due to the fact that GOP Veep Dick Cheney was the tie vote. But then Jim Jeffords switched sides, throwing control back to the Democrats until January 2003.
Right now, trends work against the Democrats making a sweeping return to power in the House this year. We’ll see if they continue to erode the GOP’s majority, which was down to practically nothing before the 2002 midterm elections. If that is the case, then they could conceivably retake the House by the end of the decade. In the Senate, chances for the Democrats are better.
Regardless, one can expect battles for congressional control to be fairly close and very hard fought for the foreseeable future.
Our tripartite government is based on checks and balances, with no group having too much control. We voters tend to put another check and balance in place, by choosing different parties to control Congress and the Executive Branch, called “splitting the ticket”. Ideally, that forces the parties to work together to come up with the best compromise approach, but when it doesn’t work, at least nothing much happens, and that usually is far from the worst outcome. Compare that to parliamentary governments, always lurching from one party’s unchecked agenda to another’s.
If you’re wondering why the 2 houses are usually controlled by the same party, it’s mainly because the check and balance between the legislative and executive is far more important than any between the 2 parts of the legislative. Congress has been controlled by the Republicans since 1994 for about the same reason we’ve chosen Democrats as Presidents every time since 1988 - splitting the ticket.
The most impartial and comprehensive account I’ve yet read of the late Republican ascendancy is in book just out, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). The authors are both British, so they have the detached perspective of outsiders looking in. I highly recommend it. In their account, the current situation is partly the result of America’s uniquely conservative political culture, and partly the result of a long process of conservative organizing, and close alliances and synergies between various conservative factions (social and religious conservatives, small-government libertarians, big-business interests and foreign-policy neocons), that has been progessing steadily since the Goldwater campaign in 1964. Liberals take note.
Actually, some folks believe the Cleland election was rigged](http://www.americanfreepress.net/08_01_03/Electronic_Voting/electronic_voting.html[/URL) by the folks who own Diebold, the company that makes electronic voting machines.
Plus, the Repubs had majorities in both houses prior to 9/11.
That’s as close to the answer as I’ve seen in the thread so far. Allow me to attempt to answer the OP’s question:
Because the majority of american voters in the majority of congressional districts believe in the Republican platform.
There is a lot of talk about “red” and “blue” states these days. States that consistently vote Democrat or Republican. We also hear of “battleground” states that go either way. That’s why presidential elections are so close and the majority in the Senate tends to swing easier than the House’s does. Because entire states are voting for one Senate seat at a time. And if the Senatorial election happens in a state with an evenly divided electorate, the outcome turns to incumbency and and candidate appeal. Since incumbents are usually favored, majorities tend to remain the same. In House elections, you have more frequent elections on a smaller scale. This is where all but the most partisan must agree that Republicans are in the majority because more people agree with and vote for them.
I have to call for a cite on this one. As a Georgian, I have no memory of anyone questioning his patriotism and any mention of that I read on the web is covered in such a partisan rant that it doesn’t come across as believable.
one of the truths of the matter is that he was a fairly liberal politician in an increasingly conserative leaning state. Eventually, the climate shift caught up to him.
Newt Gingrich’s political genius. No one paid any attention to the antics of their local Congressmen until he and his Political Action Committee GOPAC came up with the idea of the “Contract With America.” The check-kiting scandals and midnight pay raises were two election cycles old by 1994. And people never pay attention to politicians bad-mouthing their opponents…that’s just par for the course, and most of it is politicians’ lies. But by loudly announcing a manifesto of “we will do better,” he actually got voters to sit up and pay attention, and to wonder what their particular Congressman had done for them lately (which, quite frankly, usually was quite little). And by capping it off with a completed checklist (which is true…all items in the CwA were passed by the House rather quickly, although some ended up getting rejected by the Senate, vetoed by Clinton, or overturned by the Supreme Court), he sealed for the Republican Congress a decent reputation.
Of course, he then set his sights on Clinton, and it backfired. But without a similar political mastermind on the Democratic side…and Terry McAuliffe ain’t it…to get voters to dump their incumbents is again an uphill battle.
You have GOT to be kidding. Republicans control the House because the electorate, as a whole, agrees with the Republican platform? That’s the worst interpretation of House elections I have heard in ages.
House elections have ALWAYS been decided, on the whole, by the drawing of districts by state legislatures after each census. Individual House districts are notorious for being poor indicators of which party might control of Congress, because, above all, districts are drawn to favor particular candidates, and to a lesser degree, maximize tenure of incumbents.
That’s why so few House races are competitive – there are rarely more than a half-dozen or so close House races in each election. It takes earth-shattering events to create or increase majorities in the House – such as those that happened in the mid-1970s (when Dems increased their control of Congress due to Watergate) and the mid-1990s (when Republicans whipped Bill Clinton good).
It is an undeniable fact that the Republican party has become very well organized in the past two to three decades, and that the South has been increasingly anti-Democrat. At the same time, control of the Senate has been relatively dicey over the last 6 years or so, and the last Presidential election was as close as they come. Meanwhile, the House has been pretty much in solid GOP hands since 1994.
There are structural factors at work here. Saying that there are more Republican voters to elect more Republican House members is not only begging the question, it ignores the most simple reason why the House rarely changes hands: it districts are drawn to favor particular candidates.
**If that is the worse interpretation of the reason that the Republicans control the House, Ravenman, obviously throughout the ages you haven’t heard many bad interpertations of the house elections. Here, let me fix it for you…
Republicans control the House because the majority of the voters agree with the Republican Platform. **
Now…see, it wasn’t necessary to get all upset.
What I was trying to say is that the majority of the electorate in the majority of the 435 house districts favor Republicans. Hence, a Republican majority.
House districts are redrawn to reflect changes in population. If a state gains or loses enough people between each census, it will gain or lose one or more congressional districts. Therefore the boundry lines must be redrawn to reflect a relatively equal population distribution within the state. It would be nearly impossible to draw a district to favor an individual, and the Supreme Court has struck down efforts to draw districts designed to favor certain population segments. There are also five elections between each census…an eternity in politics.
That’s not to say that the Republicans will not benefit from redistricting…they will. As the population of the country continues to the south and west to states favorable to the Republican platform, more congressmen will come to the house that will most likely be Republicans. Texas, Nevada and Georgia are three states off the top of my head that I know gained seats. If you look at a presidential electoral map, you can see which party is likely to gain from an additional seat in congress.
A simpler explaination is that the Republicans have gotten better at lying than the Democrats have. Take Newt Gingrich’s list of political smear words, mix in heavy conservative control of the media (ClearChannel, talk radio, Fox News), and a populace that’s too busy to follow the news any deeper than a sound bite or two, and you’ve got all you need to bullshit a significant portion of the populace.
In my home state, the Reps gained 3 seats in 1994:
CA-1 (the North Coast) had a reputation for swing voting, CA-19 (Central California) had been made more Republican in the 1991 court redistricting (the incumbent barely won in 1992), and CA-49 (North San Diego) and the districts it was descended from (CA-36, CA-41) had not elected a Dem to Congress between the creation of CA-36 in 1962 and the 1992 election.
Maybeso, ** rjung**, but the way I read your desperate rhetoric is that you think that the American people are too dumb to follow your highly intricate indoctrination and interpretation of events.
Maybeso.
But maybeso, goodbuddy, your arrogance and sily presumptions will be ditched by the dumb American voters in the November elections.
(Oh I how love it when you Democrats can’t disguise the arrogant notion that you are of the intellectual elite. 
)
Maybeso, ** rjung**, but the way I read your desperate rhetoric is that you think that the American people are too dumb to follow your highly intricate indoctrination and interpretation of events.
Maybeso.
But maybeso, goodbuddy, your arrogance and silly presumptions will be ditched by the dumb American voters in the November elections.
(Oh I how love it when you Democrats can’t disguise the arrogant notion that you are of the intellectual elite. )
I usually stay out of this forum, but can’t resist asking WTF the above quotation translates to. They’re English words (or most of them are), but when strung together in this order they seem to be merely noise. Am I missing something? Or is this GD-speak? “…highly intricate indoctrination…”?
I’m serious. Can someone enlighten me?