Robert A. Strong

Therewere lots of surprises on the evening of Nov. 3 when the picture of the Democratic midterm success began to be painted on network news touch screens. The maps kept getting bluer. Eventually, it was clear that this was not an ordinary midterm cycle when the party out of power slaps the wrist of the sitting president and his administration. It was much bigger than that, something on a scale the U.S. has seen only two times in the past half-century.

One was the Newt Gingrich “revolution” in 1994 that put Republicans in control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.

The other was the election of 1974 that flooded Capitol Hill with “Watergate babies” – new members elected just after the Nixon-era scandals.

In both cases there were high hopes that big changes would take place in the aftermath of remarkable midterm elections. The actual results were more modest than the victors expected.

1994’s wipeout election

The 1994 midterm elections gave the Republican Party a dramatic victory. The Democrats lost their majority in the Senate, and 54 seats were flipped in the House of Representatives, making Gingrich the first Republican speaker of the House since Eisenhower lived in the White House.

It was a wipeout election that had not been expected, and it changed the dynamics of Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The combative Gingrich emerged as a political celebrity; partisanship intensified and gridlock became the new norm. Confrontations over spending led to controversial government shutdowns and the first modern threat to default on America’s debt obligations. Because the new Republican congressional majorities appeared to overreach in their efforts to cut taxes and spending, Clinton was able to recover sufficient popularity to win a second term.

In the run-up to his bid for reelection, Clinton took the electoral rebuke of 1994 to heart and followed a centrist strategy that represented a move to the right of longtime Democratic positions on welfare, crime and immigration. He continued to oppose many Republican policy proposals but worked with Republicans to craft welfare reform legislation and new bills dealing with crime and immigration. Budget confrontation eventually gave way to compromise, and for a few years in the late 1990s the United States had a balanced budget.

Partisanship became more personal in Clinton’s second term when Gingrich pushed for impeachment following the revelations of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton, with a tarnished reputation, survived his Senate trial. Ironically, it was Gingrich who resigned after failing to remove the president at the ballot box or in the impeachment process. Gingrich, the biggest winner in the 1994 midterms, left office with a promised revolution largely unrealized.

1974’s Watergate reformers

Going back even further in American political history, the midterm elections following President Richard Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal produced a Democratic Party victory. That victory was not a surprise; the scale of it was.

Democrats, who already had majorities in the House and Senate, won a huge margin in the congressional popular vote and brought new members to both chambers who were younger, more liberal and reform-minded. They wanted to prevent future Watergates. New laws would make the government more open, more honest and more accountable. New and more staff would allow Congress to be less reliant on executive branch information and better able to act in foreign policy and budget management. Special prosecutors would be appointed to investigate abuses of power and violations of law.

A Democrat, Jimmy Carter, would be elected president two years after the massive 1974 midterm victory, and more reform legislation would be passed.

The post-Watergate congressional agenda was long and bold – the war powers resolution, a freedom of information act, the creation of inspectors general, campaign finance reform, a presidential records act and new legislation to regulate foreign intelligence surveillance and the bribing of foreign officials.

These new laws were supposed to stop, or uncover, the kind of wrongdoing that made Nixon an imperial president. The new laws and institutions certainly made a difference – but not without creating their own problems.

All the post-Watergate presidents thought the war powers resolution was unconstitutional, objecting to its restrictions on the president’s authority as commander in chief, and US military interventions overseas continued to occur. Special prosecutors conducted many investigations, but often at great expense and without adequate supervision or meaningful results.

Carter, narrowly elected president in 1976, served only one term and lost reelection to Ronald Reagan, who fully restored the Republican Party’s dominance in presidential politics.

Over time, many presidents, especially Donald Trump, dismantled or ignored important elements of the post-Watergate reforms.

The large and enthusiastic congressional majorities that took power after the 1974 midterms were energetic but produced a political legacy with complicated and controversial results.

Chaos and conflict – or compromise?

What is the country likely to see in the next few months and the next two years? Will it be chaos, conflict and occasional compromise, like the politics that followed the midterms in 1994? Or will it be earnest and sometimes heavy-handed congressional efforts to investigate and prevent presidential wrongdoing, like those that swept through Washington after 1974?

Surprising midterm elections that create new majorities on Capitol Hill look to be revolutions in the days after they occur. Years later, they often appear to be more complex – and less significant.

(The writer is a senior fellow with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, United States)