Despite Democratic gains in House elections earlier this month, history doesn’t augur success for the party’s bid to take back control of the House in 2014.
Democrats regained seven or eight seats this year, meaning they’ll need to add 17 or 18 more to their side two years from now to achieve a House majority.
But Democrats have to overcome a huge hurdle: the party occupying the White House during a president’s sixth year in office has lost seats in every mid-term election since 1918,
Politico reports. The lone exception came in 1998, when the Democrats benefited from a buoyant economy and Republicans’ pre-occupation with President Bill Clinton’s adultery.
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The average seat loss for the incumbent party in the White House is 30 seats.
“Voters get frustrated, and there’s burnout,” Andrew Myers, who conducts polls for many Democratic congressional candidates, told Politico. “It’s overexposure. People are just ready for something different.”
The New York Times’ star election prognosticator Nate Silver sees the odds stacked against Democrats taking over the House in the 2014 elections.
“Both historical precedent in mid-term election years and a deeper examination of this year’s results would argue strongly against Democrats being able to gain that many [17] seats,” he writes.
“Odds are that the electoral climate in 2014 will be somewhere between neutral and Republican-leaning, rather than favoring Democrats.”
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