Mea Culpa: When history is a bad guide to elections
This was how I opened an article in the Baltimore Sun in 1998:
So much in life is unpredictable that I instinctively refrain from ever making predictions. Will the stock market continue its downward trend? I don’t know and refuse to guess. Will Yeltsin finish his term? Don’t know that either. But I can tell you with the utmost certainty that this November, no matter how the public eventually comes to feel about Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Kenneth Starr or Bill Clinton, the Republicans are not only going to hang onto their majority in Congress, they are going to add to it.
How did I know this? Because of history, silly:
It’s practically an iron law of history.In the off-year elections the president’s party almost always loses seats in the Senate and always does in the House of Representatives, save for one exception. In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, when Republicanism was synonymous with Hooverism, Franklin Roosevelt increased his party’s majority in the House of Representatives.
Let me put this another way, more starkly. Since the birth of the modern two-party system 150 years ago only once, during FDR’s first term, has a president succeeded in increasing his party’s control in the House. Pick any president you like. The story’s the same. Woodrow Wilson? His first term his party lost 61 seats in the off-year elections, the second, 26 seats. Harry Truman? 54 and 29. Dwight Eisenhower? 18 and 47. Ronald Reagan? 25 and 5.
I was wrong, of course.
Republicans, defying history, lost seats in the Congress in 1998.
I drew a lesson from this experience.
Be more of a weasel in making predictions.
In keeping with this spirit I decline to predict what will happen in 2006.