Faced with a president with modest poll numbers and international crises, Harry Truman’s Democrats suffered a disastrous defeat in the midterms of 1946. But the Republicans celebrated only briefly at the time.
US President Harry Truman addressing the American people. Photo from October 1946.
The President of the USA was aware of an almost ironclad political rule: in mid-term congressional elections, it is never the ruling party in the White House that celebrates on election night. When Harry Truman reflected on his Democrats’ electoral prospects in the Oval Office in early November 1946, he was aware that the presidential party had emerged victorious from the Midterms only once. Not so long ago, in 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democrats had gained seats in both houses of Congress, bucking every historical trend. The voters honored the fact that the 32nd President had taken energetic steps to overcome the Great Depression under the slogan “New Deal”.
A success of historic dimensions
The shadow of the predecessor weighed heavily on Truman. The senator from Missouri was elected Vice President Roosevelt in 1944 for his fourth term (which would no longer be possible today by an amendment to the constitution). After Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he succeeded him in the highest office. The wave of sympathy for the successor – shortly after taking office, Truman had an approval rating of 87 percent – had quickly subsided. Many commentators compared the unassuming spectacles wearer to his flamboyant predecessor and found him too uncharismatic.
Even worse for his party, however, was that the euphoric mood in the country after winning the world war had drastically deteriorated. It was paralyzed by strikes, particularly in the steel and auto industries, as well as on the railways. Inflation was also depressing after the price controls dating back to the war were lifted; Basic groceries saw price increases not seen in a generation – if they were even available. There were delivery problems as a result of the rationing that had not yet been overcome. In Denver, for example, housewives hijacked the truck of a large bakery with its load of bread.
The conditions for the opposition party were therefore ideal. The Republicans campaigned against a president who only had an approval rating of 32 percent and complied with the requests of numerous running party friends not to show up at their campaign events.
On election night, the Republicans’ hopes were fulfilled: They turned the balance of power in Congress around. They won 55 seats in the House of Representatives, the largest win since the 1894 midterm elections. In the Senate, the win was historic. Only twice in American history has a party succeeded in snatching more than ten seats in the small chamber from its opponent. In 1946, the Republicans captured 12 seats. The Congress had thus become a potent corrective for Truman’s policies.
A stark warning from history
Republican strategists have similar expectations for Tuesday’s congressional elections. Even if the problems of the present differ from those of the first year after the war, the mood seems comparable to that of then – especially with regard to the President, who only laboriously climbed out of the polling low.
Since the Second World War, the party of the incumbent president has lost an average of 26 seats in the House of Representatives and 4 in the Senate in the midterms. It was only able to make gains twice: Alongside the Democrats under Roosevelt in 1934, the Republicans under George W. Bush succeeded in doing so in 2002, when the nation largely supported the incumbent in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In 1998, in the wake of the Clinton mudslinging, the Democrats won seats in the House of Representatives but not in the Senate. Both houses remained under Republican control.
In one respect, election night 2022 could resemble that of 1946: a victorious Republican Party would see the result as the beginning of the end of the Democratic president. But here American history offers a stark warning. Victories in the midterm elections are fleeting and have little bearing on the presidential election coming up two years later. After the 1946 landslide victory, the Republicans were so confident of success that they banked on a loser. They sent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, who had lost to Roosevelt in 1944, into the running again.
The pollsters cheered on the certainty of victory not only until the vote was cast, but even beyond. A piece of 20th-century iconography is the photo of the beaming, newly re-elected President Truman holding up the newspaper with a hasty headline: “Dewey defeats Truman!”