Know your candidates and causes, find your polling place, have a plan! There are plenty of small steps you can take to be ready for the midterm election. But if you want to know what they're about and why they matter? Look and listen no further. Keith Hughes (with some help from Cheryl Cook-Kallio and Dan Cassino) tells us the five things you need to know about midterms.
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Transcript: Everything You Need to Know About the Midterms
Nick Capodice: In 1965, opponents of President Lyndon Baines Johnson referred to him as King Lyndon, the first.
Lyndon Johnson: For in your time. We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society.
Nick Capodice: His approval rating 70%.
Lyndon Johnson: But upward to the Great Society.
Nick Capodice: Since being sworn in as [00:00:30] president after the assassination of JFK in 1963, Johnson had launched a set of programs called The Great Society.
Lyndon Johnson: It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.
Nick Capodice: He signed the Heart-Celler Immigration Act, created Medicaid and Medicare.
Archival: Integration leader Martin Luther King receives his pen, a gift he said he would cherish.
Nick Capodice: It was in this administration that protests led by Martin Luther King in D.C. and in Selma resulted in two pieces of the most important legislation [00:01:00] of our country, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. All of this while navigating our involvement in Vietnam.
Archival: The main purpose of the operation was to clear the area of an estimated battalion of Vietcong.
Nick Capodice: Democrats held 289 House seats and 68 Senate seats. Political minds declared the Republican Party officially dead. How can you unseat a king?
Archival: It's like entering a gambling [00:01:30] casino in Reno to walk into the grocery store in Prince George's County.
Nick Capodice: Milk.
Nick Capodice: The Great Society was no match for the price of milk. In 1966, small protests in Baltimore and Denver caught the eye of the Republican National Committee, which claimed Johnson's Great Society programs and America's involvement in Vietnam were to blame for rising grocery costs. Republican candidates for office latched on to [00:02:00] the idea. They brought giant grocery carts to campaign events. They printed out oversize price tags showcasing rising food costs. They pushed inflation hard. This was the stage for the 1966 midterm election.
Archival: Biggest shot in the arm for the American Republican Party. The election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California. Most of the polling stations from west to east showed a swing away from President Johnson's Democratic Party.
Hannah McCarthy: So [00:02:30] what happened?
Nick Capodice: What happened? What happened here? It was huge. One of the biggest losses to the Democratic Party in the history of elections. Republicans gained 47 House seats, three Senate seats, eight governorships, 557 state legislature seats. Nixon got elected two years later. Newsweek wrote in the space of a single autumn day, the 1000 day reign of Lyndon. The first came to an end. The Emperor [00:03:00] of American politics became just a president again.
Hannah McCarthy: That is quite a turnaround.
Nick Capodice: It is. And the thing is, Hannah, Johnson was still president. It was a mid-term.
Nick Capodice: But. His reign, his long stretch of assured Democratic Party power had come to a close and the Republican Party that had been declared dead basically was brought back to life stronger than ever. These midterms were like the qualifying trials for who's going to become president over the next [00:03:30] few decades. And it wasn't just Ronald Reagan who got elected as governor of California that year. Six other people, Hannah, seven people total who were involved in the 1966 midterms would eventually become president. And by the way, that milk forward Republican playbook. It worked so well that they're still using it to this day.
Archival: Why?
Archival: Because Democrats are printing trillions of dollars to pay for their massive deficit spending. Inflation is the Democrats tax on the middle class.
Archival: And [00:04:00] now we face record inflation. Congresswoman Kim Schrier even admitted she saw a coming in.
Archival: 10 dollars for bacon. I said $10 bacon?
Archival: Now you're paying the price. Tell Sean Patrick Maloney we can't afford this.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: And I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And this is Civics 101. And today, as part of our midterms series, we're talking about the five count them five essential things you've got to know [00:04:30] about the midterms. First, we spoke with Cheryl Cook-Kallio.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: Hello, I'm Cheryl Cook-Kallio. I'm a teacher. I taught government for 39 years. My claim to fame is that Sandra Day O'Connor held my hand and he said, Sandra, I'd like to announce your appointment to the Supreme Court tomorrow. Sandra Day O'Connor is the first woman to hold a seat on the Supreme Court. Sandra Day O'Connor, the very won any national election that takes place without a presidential candidate, is considered a midterm. We elect some extremely important [00:05:00] positions during this period of time.
Nick Capodice: And in all of these offices, the term lengths can vary. So senators in Washington, D.C. have a six year term, but some state senators can have an election every two years.
Hannah McCarthy: That's what we have in New Hampshire.
Nick Capodice: Yes, but some states have a four year term and others have completely different terms. But I wanted to cut to the heart of midterm elections, so I asked this guy.
Keith Hughes: My name is Keith Hughes. I'm a social studies teacher. I also run a YouTube channel called Hip Hughes History.
Nick Capodice: He's made over 500 educational videos [00:05:30] about U.S. and world history. I asked him to tell me the one thing he wished Americans knew about the midterm elections, and he gave me five. Are you ready for a listicle?
Hannah McCarthy: I am always ready for a listicle.
Nick Capodice: Number one.
Keith Hughes: So number one is the president is going to take it on the chin? Well, at least most of the time, midterm elections many times are called a referendum on the president. And what that means is people are going to the polls, not so much just voting on local issues, which they do a lot, but they're really kind of [00:06:00] judging and evaluating the president and deciding if they want to give them full rein to do what they're doing or if they think that checks and balances might be in order to rein that president in a little bit.
Nick Capodice: So if you love the president, love, love, love of what he's doing, this is a thumbs up. Or if you're super frustrated with the president, even though he's not on the ballot, you can take your frustrations out on his party.
Dan Cassino: So the midterm elections wind up being important because what we get in the monitor is, as it's called, surge and decline.
Nick Capodice: This is Dan Cassino. [00:06:30]
Dan Cassino: I'm Dan Cassino, an associate professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Now, political science spent a lot of time worrying about surge and decline, but the basic principle is this whichever party did better in the presidential election does worse in the midterm election.
Hannah McCarthy: Why is that?
Dan Cassino: Why is that? If your party does really well in the presidential election, it's because you turned out a lot of voters who otherwise wouldn't vote. These sort of marginal voters normally stay home. Well, guess what? Two years later, they're going to stay home. [00:07:00]
Keith Hughes: In the past modern era, at least 50 or 60 years, the president in power has always lost seats in the midterm election, except for 1998. Bill Clinton was lucky enough to have a really good economy. And George Bush in 2002 and I'm thinking 911 might have had something to do with that. But every other election, whether it be Barack Obama or it be Bush or Nixon or we can go way back to Harry Truman, usually Americans that are going to turn out want to see a constitutional republic that works. And usually [00:07:30] that means that the president, who's in power, like I said before, is going to take it on the chin.
Nick Capodice: The 2018 midterms, however, were an outlier while Donald Trump was in office. Democrats gained 41 seats in the House, but Republicans gained two seats in the Senate. This was the first midterm since 1970 where a sitting president's party made gains in one chamber and had losses in the other. It's also worth noting that 2018 was an outlier because of voter turnout. It was the highest [00:08:00] midterm turnout since 1914.
Archival: It was not a blue wave. It was enough to put them in the power, but the lack of a blue wave. That's why we are seeing the White House celebrating tonight and declaring victory on their side.
Hannah McCarthy: It was also an outlier for the actual candidates on the ballot. You had the first openly bisexual US senator. Two states elected their first ever black congresswoman and the first openly gay man was elected governor. So there were a lot of firsts. It was an unusual midterm in many [00:08:30] ways, but generally speaking, it sounds like there's a surge when everyone comes out to vote in the presidential election, and then there's a decline two years later when lots of those voters just stay home.
Keith Hughes: So number two is really the cyclical cycles that occur in the House and the Senate. And it really isn't a cyclical cycle in the House because every single House member is going to be up for reelection. That's right. All 435 members of the House have to face [00:09:00] the music. But in the Senate, it's one third of the Senate.
Dan Cassino: So the Senate is divided into three classes. We actually call them Class A, Class B and Class C, and each of those classes is up for election every two years. So every two years, one third of the Senate is up for reelection.
Nick Capodice: Again, this is Dan Cassino.
Dan Cassino: Now, the reason that matters is because no matter how big a wave you get in a midterm election or even in a presidential election, it can't affect more than one third of the Senate. This creates a temporal division of power [00:09:30] where in the Senate, one third of it is governed by what happened two years ago, one third by what happened four years ago, one third by what happened six years ago.
Archival: Meanwhile, domestic politics also makes headlines. The 1966 election chooses governors, senators and congressmen and serves as a significant preview of the '68 presidential elections.
Dan Cassino: So in 2016, in the Senate, for instance, you are still seeing a bunch of people who have been elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010. Now, that wave wasn't really going very much anymore in 2016, but it didn't matter [00:10:00] because they were still in there. You're still sharing power across all those years, and the idea is to kind of average things out where the House is reflecting all of these, you know, minute whims of the people they want animistic party. They want the Tea Party. Well, the Senate is going to be the insulation between those whims and the actual power of government.
Hannah McCarthy: So the Senate, by design, has this long institutional memory and the House is more reactive.
Nick Capodice: That's right. But the staggered Senate means every election is [00:10:30] different when it comes to who even has a chance. A chance.
Keith Hughes: So depending on which states are up for grabs, you can see a year where the Democrats are very safe or the Republicans are very safe.
Nick Capodice: This year, 2022 Republicans are sort of broadcasting to the public a very safe red wave on the horizon, fairly likely to take the House and potentially the Senate as well, though recent polls show Democrats are favored to hold that chamber. This year is [00:11:00] also interesting because both parties are facing backlash to two years of partisan and political issues. For the Democrats, it's a president with low approval ratings, inflation and a potential recession. For the Republicans, it is association with the January 6th insurrection, the Supreme Court overruling of Roe v Wade and the unpopularity of Donald Trump among many voters from both sides of the aisle. Now, regardless of the degree to which these issues actually apply to any given [00:11:30] candidate, you've got some candidates who are distancing themselves from Biden, others distancing themselves from Trump. Also, significantly this year, there are 36 governorships up for grabs, a lot of them lean Democrat. But in places like Wisconsin, one of the most narrowly divided states in the nation, that race is going to be pretty tight.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, you know what is not a hard call to make supporting your friendly civics podcast.
Nick Capodice: Oh, that's [00:12:00] right, Hannah. It's a sure bet.
Hannah McCarthy: Because we are committed genuinely to giving you the most high quality, nonpartisan information we can. And we are not doing it for money or power. Believe you me, this is public radio, my friends.
Nick Capodice: That said, donations from listeners make a huge difference to our ability to actually create this show, which we hope to be able to continue doing until you vote us out. Metaphorically speaking, actually, I don't know if that one works, Hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I don't.
Hannah McCarthy: It doesn't. If you have the ability and inclination to make [00:12:30] a contribution to our show, you can do that at civics101podcast.org.
Nick Capodice: We've also got a link to that in the show notes and thank you. We're back and we're talking to Keith Hughes about the five things you must know about this midterm.
Hannah McCarthy: We've covered the fact that the president typically takes one on the chin in the midterms and the midterm cycle. Every House seat is up for grabs and one third of the Senate is up for grabs. So I believe, Nick, that puts us up to three.
Nick Capodice: Three it is. Number [00:13:00] three. Congressional redistricting or when it's done politically, gerrymandering.
Dan Cassino: Now, we've probably heard a lot about gerrymandering in the House of Representatives. That's where state legislatures draw districts to help one party or another. So they might draw districts to make sure that Republicans are always going to one seat or the Democrats are to one seat. And both parties do this. Although in recent years, generally, Republicans have done a better job of it than Democrats.
Dan Cassino: Have.
Arnold Schwarzenegger: Because the politicians are interested [00:13:30] in only one thing. And this is to stay in power. To stay in power no matter what. It doesn't matter if you're Democrat or Republican.
Dan Cassino: Now, what that means is then the House of Representatives, I am largely representing a district that already likes my party. So I'm speaking to here from Montclair, New Jersey. And Montclair, New Jersey as a whole is a city that is slightly to the left of Trotsky. That means if I'm the representative from [00:14:00] Montclair, I run as far left as I can, and that'll get me elected. If I go to towns over, I'm going to be in a town that had the birth of the Tea Party. And guess what? I'm going to run as far right as I can and I'm going to win reelection. House of Representatives districts tend to lead to polarization, with members of Congress trying to go as far left or as far right as they can get.
Nick Capodice: Just a quick clarification that we make all the time. Congressional redistricting and gerrymandering are not interchangeable. They're not the same thing. Gerrymandering is [00:14:30] when you do congressional redistricting to favor your party. We have a whole episode that digs into it. Just search gerrymandering in our podcast feed.
Keith Hughes: Most political scientists put it at about 40 seats that are truly up for grabs with all of the rest. If you could think of that 435 seats, there's only 40 really competitive districts, which means the other ones are really, really red or.
Keith Hughes: Really, really blue.
Keith Hughes: Keith used the 2016 general election as an example.
Keith Hughes: It was pretty split in terms of the [00:15:00] House, the House of Representatives. We saw if you took the total vote for House members, it was about 50%, 50% split between Democrats and Republicans. But when you break that 50, 50% down and you look at, you know, what happened in terms of the outcome of the vote, you know, the Republicans have more of a 40 seat advantage in the House.
Nick Capodice: I have to restate this, Hannah, because I could not believe it when I heard it the first time, even though in 2016, almost the exact same number of votes were cast for Democratic representatives [00:15:30] and Republican representatives. The Republicans won 241 House seats and the Democrats won 194.
Hannah McCarthy: And of course, as of 2022, every state in the nation has a new districting map based on the 2020 census.
Nick Capodice: Right. And currently some of these district maps are being challenged as gerrymandering, but those challenges are unlikely to be resolved before the election. Republicans have positioned themselves to gain a few more seats in 2022. At the end of the day, Hanna [00:16:00] still just 40 highly competitive seats in this country. Oh, also with these new maps, people of color pretty much are guaranteed to remain underrepresented. So let's keep going. Number four.
Keith Hughes: Number four, midterms matter because you really are pressing the button for new ideas if the Democrats are able to flip the House or flip the Senate. Not only does it give a chance for the party to redefine itself, to have new leaders, to have fresh faces, to try to put that agenda in [00:16:30] front of the American people and maybe put, you know, the president under some pressure in terms of is he going to support ideas that might be popular with most Americans because that legislation is now coming out of the House and coming out of the Senate. But in the long term, it really can help a party rejuvenate itself. You know, come out new. Start over again.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, the guy who wrote the book on midterms, Andy Bush, told me about this. He said that if we look at huge areas of new policy in American history, say the New Deal [00:17:00] or LBJ's Great Society, they were bracketed by midterm elections, not presidential elections.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, it's like midterms are a test kitchen for politics and we saved the best for last. Here comes number five.
Keith Hughes: And finally, number five. Why midterm is really important is because voting counts. Voting really matters. And when you look at statistically the type of turnout that you get in midterm elections, it's really, really sad. My fellow Americans, you know, in a national election, you might see 55, 65% of registered [00:17:30] voters coming out. But in a midterm election, it could be as low as 25, 30%.
Archival: Sometimes your instincts tell you when a man is right for the job.
Nick Capodice: So there it is. Keith Hughes, top five things to know about the midterms. Again, number one, the president almost always takes a hit to the Senate's staggered election cycle is crucial. Three congressional redistricting, aka [00:18:00] gerrymandering, when it's done politically, is going to happen after the midterms. Four midterms are the proving ground for new ideas. And five, your vote really, really counts in a midterm.
Hannah McCarthy: I got to say Nick. I really have learned a lot in this episode.
Nick Capodice: Me, too. So before we say goodbye, we're going to end this episode with a snapshot of an historic midterm broken down by Brady Carlson, former NPR reporter and current afternoon host at Wisconsin Public Radio, as well as the author of Dead Presidents [00:18:30].
Hannah McCarthy: Brady Carlson.
Nick Capodice: You know him, right?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I know Brady.
Nick Capodice: He's going to tell us about a famous midterm from the past.
Brady Carlson: Sometimes a midterm election can turn an era of good feelings. Into an era of hard feelings. Today's midterm is the 1826 midterm election. And to understand the election of 1826 and 1827, they were split up back [00:19:00] then. You first have to understand how weird the 1820s are in American political history. This is one of the few times where the country doesn't have major political parties that oppose each other. There had been two main political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans, but the Federalists collapsed. And so the Democratic Republicans were kind of the only game in town by the 1820 presidential election. James Monroe, the incumbent, ran basically unopposed for reelection. [00:19:30] And because there's no organized opposition to his administration, this period becomes known as the era of good feelings. The feelings were actually a little more mixed than that, especially when 1824 rolled around because there were a bunch of people angling to be Monroe's successor. At that time, the typical frontrunner to be the next president was the previous president's secretary of State. And at that time, the Secretary of state was a guy called John Quincy [00:20:00] Adams of Massachusetts. But there was also kind of a wild card thrown into the mix. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.
Archival: Have you been long in Nashville, Mr. Jackson?
Archival: Not long, ma'am.
Brady Carlson: He was a military hero in the war of 1812. He was enormously popular and he had thrown his hat into the ring. He wasn't going to wait around to become secretary of state first.
Archival: There's only one thing that can keep you from being president, and that's you yourself.
Brady Carlson: The election happens. Jackson wins the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, but not a majority of [00:20:30] either. And under the Constitution, when there's no majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives chooses the president. And in 1824, they chose the second place finisher, John Quincy Adams.
Archival: They're determined back east not to have a Western president.
Brady Carlson: So obviously the Jackson people are furious. They finished first and didn't win the election. So they essentially say this is a rigged system. The Adams people had conspired with the insiders in the House of Representatives to take away the election [00:21:00] not only from Andrew Jackson, but to their minds, the will of the American people. So the Jackson people respond to this by organizing their own political party. They called it the Democratic Party, and their mission was to basically wage a four year election campaign against President Adams and the people who had put him in office. So they specifically targeted those lawmakers from the pro Jackson districts who had voted to elect Adams. They called it a blacklist. Now, Adams was still rooted in the [00:21:30] old model that public officials were public officials, not politicians. They shouldn't carry the banner of a party. He even once told Congress that they needed to pass some of his agenda, even if it was unpopular with the people. He told them, and this is a quote Don't be, quote, palsy by the will of our constituents. Now, that's not the kind of thing that wins you a lot of public support. So the Jackson forces took this opportunity and they started using something close to modern election techniques. They were going district [00:22:00] by district. They were really playing up the personalities of their candidate.
Archival: But Jackson, he was wide awake and was not scared of trifles.
Brady Carlson: And when the midterm elections were done, they had majorities in both houses of Congress, and they used those majorities to block the Adams administration and its priorities for the next two years until the 1828 presidential election rolled around, which Andrew Jackson won in an outright majority. This was an early example of what's now known as the midterm [00:22:30] decline, where a new president comes in and two years later, voters move toward the opposition in Congress to serve as a kind of check on that administration. This is something that's happened not in every presidency, but in enough that it's become an almost expectation when a new president comes into office.
Nick Capodice: That'll do it. Go vote. This episode is produced by me. Nick Capodice with you. Hannah McCarthy, thank you.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh sure. [00:23:00]
Nick Capodice: Christina Phillips as her senior producer. Jackie Fulton, our producer, Rebecca Lavoie are executive producer.
Hannah McCarthy: Music in this episode by Diamond Ortiz, Rondo Brothers, Blue Dot Sessions, Yung Logos, Dead Boys, Ethan Maxwell, Parvis Decree Samuel Woodworth, Silent Partner Fran Schubert, The Green Orbs and Quincas Moreira.
Nick Capodice: If you want to know more about Civics 101, or you want to submit a civics question of your own, you can do that at civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. [00:23:30]
