Lessons from the 1998 Midterms

We’re not done counting votes or election results, but it is clear that the 2022 midterms were a disappointment for Republicans. What does that tell us for 2024? In my immediate postmortem column, I noted a silver lining: Democratic presidents rebounded to win reelection after the 1994 and 2010 blowouts, and in 2012, that included running the table in Senate races as well. Republican presidents did so after bad first midterms in 1982 and 1954. By contrast, if you look at the last three presidents to lose reelection, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush both had largely mild, status quo midterms in 1978 and 1990, respectively, and Donald Trump’s midterm losses in 2018 were softened by gaining seats in the Senate and retaining a bunch of crucial governorships. Each of those midterms and presidencies had its own dynamics, but the outcome of a first midterm is closer to being inversely related to a president’s reelection than to being a test of his strength two years later. True, George W. Bush was reelected after the wildly successful 2002 midterms for his party, but Bush — like John F. Kennedy in 1962 — made big gains on the basis of his foreign policy being hugely popular at the time of the midterms.

Erick Erickson argues that Republicans should learn from the last time the party was out of power and had disappointing midterms: 1998. The 1998 midterms were after Bill Clinton’s reelection, so it can tell us little about Joe Biden and the Democrats. And it was a very different political environment: Americans were deeply uneasy about Bill Clinton’s honesty, integrity, and basic decency amidst the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the politics of the 1990s generally favored Republican ideas on a lot of issues, but they were also very happy with his job performance during a booming economy. The 1994 Republican revolution behind Newt Gingrich had shown the way forward for a Republican resurgence and compelled Clinton to adopt a good deal of the Republican policy agenda, but people were still turned off by what they saw as the harshness and hypocrisy of the party’s congressional leadership and its overzealousness in pursuing impeachment against Clinton. Those failures of personality, tactics, and public image created a gap between the potential Republican coalition and the actual performance of the party at the polls in 1996 and 1998.

But the failure of 1998 led the party to break with Newt and his baggage, and turn away from Washington to a governor who had just won a huge reelection:

The echoes of 1998 run through Florida. DeSantis just saw a massive GOP wave in Florida while Republicans elsewhere say maybe ripples. In 1998, Republicans nationally underperformed expectations with a net zero gain in the Senate and a five-seat Democrat pick-up in the House. Republicans in Washington went into rebellion against Gingrich, tossing him overboard. Republicans nationally gravitated towards the guy in Texas who’d just taken a purple state and locked it in bright red. Now, in 2022, Republicans in Washington expecting a wave may throw Kevin McCarthy overboard. DeSantis made waves where few others did. . . . If, like in 1998, the base starts drifting organically to DeSantis and the large and midsize donors move his way, that sets the stage for a 2024 battle with Biden. The Democrats’ performance in the 2022 midterms means they can’t can Biden.

As Erickson notes, the wild card here is that Gingrich went away quietly, and Trump won’t, so DeSantis is unlikely to get the coronation that Bush enjoyed in the 2000 primaries (interrupted only by a month of spirited contests with John McCain):

Already, Ken Griffin, a major GOP donor, is Team DeSantis 2024. Griffin’s entry is what motivated Trump to get out of the door early. That early maneuver by Trump, along with his attack on DeSantis right before the midterm election, is generating ire from the base today. Ken Griffin is owed thanks for forcing Trump to perform erratically enough that Trump gets some solid and deserved blame for the midterm outcome. . . . The big difference between 1998 and 2022 is Bush’s dad, the last one-term president, wasn’t out to sabotage his son before 2000. Trump clearly is out to sabotage DeSantis before 2024. But that might do more harm to Trump. Trump, like Smaug the dragon, wants to lie on his gold and never use it. If the donors of the GOP show him he’d have to spend his own money, that might change things.

The lesson of 1998 is clear. DeSantis, compared with Bush, is cut from different cloth in terms of both personality and agenda, but he’s similar in offering the party a path forward to turn disparate threads of insurgent energy into a governing coalition. In Bush’s case, lest we forget, that path proved enormously successful for a decade from 1994 to 2004: Bush turned Texas red and it stayed that way to this day; he flipped control of the White House in a low-turnout election when the voters were mostly happy with peace and prosperity; he expanded the party down-ticket in the 2002 midterms and the 2004 coattails; and at the presidential level, he grew the party from 39.2 million voters in 1996 to 50.5 million in 2000 and 62 million in 2004, a 58 percent expansion that is nearly without precedent. FDR in 1932 and 1936 is the only other post-1856 candidate to grow his party’s vote total by 20 percent in consecutive elections behind the same candidate; Donald Trump expanded the GOP vote by 23 percent (14 million voters) over two elections, a much smaller growth even acknowledging that part of Bush’s accomplishment was bringing home H. Ross Perot voters (of whom there were 8 million in 1996).

All of that ended badly between 2005 and 2008, for a variety of reasons (we can debate how much was the consequence of Bush policies, how much was the natural cycle of the two parties and generational shifts in the electorate, and how much was just bad luck from external events), but then, nothing in politics lasts forever. The point is that Republicans didn’t react to 1998 by demanding that the party build its plans around personal loyalty to Newt Gingrich, it didn’t trot out the loser of the last election to run again, and it didn’t spend the 2000 campaign trying to refight the impeachment battle. Instead, the party acknowledged that it had failed to win over voters who were persuadable to its core agenda, and it looked at a leader in the states who had figured out how to do so. That can be done again, if Republicans care more about winning the future than relitigating the past.