Maybe There Is No Sixth-Year Jinx

One of the enduring memes in politics is that the Presidential party really takes it on the chin in the midterms in Year 6 of a Presidency.  People get tired of the incumbent, scandals inevitably reach critical mass, and the President's party pays the price.

The main objection raised against this alleged truth is: what about 1998?  The answer is always: it was a special case, what with the Republicans impeaching a President that the public supported.

But I just don't think there's actually a pattern, just the illusion of one.  Here's my argument:

I'll be 60 when the 2014 midterms roll around.  (I hardly feel that age, I'm glad to say.  Moving on...)  During my lifetime, all nearly 60 years of it, there has been only one Democratic President to reach Year 6 of his Presidency.  That President, of course, was William Jefferson Clinton, and his party lost no ground in the 1998 midterms, despite a major scandal that was the culmination of six solid years of the hunting of that President.

If one wants to bend a rule and treat Kennedy-Johnson as a single Presidency, you could point to 1966 as well.  I don't buy that: I remember 1966, first of all, and it just doesn't fit the mold.  LBJ had been President for only 3 years (and had been practically invisible as Veep), so people weren't tired of him.  There wasn't a critical mass of scandals: sure, Bobby Baker, Billy Sol Estes, but no sense that they were more than peripheral.  And the 1966 midterms were more a reversion to the mean after the GOP's Goldwater debacle in 1964, than a public upset with the President.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, what do we have in sixth-year Presidencies?

When it comes to scandals, we have the real thing: Watergate in 1974, Iran-Contra in 1986, and pretty much everything in 2006.  And in the last case, a public that had thoroughly had enough of George W. Bush.

You've got to go back to Eisenhower to get a 'typical' sixth year.  Minor scandals by today's standards (Sherman Adams), a mild recession, a sense (that Kennedy would soon take advantage of) that perhaps the old general had lost his energy with age...if there's a genuine year-six jinx that's independent of truuly major scandals and Presidential fuckups, this is your only data point in the past six decades to back it up.

And (a) one data point isn't a pattern, and (b) 1958 was a long time ago.  The world has changed a bit since.

Not to mention: if there's a pattern emerging in recent Democratic administrations, it's to screw the pooch electorally in Year 2, and to only gain minimal ground back in Year 4 while holding onto the Presidency. 

IMHO, the real reason why the GOP didn't and couldn't blow it open in 1998 was that there was little room for them to have another blowout, after having just had one in 1994.  I suspect the same is true for Obama in 2014: the GOP picked up most of the marginal seats there were to win in 2010, and just don't have a target-rich environment in the House in 2014.  (They do in the Senate, but potential quality challengers are shying away in droves from running for Senate in 2014.)

But I don't think there's any clear pattern that says a President's party has to get its ass kicked in Year 6.  The immediate circumstances will tell, not any overarching pattern.  What the Dems have to worry about in 2014 is getting their base to show up, given that midterm voters tend to be older and whiter than the electorate in Presidential years, not scandal and sixth-year public fatigue with the President.

Comments

[Bill H]

Yes, we're going to regain the House in 2014. Hold onto that thought while you pet your unicorn.

[low-tech cyclist]

Given the second sentence, Bill, I assume the first is sarcasm. But either way, please don't exclude your middles, my friend.

[paula]

omigod:\from AP, 9:57 pm
BREAKING: Wash. State Patrol: I-5 bridge collapses into Skagit River; sends vehicles, people into water.

[nancy]

"The bridge, built in 1955, was classified by the National Bridge Inventory as “functionally obsolete” in both 2000 and 2010. But the Washington Department of Transportation does not list it among its list of “structurally deficient bridges.” Seattle Times.

What? This is I-5, the N/S artery. No weather event. We've crossed any number of times.

Unbelievable. Infrastructure failure here? So what else is ready to crumple? Jesus.

[paula]

Yeah, I just got off the road driving from eastern LI up to Mass, all on interstates, in heavy traffic, crossing any number of bridges. For most of the trip I was in a terrible storm. Makes me shudder to think.
That's austerity for ya. Small/no government.
No taxes=No responsibility.

[nancy]

Right. American Society of Civil Engineers infrastructure report card. D+

But. Deficits. Austerity. Sequester.

[nancy]

Sorry lt-c. Should have scooted over to open thread. Will do.

[low-tech cyclist]

No prob, nancy. Every thread here is implicitly an open thread, and it's a nuisance to move a conversation from one thread to another once it's started.

Good Lord, that's horrible about the bridge. At least nobody was killed - they're reporting 3 people went into the river, but were rescued, and it sounds like they'll be OK.

Dear Congressional Republicans: NOW will you take up a freakin' infrastructure bill?? We got lucky here. Luck is not a plan.

[kathy a.]

they're lucky that bridge was so low over the water. but yeah, how 'bout some infrastructure?

[Sir Charles]

The fact that a majority of Americans have accepted this second rate bullshit as a fact of life in order to keep taxes low on plutocrats continues to infuriate me.

[nancy]

From the editor of the Seattle Times:

#SkagitBridge had a 57.5 DOT sufficiency rating. Seattle's Alaska Way Viaduct's rating? NINE, on a scale of 100.

— David Boardman (@dlboardman) May 24, 2013

Good heavens. A collapse similar to the Embarcadaro Freeway just waiting to happen in a place where another quake is due. The last Seattle quake we felt in our bedroom 280 miles away and not that long ago. February 2001. Nisqually earthquake, a 6.8.