Has President Obama ‘Lost’ More Democratic Seats In Congress Than Other Modern Presidents?
” The Democrats took their final drubbing of the 2014 midterm election Dec. 6 with the decisive defeat of Sen. Mary Landrieu in the Louisiana Senate runoff. The election of U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy means Republicans will hold 54 seats in the new Senate.
Assessing the Democratic plight, one-time Republican consultant turned news analyst Matthew Dowd said President Barack Obama had overseen historic losses for his party.
” President Obama has demonstrated he’s very good at winning his own elections,” Dowd said on ABC’s This Week on Dec. 7, 2014. “But in modern times, he has lost more members of the House and more members of the Senate than any president ever has lost.”
We asked Dowd what he meant by modern times and he told PunditFact he was thinking of post-World War II. We went to the congressional records to see how this president and his party stack up compared to past administrations.
We decided to look at how many seats for the own president’s party, be it Democrat or Republican, shifted during each president’s time in office.
We ran the numbers two ways. In the first approach, we looked at the electoral impact of a president who was running on his record. This meant we ignored party shifts in the year he was first elected because at that point he had no presidential track record. This meant that for two-term presidents, we summed the changes for the first midterm, the re-election, and the second midterm. We scored single-term presidents for just one midterm.
Here’s what we came up with. “
President President’s party shift in Congress (Without first election) President’s party shift in Congress (Including first election) Franklin Roosevelt (D) -71 seats +38 seat Harry Truman (D) -17 seats -17 seats Dwight Eisenhower (R) -83 seats -60 seats John F. Kennedy (D) -2 seats -22 seats Lyndon Johnson (D) -14 seats -14 seats Richard Nixon (R) -1 seats 11 seats Gerald Ford (R) -54 seats -54 seats Jimmy Carter (D) -16 seats -16 seats Ronald Reagan (R) -24 seats +24 seats George H.W. Bush (R) -7 seats -10 seats Bill Clinton (D) -59 seats -67 seats George W. Bush (R) -18 seats -26 seats Barack Obama (D) -85 seats -52 seats
As the Professor writes , the numbers are ever more horrific (for the Dems) if one takes into account state legislatures and governorships . Read the rest at Politifact
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