5 min readMidterm elections are strange and powerful beasts. Every couple of years, we get to legally overthrow our government by electing the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. This can—and often does—change the nature of our nation.
The Constitutional Convention established midterm elections as part of the Great Compromise of 1787—which, to be honest, hasn’t looked that Great as the decades go by. It’s the reason that Wyoming and California have the same number of senators, and the nation’s slaveholding states only got on board because it included the infamous three-fifths clause, from which we’ve never really recovered.
Although midterms affected only the House of Representatives until 1913, when the adoption of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution called for the direct election of senators, they’ve often acted as a healthy check on presidential power. Only Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush gained seats in both houses of Congress during a midterm, and only seven times has an incumbent president’s party gained seats in either house.
A number of midterms were important pivot points in history. Some were acts of contrition, attempts at redemption. Others were nationwide circuses, vehicles of mass entertainment. They can exacerbate into terminal the historical illness known as the Second Term Plague, whereby for one reason or another the American public gets bored with the president it elected twice and, knowingly or unknowingly, begins to rid itself of him. This infirmity has overwhelmed the current president, even though his first and second terms were separated by four years and even though his second term has been everything but boring.
So to prepare ourselves for November, here are my picks for the five most consequential midterm elections, and a handful of honorable mentions, from across our country’s history. Who says electoral Armageddon can’t be fun?
1794
Even George Washington was subject to the Second Term Plague, though he contracted it during the first formally partisan congressional election in the shiny new Republic. His Cabinet blew up, largely because of the heated rivalry between Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and the factions that coalesced behind them.
During the Revolution, many of these men swore up and down that they hated party politics. But as soon as that period passed and a workable political system was devised, they sorted themselves into two: the Federalists, who supported President Washington and Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, who lined up behind Jefferson and like-minded dissidents. The latter still exists and nominated a bunch of New York democratic socialists for Congress in June.
Honorable Mention: 1789
Although not truly a midterm, since it was the first election held under the new Constitution, it’s included because Patrick Henry, that old gerrymanderer, pitted two friends and future presidents—James Madison and James Monroe—against each other to represent the Fifth Congressional District in Virginia. It actually was a proxy fight over the Constitution, which Henry opposed. The race was relatively civil. Madison won, but the contest helped to prompt his colossal flip-flop on the need for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution.
This article appeared in the September 2026 issue of Esquire subscribe
1866
Oh, the things the country saw. Andrew Johnson, the Democrat who’d staggered into the presidency after the murder of Abraham Lincoln, wanted to set himself up to run for the job himself. Johnson had alienated Washington almost from the jump; he’d been completely hammered at Lincoln’s second inauguration. So in order to elect a Congress more amenable to his plans to end Reconstruction, Johnson decided to take his case to the People. He set out on a westward campaign swing with stops in Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland. What ensued was a monumental fiasco.
Dubbed the “Swing Around the Circle,” Johnson’s trip got off to a decent start, even though his advisors lived in terror that he would go off the script, off the rails, and off the wagon. Those fears were justified. Johnson frequently compared his soft-on-secession policies to Jesus Christ’s forgiveness of sinners. The crowds got progressively wilder the further he got from Washington. In Indianapolis, a man was shot to death. Johnson was even hanged in effigy in Bloomington, Illinois.
Things unraveled completely in Cleveland. Johnson harangued his audience, argued back and forth with hecklers, some of whom were plants from his political opposition, and generally summed up his appearance by telling a senator, “I don’t care about my dignity.” Ultimately, the trip was a thorough-going catastrophe. Republicans earned huge victories at the polls that fall, setting the table for Johnson’s eventual impeachment in the House. The Swing Around the Circle was a swing and a miss.
Honorable Mention: 1894
Democrat Grover Cleveland was mired in the second of his two nonconsecutive terms. The country was sunk in a deep recession as a result of the Panic of 1893. The railroad workers were on strike, and mass marches of the unemployed came to Washington. Democrats lost 116 seats in the House and five in the Senate—and there were only 44 states at the time. The Republicans would control both houses of Congress for the next 16 years.
1974
No party ever was teed up as soundly as were the Democrats in 1974. They were running in a midterm election barely three months after Richard Nixon had beaten feet out of town, two steps ahead of the law. Plus, Republican president Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, which was not helpful. The Democrats, who already held 248 seats in the House, won 43 more. Good government got a rare win, for a couple of years, anyway.
Honorable Mention: Tie, 1994 and 1998
The Republicans seized control of the House in 1994, for the first time since God was a boy. They also took eight additional seats in the Senate. The engine behind this was Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who pioneered a scorched-earth strategy charged with an overwhelming opinion of himself as a world-historical leader. Four years later, Gingrich put all his chips on the table behind the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. As a result, Democrats picked up five seats in the House, which reduced Gingrich’s majority to 11 seats. That majority pushed through the impeachment anyway. By the end of things, Clinton was still in the White House and Gingrich was out of the Speaker’s chair, his significance evaporated.
2010
Another Republican “shellacking,” to use the phrase then-president Barack Obama summoned up to describe what had happened. The Republicans picked up seven seats in the Senate and a whopping 63 seats in the House, the biggest shift in that body since 1948. The results were enough to raise doubts about Obama’s chances at reelection. Those doubts were dispelled by the eventual Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. However, the swing did bring in a generation of Republicans that had been marinating in the Crazy for most of their adult lives. That generation is now running the whole train, and the cliff is getting closer.
2026
We’ll see, I guess.
