Monday, 12/29/14, Public Square

Could the “Tea Party” take over Congress?

This gathering of libertarians, conservatives, and others just plain fed up with business as usual in Washington has some prominent figureheads – Fox News broadcasters and political pot-stirrers Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck –and, is clearly having a major impact on the midterm elections — putting a significant number of more conventional Republicans as well as Democrats into a cold sweat as they look over their shoulders at tea-party backed candidates with a real possibility of winning.  Some of these candidates should scare the hell out of most voters — these are not your average run-of-the-mill politicians, in fact, they’re worse.

Which tea-party-backed candidates do you think will be elected this fall, and why? Which ones are most off center, maybe even off the far edge of ‘right?’

Looking back in history at midterm elections

In the midterm elections, the party occupying the White House nearly always loses a substantial number of seats in both the House and the Senate. Current polling indicates that this year does not appear to be an exception. The chart below shows the House “gains” from 1946 to 2006 for all the midterm elections, where positive means that the party in the White House gained seats and negative means they lost seats. The color is that of the President’s party.

The Senate picture is roughly the same, as can be seen here.

Does this mean the Democrats’ goose is cooked? Not entirely, but the signs are not good for them. In particular, the health-insurance bill is likely to dominate in 2010. If the Democrats fail to pass a bill, they will have shown themselves incapable of governing even with huge majorities in the House and Senate and the voters will surely give the others guys another try. If they do pass a bill and manage to effectively sell it, they might be able to limit losses.