How will Democrats fare in 2022? Some history.

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( One way to get a handle on reasonable expectations for the 2022 midterm elections and the remainder of the Joe Biden presidency is to look for historical comparisons. Some Democrats are [nervously invoking 1966](, when they lost 47 seats in the House of Representatives, but the political analyst Stuart Rothenberg makes a good case that [1966 doesn’t cast much light on 2022](. Let’s take a look at a few other possibilities. The key to 2022 is that it’s the first midterm after a party change in the White House — but one in which the incoming party had disappointing results in congressional races. The modern elections that might fit that definition would include the ones after the 1960, 1968, 1976, 1992, 2000 and 2016 contests. I’ll toss out 2000 and 2016, in which the presidential-election winner lost the popular vote, since those pose different challenges for the president’s party. I’ll also eliminate 1968, when President Richard Nixon’s Republicans gained ground in both chambers of Congress, but still fell way short of majorities. That, too, is different from what Biden and the Democrats are dealing with now. So that leaves three midterms to look at: those after the elections of John Kennedy in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992. In all three of those election years, Democrats retained majorities in Congress, but lost some ground. And in each case, that probably made it harder to get much done. The first two years of the Kennedy, Carter and Clinton presidencies were disappointments in terms of legislative output — a serious contrast to the first two years of, say, the Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama presidencies, when a new party in the White House was accompanied by big gains in Congress. Of course, some bills passed in those Congresses, but most observers considered the legislative agendas of Kennedy, Carter and Clinton to be stalled or worse. So far, that’s not the case for Biden and this group of congressional Democrats — making it perhaps a very impressive achievement if they do manage to pass ambitious bills like an infrastructure plan. Carter was elected with large Democratic majorities in Congress as an aftereffect of the 1974 post-Watergate landslide, but Democrats in 1976 had no further gains; they added just one House seat and no Senate seats. Carter began as a [very popular president](, but by his second year that was no longer the case. The 1978 midterm was disappointing for his party, but hardly catastrophic. Democrats went from 61 Senate seats down to 58 and retained 277 House seats despite losing 15. (In all cases, I’m [comparing]( the beginning of one Congress to the next, so some gains and losses happened during intervening special elections.) The really big losses wouldn’t happen until 1980, when Republicans gained the White House, captured their first Senate majority since the 1950s and restored a conservative-coalition majority in the House, even though they couldn’t quite win the gavels. I’m not sure whether Carter or Clinton is the Democrats’ worst-case scenario. In 1992, Democrats gained one Senate seat and lost nine House seats, retaining majorities in both chambers. The roof caved in for them in 1994, when Republicans regained the Senate majority they had lost in the 1986 midterms and won their first House majority in 40 years. The good news for Democrats was that Clinton, who had an awful early presidency but began recovering after his first year, was easily re-elected in 1996. The bad news for them was that it would be another decade before they regained a House majority, leaving divided government for the last six years of Clinton’s presidency. The Kennedy case is different. Like Carter, Kennedy was elected two years after a huge Democratic congressional landslide. In 1960, they lost 22 House seats, the record for a party that also gains the presidency, and lost a little ground in the Senate. Despite legislative frustration, however, Kennedy remained popular during his first two years. The result? Democrats gained three more Senate seats in 1962, giving them 67, and lost only four seats in the House. We’ll never known how the 1964 elections would have gone had Kennedy lived, but as it was, Democrats swept to huge gains with Lyndon Johnson elected to a full term of his own in a landslide and Democrats reaching their best numbers in Congress since Franklin Roosevelt’s second term. I don’t know what lessons Biden and the Democrats should draw from all of this. Kennedy was popular, Clinton and Carter were not, but there’s no magic formula for presidents to follow to get voters to like them. It’s certainly a good idea to have a healthy economy — Clinton wasn’t helped by a continuing slow recovery from the same recession that defeated George H.W. Bush in the first place, while inflation was already hurting Carter in 1978. It’s also a good idea to avoid alienating half or more of Washington, as Carter did. And it’s a good idea to begin the presidency with a smoothly functioning White House, something that took Clinton more than a year to achieve and something Carter really never managed to have. The lessons, I think, are for the rest of us as observers. On the one hand, there’s a pretty clear record of disappointment when it comes to legislative agendas of the three Democratic presidents who took office in political circumstances resembling Biden’s. Biden’s challenges should probably be judged in that context, even beyond the small margins his party holds in both chambers. Beyond that, and looking at the midterms and beyond, the three cases yield very different results. But that’s not meaningless; it tells us that there’s a lot more to midterm elections, and to the subsequent presidential elections, than just the original election context. 1. Dan Nexon on why George W. Bush was a [really bad president](. 2. Geneva Cole at the Monkey Cage on [the summer after the Black Lives Matter protests](. 3. Dan Drezner on [Biden’s foreign policy](. 4. Greg Koger at Mischiefs of Faction on [the evolution of the filibuster](. 5. Dave Karpf on [climate strategies](. 6. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Clara Ferreira Marques on [leaving Hong Kong](. 7. And Ed Kilgore on [the one and only Edwin Edwards](, the former Louisiana governor who died Monday. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. 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