Ronald Reagan's D-Day Speech

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At his best, Ronald Reagan could redce an audience to tears with his speeches. I saw him do it on a number of occasions — when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1985, when Reagan accepted his renomination as the Republican standard bearer in the summer of 1984.

Speechwriter Peggy Noonan was often responsible for putting the words in Reagan's mouth that accomplished that. Noonan, more than anyone else, was responsible for Reagan&'s moniker

I'll be the the first to acknowledge that Noonan is a gifted writer. But few of Reagan's speeches could match "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc" that was delivered on the 40th anniversary of the D–Day invasion 40 years ago today.

That really wasn't surprising. D–Day was the turning point of World War II, and the men who fought in it truly could be said to have saved the free world. Reagan paid tribute to them when many were still living.

The RFK Assassination

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"Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live."

Robert F. Kennedy

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the fatal shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles after he had declared victory in the California presidential primary.

He didn't die immediately. He lingered for about 24 hours.

I have written on this blog before about my memories of that event. What I am thinking about today is the aftermath — when his body was brought back to New York for the funeral, then carried by train to Washington where he was buried next to his brother in Arlington Cemetery.

I remember watching the funeral service on TV — and seeing Sen. Edward Kennedy's moving eulogy to his brother. I remember the stoic demeanor of Kennedy's widow, Ethel. In the context of what had occurred in the preceding days, it was heart–breaking.

But I suppose my dominant memory is of the train making its way from New York to Washington. It is a distance of only about 200 miles — ordinarily a four–hour trip by train, historian Theodore White observed, but more than doubled by the crowds that came out to pay their respects. It seemed as if nearly everyone who lived between those two cities came out and stood beside the railroad tracks until the train carrying Kennedy's body went by.

At first, the crowds were mostly small groups, but as the train proceeded, the crowds grew larger, standing three, four, five rows deep, sometimes more. Every segment of the American population was represented — young, old, black, white, affluent, poor. Sometimes they spilled onto the tracks, forcing the train to slow down even more. My memory is that a handful of people may have been killed after being struck by the train.

There have been museum exhibits recently that sought to capture that experience for those who have no memory of that time, but the sensation is incomplete without knowledge of the signs that were always present during Kennedy's life — and followed him to his grave.

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When Kennedy walked among us, those signs encouraged him to seek the presidency or demanded justice after he made his decision to run. After he was shot and his fate was still unknown but widely anticipated, the signs read "Pray for Bobby." Along the train route, they simply said, "Goodbye" or "So long."

White tried to describe the scene — but how do you describe the indescribable?

"There were the family groups: husband holding sobbing wife, arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort her," he wrote. "Five nuns in a yellow pickup truck, tiptoeing high to see. A very fat father with three fat boys, he with his hand over his heart, each of the boys giving a different variant of the Boy Scout or school salute. And the people: the men from the great factories that line the tracks, standing at ease as they were taught as infantrymen, their arms folded over chests. Women on the back porches of the slum neighborhoods that line the tracks, in their housedresses, with ever–present rollers in their hair, crying. People in buildings, leaning from office windows, on the flat roofs of industrial plants, on the bluffs of the rivers, on the embankments of the railway cuts, a crust on every ridge and height. Pleasure boats in the rivers lined up in flotillas; automobiles parked on all the viaducts that crossed the line of the train. Brass bands — police bands, school bands, Catholic bands. Flags: individual flags dropped in salute by middle–aged men as the train passed, flags at half–staff from every public building on the way, entire classes of schoolchildren holding the little eight–by–ten flags, in that peppermint–striped flutter that marks every campaign trip. He turned them on, black and white, rich and poor. And they cried."

No other politician in modern history could connect with as many disparate groups as Bobby Kennedy. It is something no one tries to do anymore because it is so difficult to achieve. And in the blink of an eye, he was gone.

Thomas Jefferson's 275th Birthday

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"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

President John F. Kennedy
At a dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere
The White House
April 29, 1962

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It was 275 years ago today that my favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, was born.

Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and may well have been the most brilliant of the Founding Fathers — but he probably draws mixed reviews today.

A product of colonial Virginia, Jefferson benefited from the work of slaves on several plantations. He also, as Fawn Brodie's 1974 biography of Jefferson, "An Intimate History," revealed, fathered children with Sally Hemings, a slave who was said to be the half–sister of Jefferson's deceased wife.

Critics of Jefferson contend that Jefferson's ownership of slaves is a clear contradiction of his assertion that "all men are created equal."

But to focus on that is to force Jefferson, in hindsight, to live according to standards that were in place nearly two centuries after the end of his presidency. Ironically, Jefferson might not be an especially popular candidate for president today. He was tall — 6 feet 2½ inches — and voters do tend to prefer tall presidential candidates, but he was perhaps a little too relaxed for many voters' tastes. Jefferson, a senator of the day remarked, "sits in a lounging manner on one hip, commonly." He wasn't a particularly finicky dresser, either. He paid little attention to fashion and preferred to dress in whatever was comfortable, resulting in frequent mixing of styles from different periods.

Most fair–minded historians prefer to focus on his advocacy of the principle of individual rights, his championing of religious freedom and tolerance and the Louisiana Purchase, which was made during Jefferson's first term as president and doubled the size of the United States.

Jefferson considered himself a Deist, and his thoughts on religious freedom stemmed from Virginia's laws that made it a crime "not to baptize infants in the Anglican church; dissenters were denied office, civil or military; children could be taken from their parents if the parents failed to profess the prescribed creeds," wrote Jon Meacham in "The Art of Power."

"Jefferson believed it unjust (and unwise) to use public funds to support an established church and to link civil rights to religious observance," Meacham wrote. "He said such a system led to 'spiritual tyranny.' In theological terms, according to notes he made on John Locke, Jefferson concurred with a Christian tradition that held the church should not depend on state–enforced compulsion."

As for the Louisiana Purchase, it is hard to imagine any acquisition by any country that has been as financially feasible. For about 3 cents an acre, the United States acquired all or part of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

Jefferson had authorized his negotiators to purchase only New Orleans and West Florida, but Napoleon, strapped for cash on the brink of war with Britain, offered the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson had his doubts about the constitutionality of the deal but quickly agreed to it before Napoleon could change his mind.

Farewell to a Great Journalist

There was a time in my life when I was on the journalism faculty at the University of Oklahoma.

The director of the school of journalism was a man named David Dary. A native of Manhattan, Kansas, he began his career as a broadcast journalist (he introduced President Kennedy on CBS just before Kennedy delivered his Cuban Missile Crisis speech in 1962), then moved on to teaching and writing about "old–time Kansas," as he put it.

I just learned today that he passed away less than a month ago.

In Dary's obituary, Beccy Tanner of the Wichita Eagle called Dary "one of Kansas' best storytellers." I have no doubt about the truth of that statement.

I have read excerpts from his books — I have never read one of his books from start to finish, but I have long wanted to and may well do so — and, being something of a historian myself, I think his engaging storytelling style was made possible by his training as a journalist. He wrote more than 20 books, most of them focused on the old American West — and he did it well enough to be inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2010 for his literary contributions to the history of the cowboy.

From what I have read, his research was impeccable and his style was entertaining — which, frankly, I would expect. During my time at OU, I spent many hours in his office, discussing all sorts of journalism–related topics and learning more from him than I ever learned in a classroom.

At the beginning of my first semester at OU, Dary and his wife hosted a dinner for the journalism faculty. I became acquainted with most of my new colleagues on that occasion, but what I really remember is looking at the bookshelves in his home, where he kept copies of all the books he had written up to that point. I was mesmerized. He walked up behind me and said something — I don't remember now what he said — and I told him how impressed I was. He smiled and said something typically modest — probably "thank you" — and then he asked me if I was getting settled in to my new job all right.

I once served on a search committee with him to find a new professor for the print journalism department. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

A family crisis prompted me to leave Oklahoma and return to Texas a few years later, but I never forgot his kindness to me while I was there.

He was a dedicated journalist, having rebuilt the OU journalism program during his tenure — and I know he inspired the students who took his classes.

Rest in peace, sir.

Fifty Years Since the Death of Martin Luther King

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"Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
April 3, 1968

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn.

Many articles have been written recapping that event for those not old enough to remember. It is not my intention to add to them. If the reader wants to know what brought King to Memphis, there are many sources for that information.

Nor is it necessary for me to discuss the aftermath of the assassination. Dr. King was the face of the civil rights movement. When that face was taken away, it sparked predictable violence across America — sadly, that violence also led to widespread looting, prompting Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the NAACP, to lament that "Martin's memory is being desecrated." It was more than that, really. It was a violation of the concept of home and the security that word implies.

"For home in America is as much home to blacks as to whites," historian Theodore H. White wrote at the time, "and violence menaces them as much as it does Americans of any color."

The night before he died, Dr. King said something that could just as easily have been said yesterday: "Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars."

Trouble is in the land today. One need look no further than San Bruno, Calif., or Austin, Texas, to see that.

Sometimes there is a racial aspect to the violence, but to focus on that alone is to miss the point; the truth is that race relations have improved in half a century. Segregated schools still existed in 1968. If they exist today, it is in the form of private schools to which only affluent families have access. Laws protect Americans from racial (and sexual) discrimination in the workplace.

Are there areas where improvement is needed? Of course. Wholesale change does not happen overnight — or even over decades. America has always been a work in progress. But there can be no denying that the America of 2018 is better than the America of 1968.

So on this day I would say that Dr. King's dream is partially fulfilled. Much work has been done, and much remains to be done.

The work will not be finished until all Americans, regardless of their color — or gender or age, for that matter — enjoy the same rights and privileges of citizenship.

Then the dream will be fulfilled.

What Will It Take to Flip the House?

The Democrats are going against the tide of history in this year's midterm elections, which are now slightly more than seven months away.

Conventional wisdom says the out–of–power party outperforms the in–power party in a midterm, and that is likely to be the case in 2018 — but conventional wisdom says nothing about whether the former is likely to win control of either chamber of Congress.

And that is the prize the Democrats really seek. It would nice to narrow the gap, but it wouldn't be the same as seizing control of the chamber and being able to block any White House initiatives in the next two years.

Doing well on the state level is vital for the Democrats as well for it is in the state legislatures that most of the district boundaries for the 2020s will be drawn. High turnout for Democrats running for federal office may help with this farther down the ballot.

In the House, the Democrats need to flip roughly two dozen seats, and the ever–increasing number of Republican House retirements may very well make that a possibility. But the odds are that Democrats still will need to defeat some Republican incumbents to achieve their goal.

It's a tall order, but it can be done. There have been 16 midterm elections since the dawn of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, and Democrats have flipped two dozen or more House seats in four of them. They did it one other time, too, in a presidential election year — 1964, when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in a landslide.

Historically, Democrats need some kind of catalyst to flip seats at that rate. The main catalyst in 1958 was a recession, which contributed to the flipping of 49 House seats.

In 1974, Democrats flipped 49 House seats again, thanks primarily to the fallout from the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's resignation that summer.

Democrats flipped 26 seats in 1982, Ronald Reagan's first midterm, when the recession that began under Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, continued.

In 2006, Democrats flipped 31 seats, thanks to a lowered national opinion of President George W. Bush, the war in Iraq and congressional scandals.

Democrats' distaste for President Donald Trump likely will not be enough by itself in 2018, and the economy is not doing them any favors.

The First Impeachment

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It was 150 years ago today that an American president was impeached for the first time.

It has been fashionable in recent years for those who lose presidential elections to start calling for the impeachment of the winner — even before the winner has taken office — but impeachment had never been attempted before this day in 1868. Only two American presidents have faced the genuine prospect of impeachment since that time, and only one (Bill Clinton) faced a trial in the U.S. Senate. The House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against Nixon in the summer of 1974, but Nixon resigned before the full House could vote on them.

Four years earlier, Johnson (a Democrat) had been selected as the running mate for Republican President Abraham Lincoln in his bid for a second term. Not only was it unprecedented for a major–party nominee to pick someone from the other party to be his running mate (they actually ran under the National Union banner), but Lincoln's choice was the military governor of Tennessee, a state that had seceded and was still not a part of the Union (it was occupied by the Union army). Tennessee did not participate in the election of 1864.

Johnson was an inspired choice for a president whose mission was to preserve the nation. While a supporter of slavery, Johnson was an unapologetic Unionist who had been the only Southern senator to oppose his state's decision to secede.

I don't think vice presidents deliver inaugural addresses anymore, but they did in Andrew Johnson's day. At least, Johnson tried to deliver such a speech, but he wasn't feeling well so he drank some whiskey, believing that would help. Instead, he got gassed and gave a rambling speech. Thus, the inauguration of 1865, which is remembered in history for Lincoln's magnanimous call for "malice toward none" and "charity for all" in the North's treatment of the vanquished South following the Civil War, was an awkward introduction for Johnson to his fellow Americans.

That was particularly unfortunate since Johnson became the nation's leader a month and a half later.

Six weeks after the inauguration in 1865, Lincoln was assassinated, and Johnson became the 17th president. Things didn't go well for him, and by this day in 1868, 11 articles of impeachment, largely related to Johnson's efforts to dismiss the secretary of war, were adopted by the House. The case was sent to the Senate for trial — where Johnson was ultimately acquitted by a single vote.

Johnson failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1868 and left office in 1869.

He returned to the U.S. Senate in 1875 and died shortly therafter.

The Turning of the Tide

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In hindsight it is neat and orderly to say that the Tet offensive, which began in late January 1968, was the turning point in Vietnam.

And, strategically, perhaps it was.

But public opinion had been turning against the war for quite awhile. The escalation of the conflict in the mid–1960s had spawned Eugene McCarthy's insurgent presidential campaign that would force President Lyndon Johnson to abandon any plans he had to seek another term, and it would lead to Bobby Kennedy's campaign as well. There were protests — and chaos — in American cities. It was a turbulent and terrifying time in American history.

Through it all, I suppose, a majority of Americans continued to believe that victory was still possible in Vietnam — until the Tet offensive revealed the weaknesses of America's war effort. While the Tet offensive failed to meet its military objectives, historian Theodore H. White called it "the shadow on the walls."

Again, in hindsight, it was. But no one really recognized the shadow for what it was — at least at first.

Two days into the offensive — 50 years ago today — one of the most famous photographs of the Vietnam era was taken. It would lead to a Pulitzer Prize for the photographer, Eddie Adams of the Associated Press, who snapped a picture of the execution in Saigon of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong operative who had been involved in the slayings of a South Vietnamese officer's wife and children.

It was a powerful picture, powerful enough to mobilize opposition to the war even — or, perhaps, especially — if the person looking at the picture did not know the details behind it. To the uninformed, it could well appear as if Vietnam was like the lawless old west with people being randomly murdered in the streets. The picture did not say why the man was being executed.

The executioner was Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, chief of South Vietnam's national police. He shot Nguyễn Văn Lém in front of Adams and a TV cameraman for NBC News. According to Adams, the shooter walked up to him and said, "They killed many of my people and yours, too," and walked off.

Film footage of the shooting was subsequently broadcast worldwide, invigorating the antiwar movement and providing the first of many shocking, unexpected and critical moments in what would be a thoroughly unpredictable year, filled with riots in the streets and assassinations.

But it could really be said to have begun on this day with the shooting of one man in the streets of Saigon.

Lessons From the Past

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Our political system is an amazing thing.

It really is. Oh, I know we all complain about things that government does or doesn't do, and we get mad at our elected officials from time to time — but nearly without exception our system has permitted us to make peaceful periodic changes in our elected leadership. We take that for granted, but we wouldn't if we lived in many other places in the world.

But our system also has its idiosyncracies.

The pendulum is always swinging, and the out–of–power party always has plenty of reasons to be energized by midterm elections, starting with the clear historical trend that favors the folks who are outside looking in. This time it is the Democrats' turn as the out–of–power party, and everything seems to point to a big year for them. The president's approval numbers remain low, and Democrats continue to hold a lead in the generic congressional ballot.

Along with that, nearly three dozen Republicans in the House have announced their intention to retire, and more seem likely. The terrain certainly looks favorable for Democrats in 2018.

But history has some cautionary tales.

Let's start with the most recent history that Democrats ignore at their peril.

In 2016 polls showed Hillary Clinton with the lead over Donald Trump — and, indeed, Clinton did win the popular vote by a considerable margin.

But the United States has never elected its presidents by popular vote. It has always elected its presidents by electoral vote, and Clinton's popular votes were too heavily concentrated in the coastal states to influence the Electoral College. (In fact, if you took California's vote entirely out of the mix, Trump would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral vote; Clinton's margin in California was about 3.1 million whereas her margin nationally was 2.86 million.)

The same thing appears to be likely in this year's congressional races. Democrats are concentrated in urban districts, and the Democrats' nominees in those districts are likely to pile up impressive margins. Nancy Pelosi, for example, routinely rolls up incredible margins in her Bay Area district. It's even likely in some places here in Texas, where Clinton carried the metropolitan counties of Dallas, Travis, Bexar and Harris by wide margins.

But all you need to win an election is a single vote. You'd like to do better than that, of course, but some Democrats are likely to roll up huge margins in some districts — when many of those votes would be more beneficial elsewhere.

In Texas, outside of the metro counties and the ones that border Mexico, Republicans still dominated in 2016 — and likely will continue to do so. Some Democrats are salivating at the thought of the open seats that have been held by Republicans, like the South Texas district that has been represented by Republican Lamar Smith for more than 30 years. Smith is retiring, and there have been rumblings of how Democrats think they have an opportunity there, but one of the Democrats seeking the seat once served on Pelosi's staff. That might help win the Democratic primary, but it isn't likely to be a general–election winner in a district that voted for Trump by 10 percentage points.

That brings me to another point. The Democrats, like the Republicans in the first midterm of the Obama years, are engaged in a battle from within. The battle is between the establishment and the extremists. At stake is the direction of the party.

As the battle plays out, the establishment will prevail in some places, and the loose cannons, who are typically the most energized in the midterms, will prevail in others.

Democrats are certain to try to nationalize the campaign, but midterms are not national campaigns. They are held in every state and every House district, but the issues and candidates vary. It is tempting to vote for the loose cannons because they typically oppose everything the in–power party does, but Democrats need to remember how some of those loose cannons worked out for Republicans in the past.

In 2012, Missouri Republican Todd Akin made his widely reported remarks about "legitimate rape" that helped politically endangered Sen. Claire McCaskill win a second term by 16 percentage points. McCaskill is back, still politically vulnerable and running for a third term in a state that voted for Trump by nearly 19 percentage points.

Similarly, Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock's remark that "even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." Mourdock won the nomination by defeating six–term incumbent Richard Lugar in the primary.

Indiana has only voted for a Democratic presidential nominee once since 1964, but it voted for the Democrat in that Senate race, Joe Donnelly. He, too, is up for re–election — in a state that supported Trump by slightly more than 19 percentage points.

McCaskill and Donnelly were originally expected to lose in 2012, and their victories are big reasons why, when Democrats need to win only two seats from Republicans to have a majority in the Senate, they must defend more than two dozen Senate seats in November.

Democrats have a rare opportunity in 2018, but it is not a slam dunk.

Taking Back the House

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Democrats face a similar situation to the one Republicans faced eight years ago. In 2010 Democrats held the White House and both chambers of Congress. Today Republicans do.

Granted, the Democrats had larger majorities in both the House and Senate — and they had a more popular president, too — in 2010. Yet they still managed to lose their advantage in the House when Republicans gained a net of 64 seats that year. They lost ground in the Senate and eventually lost that majority as well.

Today many political observers are convinced that the tables have turned — which is based on solid historical data. This is a midterm year, and midterm years almost always go against the party in the White House. That has been true whether the incumbent was popular or not.

Indeed, presidential approval ratings play an important role in midterm elections, but the responses have become increasingly polarized over the years. In the 1950s, for example, an average of nearly half of Democrats said they approved of the job Republican Dwight Eisenhower was doing as president. In the 1980s, an average of less than one–third of Democrats approved of the job Republican Ronald Reagan was doing, and in the 1990s, slightly more than one–fourth of Republicans approved of the job Bill Clinton was doing.

Clinton's successors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, failed to average even that much support from the opposing party.

But Bush's Republicans benefited electorally from the terrorist attacks of 2001. They might have been expected to lose ground in the midterm elections of 2002; instead, they gained ground in both chambers, the first time a president's party accomplished that in a midterm election in nearly 70 years.

(It is unwise to ignore the influence that circumstances can have. At the same time, though, it is not wise to expect too much from things like scandals. The Iran–Contra scandal dropped Reagan's approval rating below 50% in January 1987, but he rebounded to higher than 60% by the time he left office two years later.)

I have a theory about that trend. When it is a president's first — and, in many cases, it has been a president's only — midterm, that president is two years removed from winning the presidency, and his supporters are complacent while his foes are energized. When it is a president's second midterm, his supporters are generally demoralized by something, a scandal or whatnot, and the rest of the country, from those who are indifferent to long–time detractors, is just weary.

It takes truly unusual circumstances for any incumbent to overcome that, and so far such circumstances have not materialized in this election. But it has been observed frequently that the 2016 elections rewrote the rules so I wouldn't rule it out.

In 2018 Democrats need fewer than half as many seats as they lost in 2010 to claim a paper–thin majority in the House. That sounds plausible — and it is — but there is something that is worth remembering.

Unlike Senate seats, which are decided every six years, House seats are on the ballot in every election. There have been 22 elections since Watergate, and a single party has gained that many House seats (or more) in four of them. The rest of the time the gains were less than 24.

It's a tall order — but not one that is impossible to fill.

As Kyle Kondik of Sabato's Crystal Ball recently noted, there is already an unusually high number of House incumbents not seeking re–election — twice as many Republicans as Democrats.

In fact, there are enough open seats in Republican–held districts for Democrats to entertain thoughts of capturing the majority in the House by winning most of them — but that would be a foolish strategy. It ignores the fact that not all districts are created equal.

Some districts have long histories of voting for one party or the other. Like mine, for instance. I live in Texas' Fifth District. It has been represented by Republican Jeb Hensarling since 2003. The only time he was held under 60% of the vote was when he was originally elected in 2002 — and he received 58% in that election. He announced a couple of months ago that he would not seek re–election.

Hensarling is not leaving because he anticipates a tough election. He is highly regarded here and would be sure to win another term if he wanted one. Whoever wins the Republican nomination will be a heavy favorite to win the general election — if he/she is even opposed.

If the voters in this district elect a Democrat to succeed Hensarling, it will be a clear indication that a wave election is underway.

Democrats are more likely to gain ground in districts like Arizona's 2nd District, which was represented by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords before she was shot in 2011 and had to retire. One of Giffords' aides was elected to fill her vacancy in 2012. Voters narrowly chose the loser of the 2012 election — Martha McSally — in a rematch in 2014. McSally was re–elected with 57% of the vote in 2016 and now is running for Jeff Flake's Senate seat.

Democrats are favored to win that House seat this November.

Other open districts are just as evenly divided — and could be prone to flip in the next election with no incumbent on the ballot. The power of incumbency, as I have noted here before, is considerable.

But it is not absolute.

Open seats do present opportunities for the party that does not occupy the White House, but Democrats have to be selective about which ones they pursue. Kondik says they need to net at least half a dozen Republican–held open seats to be on track to seize the majority in the House. The rest, he wrote, will need to be taken from the officeholders. His estimate is that Democrats will need to beat 15 to 20 incumbents head to head.

That may seem like a challenge, but Kondik insists the number is not too high by historical standards.

Time will tell.

The Minnesota Two-Step

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Let's start with some stuff that is important to understand, although not enough people do:

U.S. senators are elected to six–year terms, and the terms are arranged so that one–third of the Senate is on the ballot in any given election. In 2018 the electoral map has few Republicans facing the voters as the senators who are up for re–election won their current terms in 2012, the year Barack Obama was re–elected. That was a pretty good year for Democrats.

If those senators were re–elected in 2012, their previous election would have been in 2006, which was a big year for Democrats. That was the year they seized control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in more than a decade.

The Democrat senators who are on the ballot in 2018 had favorable winds at their backs the last two times their seats were on the ballot. Their party gained two Senate seats and eight House seats in 2012 — five Senate seats and 34 House seats in 2006.

The political terrain wasn't as favorable for Republicans in those years as it was in others, and fewer were successful. As a result, fewer Republicans hold the Class 1 seats that will be on the 2018 ballot.

Senate terms are also staggered so that no state must elect both its senators in the same election year — unless there is a midterm vacancy that needs to be filled.

Sen. Al Franken's stated intention to resign in January puts Minnesota in that comparatively rare category in 2018.

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's senior senator, is seeking a third six–year term in her Class 1 seat. Franken's seat is a Class 2 seat that would be slated to face the voters again in 2020, but because he is leaving the Senate, his appointed successor will be on the ballot in the next election. The voters will decide who will represent them until 2020 — at which time the winner of the 2018 race will have to decide whether to seek a full term.

Such two–fer Senate elections are rare — some states have never had one — but this will be the second time for Minnesota. The first time was 40 years ago — in 1978. Then, as now, both seats were held by Democrats.

Does that 40–year–old election have any relevance to 2018?

One of the seats had belonged to Sen. Walter Mondale, who was elected vice president in 1976. Minnesota Gov. Wendell Anderson resigned so his lieutenant governor could become governor and appoint Anderson to fill the Senate vacancy for the last two years of the term.

The other seat had belonged to former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was elected to the Senate after leaving the vice presidency and then re–elected in 1976; then he died of cancer in January 1978. His widow was appointed to the seat until an election could be held later that year. The winner would hold the seat until 1982. Muriel Humphrey chose not to run, and Minnesota Democrats selected a rich trucking firm owner to be their standard bearer.

Minnesota has a reputation as a deep blue state in 2017, and it was quite blue in the '70s, too, although it did vote for Richard Nixon in 1972 and had voted for other Republicans for president in the first half of the 20th century; still it hadn't elected a Republican to the Senate since 1952.

Republicans used that to their advantage. They made the point that Minnesota's leading statewide offices were held by people who had not been elected to them — and the seats would all be on the ballot in 1978. That was the voters' big chance, the Republicans said, gleefully asserting that Minnesota's Democrats would face "something scary" in 1978 — "an election."

That wasn't entirely fair. Democrats had been elected to all those offices the last time they were on the ballot, and Democrats were appointed to fill the vacancies. It wasn't as if someone was circumventing the political will of the voters.

(The party affiliation may have been the same, but the philosophy wasn't always. That trucking firm owner who was nominated when Mrs. Humphrey decided not to run was more conservative than most Democrats were then or are now.)

In 1976 Minnesota gave the Carter–Mondale ticket nearly 55% of the vote. The voters knew that, if the ticket won the election, someone would replace Mondale in the Senate. They voted for the Democratic ticket, anyway. When Humphrey was re–elected that same year, it was no secret that he was sick; nearly three–fourths of Minnesotans voted for him, anyway.

What hurt the Democrats in 1978, though, was Anderson's blatant move to gain Mondale's seat. I suppose it hinted of entitlement to many, and the voters clearly didn't like that. Only 42% of them supported Anderson in November.

Muriel Humphrey, by her own admission, was no politician. She was a politician's wife, and she played that role graciously for decades, then dutifully kept the seat warm until the election. Would the magic of the Humphrey name have carried the day and kept the Senate seat in the Democrats' hands if she had not decided to step down?

We'll never know, but that businessman who won the party's nomination when Mrs. Humphrey declined to run only got 36% of the vote in November.

When the Senate convened in January 1979 Minnesota was represented by two Republican senators for the first time since the Truman administration.

Republicans completed the sweep by winning the governor's office as well, and the 1978 election came to be known as the "Minnesota Massacre."

Now, to an extent, voters throw tantrums in these special elections and vote contrary to their usual patterns. Like a fever, though, it passes, and voters return to their roots by the time the next election is held. We saw this in the early part of this decade when Massachusetts elected a Republican to serve the remainder of Ted Kennedy's term, then chose a Democrat when the seat was on the ballot for a full six–year term.

I suspect we will see that same phenomenon — albeit in reverse — in Alabama in 2020, when Democrat Doug Jones must decide whether to seek a full six–year term.

The dynamics were different in Minnesota 40 years ago, though. The Republican who was elected to complete Humphrey's term, David Durenberger, went on to win two full terms and then retired after 16 years in the Senate. Rudy Boschwitz, the Republican who defeated Anderson, was re–elected once.

If Minnesota threw a tantrum in 1978, it had staying power. It remains to be seen whether the voters of Minnesota will throw a similar tantrum in 2018.

Political tantrums require catalysts, and those catalysts vary from state to state. The circumstances that led to Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy's seat in 2010 were different from the ones that propelled Doug Jones to victory in the race for Jeff Sessions' seat or led to the Minnesota Massacre.

At present there appear to be no storms on the horizon for Minnesota Democrats, but as I observed more than a year ago, in spite of voting Democratic in 10 consecutive presidential elections, deep–blue Minnesota wavered a few times and was a candidate for flipping to the other party in 2016.

It didn't, but it came close. A week after I posted that, Minnesota voted Democrat for the 11th straight time — but Hillary Clinton's share of Minnesota's vote was the smallest for a Democrat since her husband in 1992.

And Bill Clinton could point to the presence on the ballot of a credible third–party candidate who took nearly a quarter of Minnesota's vote.

Who knows which issues may emerge in 2018 to help or hurt Tina Smith, Franken's appointed successor? Smith, who was once regarded as a gubernatorial prospect, will become a senator as an indirect result of the emergence of sexual harassment as a political issue and a direct result of credible accusations that were leveled at her predecessor.

But what if not–so–credible accusations are made that cast a shadow over the issue? That could lead to voter backlash.

Are there any Tawana Brawleys lurking out there in Minnesota?

A Noteworthy Day in American History

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Today is the anniversary of two noteworthy events in American history.

They are noteworthy for different reasons — and, on the surface, appear to have little, if anything, in common. But bear with me.

Now, something has happened on every day in the calendar — even if it was nothing more than people were born on that day and people died on that day. For a long time I believed that nothing of note ever happened on the day of my birth — other than the fact that a few famous people were born on that day and a few died — but I later learned that there were some historic — albeit minor — events on my birthday.

There are 365 days in a year (366 in Leap Years); in a few thousand years of recorded history it stands to reason that something, however great or small, must have happened on each at some time.

Dec. 19 is the anniversary of two significant events in American history, separated by nearly two centuries, but they both speak to the purpose of America.

The first event was on this day in 1777. Gen. George Washington and his men began to set up their winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pa.

Even if you never learned the specifics when you were in school, you almost surely learned of the Continental Army's struggle to survive that winter. They had been engaged in a battle with the British in early December, and Washington sought some place where his men could spend the winter.

There were several considerations — Washington needed a location that would support wartime objectives. Valley Forge was far from ideal, but it was easy to defend and had plenty of timber that could be used to build huts.

Everything was in short supply — food, clothing, shelter.

As for shelter ...

It was on this day 240 years ago that construction of the first hut at Valley Forge began. It was completed in three days. By February, 2,000 huts had been built.

Having shelter against the elements helped, but it did nothing for the food and clothing shortages. Contrary to popular belief, Valley Forge had comparatively little snow that winter, but the conditions were still frigid, the men were ill–clothed and underfed.

Why did they endure such hardship? Because they believed in the concept of freedom.

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Fast forward 195 years.

On this day in 1972, Apollo 17 returned to Earth. It was a little more than three years since Apollo 11's historic voyage to the moon.

Consequently most Americans probably expected to see men walking on the surface of some other object in the heavens — even though Apollo 18 had been canceled more than two years earlier and no further space landings of any kind were on NASA's schedule. No such missions have been launched in 45 years, and no such missions are planned although the notion has been given plenty of lip service.

Most people probably didn't recognize it at the time, but America was in a truly transitional period. The idea of American exceptionalism had been taking a beating due to the Vietnam War and Watergate. There was a crisis in American confidence that continues to this day.

After Richard Nixon cruised to re–election as president in 1972, things began to change in American politics. In the next two decades, three incumbent presidents would be rejected at the polls by the voters (for comparison purposes, three incumbent presidents were rejected by the voters in the previous 80 years), and the only destinations for American space travelers were space stations.

If they could visit America today, the veterans of Valley Forge might wonder what has become of the country for which they sacrificed so much. What has happened to the courage that sustained them through Valley Forge and the seemingly impossible revolution against British rule? What has become of that "what's next" spirit of exploration that led Americans from the eastern shores of the continent to the western shores — and from there into space?

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While it is true that President Donald Trump recently signed Space Policy Directive 1, which provides for a return to the moon — and beyond — Ethan Siegel writes for Forbes that ain't happening.

"With no plans for adequate, additional funding to support these ambitions," Siegel writes, "these dreams will simply evaporate, as they have so many times before."

Perhaps Siegel is right. Perhaps the objective needs to be more targeted. The scattershooting approach of returning to the moon then jumping to the next goal (Mars) and beyond may not be the way to go, as Siegel suggests.

"If we want to go to Mars, we should make that our goal and invest in it," he writes. "If we want to go to the Moon, we should make that our goal and invest in it. Pretending that one has anything to do with the other is a delusion."

Maybe so. But it also seems to me that the spirit of Valley Forge has taken a beating since the days of Apollo 17.

The Crystal Ball Is Foggy

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I have observed this year's special elections to fill vacancies created by Trump administration appointments with a kind of amused bewilderment.

The special elections were all billed as referendums on the president — but all the vacancies were in clearly red states with red voting histories in good years and bad. I suppose if any of those races had gone for a Democrat, that would have been big news. But the fact that no Democrat won a special election is non–news. Kind of a "dog bites man" story. When the man bites the dog, that's news.

The same is true in reverse of the gubernatorial elections that are traditionally held in Virginia and New Jersey in the odd–numbered years following presidential elections.

At one time Virginia had the longest streak of support for Republican presidential nominees in the entire South. It was the only Southern state that voted against Jimmy Carter in 1976, but shifting demographics led it to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016. Today it is regarded as dependably Democratic.

Thus, while polls in this year's gubernatorial race suggested the Republican nominee might have a chance at an upset, it was no surprise when the Democrat won.

Nor was it a surprise that a Democrat won in New Jersey. The outgoing Republican incumbent was extremely unpopular, and New Jersey has a history of shifting political allegiances. No, that wasn't a surprise.

Now the scene shifts to Alabama, where a special election will be held next Tuesday to choose a successor for Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate. Republican Roy Moore has been beset by sexual harassment charges that narrowed the gap between him and Democrat Doug Jones — for a time. Recent polls suggest things are returning to form in Alabama, and Moore's lead, while closer than one usually sees in Alabama elections, is expanding.

I know there are still some Democrats, perhaps many, who believe Jones can pull off an upset, but what they fail to comprehend is that Alabama is a really red state — not pink or purple like some states but deeply red — and polls suggest that the voters in Alabama are gravitating toward issues now. My guess is it would take a sexual bombshell eclipsing everything that has come before in order for Jones to win this race.

One issue in particular seems to be driving Republicans and independents who had been wavering — abortion. Jones holds a liberal position on abortion; Moore's position has been more in line with average Alabama voters

Many folks up North like to belittle Southerners as backward, ignorant, uneducated. But that is an unfair stereotype, and the voters in Alabama are smart enough to know what the margin in the Senate looks like. They know which party and its candidates hold positions closer to their own and which do not, and this, one of the reddest of the red states, is not likely to send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in a quarter of a century.

I know Democrats are eager to seize control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, but they would be better advised to pin their hopes on races in more centrist states.

The Power of Anti-Incumbency

I have written here before of the advantages of being an incumbent officeholder in an election year. There is clearly a strong motivation for people to support the re–election of an incumbent. An incumbent has experience doing the job. His or her every move gets attention from the media back home, and free press coverage has a lot of value.

I have also written here about the hazards of midterm elections for the president's party (whoever the president may be).

The power of incumbency isn't always so powerful.

But often the ramifications of neither are apparent until after the elections have been held. Democrats realized too late what they were up against in 2010 and 2014; likewise Republicans didn't see the wave that was upon them in 2006.

Sometimes — but not always — you can get clues ahead of time through party primaries.

Because of their strengths, incumbents usually prevail in their parties. In a typical election, whether it is a presidential year or a midterm, most incumbent senators win renomination; at worst, one may be defeated by a challenger from within the party. Between 1946 and 2012, nearly 1,000 incumbent senators ran for re–election instead of choosing to leave office for one reason or another, and only 46 (or 5%) were denied renomination by their party's voters.

When more than one incumbent senator loses in the primaries, the problem is not confined to a single state or perhaps even region. If the number of incumbents who seek re–election and lose renomination gets higher than that, it is usually — but not always — a harbinger of things to come.

The worst year for Senate incumbents during the primaries was in the first election after the end of World War II. Thirty senators sought re–election that year, and six were denied renomination by their party's voters. That's 20%.

Harry Truman had become president following Franklin D. Roosevelt's death the year before. Even though the Allies had won the war, Truman was wildly unpopular — perhaps in part because Democrats had been in charge of everything for well over a decade but also because of his controversial handling of some high–profile postwar labor strikes — and the midterm election was, as it often is, a referendum on the president.

Truman was seen as such a liability, in fact, that he campaigned for few Democratic candidates — if any. The same phenomenon has been seen in recent years. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were kept at arm's length by their parties' nominees.

Republicans also benefited from what is considered a "good map" — in which the other party has to defend the majority of the seats on the ballot. Incumbents tend to benefit from such maps; open seats typically are much harder to defend.

As it was, the Republicans won seven Senate seats from incumbents who were on the ballot that fall — and captured six others, seizing the majority for the first time since 1930.

The next–worst year for postwar incumbents seeking another term came in 1950.

In the intervening four years, Truman scored his upset victory over Tom Dewey, and Democrats retook control of both chambers of Congress.

But by 1950 Truman was unpopular again, and once again the election was a referendum on him. Thirty–two senators ran for re–election and five of them (16%) were denied renomination. When the votes were counted in November, the Democrats lost ground in both chambers but still retained majorities.

In the Senate, four Republicans defeated incumbent Democrats, and one Democrat defeated an incumbent Republican. (As an historical side note, future President Richard Nixon, a Republican, flipped a Senate seat that year, too, but he didn't defeat an incumbent. The incumbent, a Democrat, retired.)

In the 33 elections that have been held since, the portion of incumbents who were rejected by their party's voters has been 10% or higher only four times. Most could be said to foretell trouble for one party or the other, depending upon who was in the Oval Office, or both — but not all. For example, 14% of incumbent senators were defeated in party primaries in 1968; while Democrats lost part of their majorities in Congress that year, they lost nearly as many Senate seats two years later — but only 3% of incumbent senators lost their primaries in 1970.

In 1978, the midterm of Democrat Jimmy Carter's presidency, 12% of incumbent senators lost their primaries, and 14% of incumbents lost their primaries in 1980, the year of the Reagan Revolution. In all, Democrats lost 15 Senate seats from the time Carter took office to the day he left Washington four years later. In hindsight, the primaries of 1978 and 1980 hinted at the voter frustration that had been building in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam and the trouble that lay ahead for Democrats in the general election of 1980.

For the next 30 years, most Senate incumbents who chose to run for another term won their primaries. Then, in 2010, 12% of Senate incumbents lost their primaries, perhaps heralding an era of discontent. The Senate remained in Democratic hands (but just barely), and the Republicans gained 64 seats to claim a House majority they retain today.

And sometimes so–called wave elections happen even when incumbents don't run into problems in the primaries, and the 2014 midterm is a great example. Republicans won nine Senate seats from the Democrats that year, and the primaries were not factors.

In short, incumbency is usually an advantage, but sometimes it is a hindrance. I recommend keeping an eye on the primaries next year to see if you can get any early clues as to the voters' mood.

The Politics of the Unusual

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Tomorrow Americans in some places are going to the polls, but this being an odd–numbered year means that most elections will be held next year.

Which brings me to another point: There is conventional wisdom about everything, I suppose, but it only goes so far, and then you're in uncharted territory.

The upcoming midterm elections of 2018 are a perfect example.

On the one hand, there is the conventional wisdom that the president's party always struggles in midterm elections. This is not a recent phenomenon. This is something that has been happening throughout our history. It doesn't disproportionately affect either party. George W. Bush's Republicans suffered just as much in 2006 as Bill Clinton's Democrats in 1994 or Barack Obama's Democrats in 2010.

Sometimes it is a very modest thing, with the president's party losing little ground, if any, on Capitol Hill; other times it is quite spectacular.

There are exceptions, of course, but those elections are usually preceded by a one–of–a–kind event — such as when George W. Bush's Republicans gained ground in Congress in the election a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

There was no precedent for that in American history.

I guess the closest thing would be the election that was held the year after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but that would not have been a good predictor for 2002. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democrats struggled in the 1942 midterms. Quite a different voter response. But it was a different world. Americans hadn't been able to watch the attack live in their living rooms in 1941.

There were other differences, too. Most, if not all, of the casualties at Pearl Harbor were in military service. They had agreed to put their lives on the line when they signed up. Their losses were tragic, but, to be honest, they came with the territory. Most, if not all, of the casualties on Sept. 11 were civilians. The folks who were working in the Twin Towers that morning took certain risks when they took their positions, too — there are risks with every job, aren't there? — but those risks had never before included the realistic possibility of an airplane deliberately crashing into your workplace.

Back to 2018.

On the other hand, while conventional wisdom can provide some helpful clues to voter behavior, recent elections have revealed an independent streak that was never seen before in the electorate — well, it had been seen before but never in the numbers we saw last year. Maybe the voters don't like being taken for granted and decided en masse — a la Peter Finch in "Network" — not to take it anymore. Folks in both parties have been guilty of taking voting blocs for granted. So if the voters feel taken for granted, it seems to me that candidates in both parties should be particularly sensitive to their constituents' concerns right now.

There are other things that usually contribute to the incumbent party's prospects — the pocketbook issues that directly affect people's lives. Is the economy thriving or sputtering? Is unemployment high or low?

The approaching midterms should provide fascinating research and lecture fodder for political scientists. They know the conventional wisdom, and they have been watching the news. They know that the polls indicate how unpopular the president is. That makes it sound like 2018 should be a big year for the out–of–power party. All the precedents of the last two centuries point to it.

Except that there is no precedent for 2018, either. Not really.

And that, I guess, is one of the consequences of the 2016 election, an election that was widely believed to be Hillary Clinton's to lose. And then she did precisely that.

We have rarely, if ever, had presidential elections like that one — in which one candidate seemed all but certain to win and then did not — and in my studies of history, I have found only a couple of elections that came close. One was the 2000 election in which Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the vote that has always elected America's presidents — the electoral vote. The other was the 1948 election, in which Gov. Tom Dewey was widely expected to defeat President Harry Truman — and then failed to do so.

But there were precedents for those elections, even if one had to go back a ways to find them. The 2016 election was decidedly not politics as usual — which, by definition, has no precedent.

Consider this: Hillary Clinton spent most of the 2016 campaign arguing that Donald Trump was unfit for office — but he won, anyway. Clinton in particular and Democrats in general have been quick to blame this on misogyny and, implausibly, racism, but that misses the greater point. I know many people who voted for Trump (before that some of them even voted for Obama twice), and I have yet to hear any of them say anything that could be interpreted as misogynistic motives behind their votes.

Those voters consistently expressed their concerns about specific issues — the economy and jobs — and they responded to the candidate who addressed those issues. Nothing new about that. Pocketbook issues are at the very core of politics as usual.

The voters knew Trump hadn't been a saint. They knew he had said and done things they didn't like, but they chose him anyway — which is a clear indicator that modern voters are more than willing to consider unconventional candidates to solve heretofore conventional problems. We are in a period of the politics of the unusual, and the 2018 midterms will tell us just how far the pendulum has swung, just how much the voters are willing to overlook in pursuit of a larger goal.

Further complicating the situation is that the economy is humming along. Like him or not, Trump's administration has presided over some of the results the voters wanted. Democrats can argue that the pieces of the recovery puzzle were put in place by the previous administration's policies, but the voters don't tend to think of things in those terms. They remember who was president when unemployment dropped below 4% or GDP exceeded 3%.

In other words, all bets are off for next year — and for 2020 — and for elections as far as the eye can see.

My major in college was journalism. My minor was history. I studied a little political science in college, and I have studied it informally for years, but I have never heard a lecture or read an entry in a textbook that discussed how an unsuccessful candidate for public office who had been expected to win should behave.

Instinct tells me that such a person would foster considerable good will by being gracious and sincere — and mostly silent.

But rather than acknowledge her own failings as a candidate, Clinton and her subordinates have spent the last year casting blame on others, the lion's share of which has been directed at Donald Trump and his alleged collusion with Russians — which, it turns out, was based on manufactured material from a dossier that had been paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

That revelation led to the uncovering of what could well turn out to be a veritable rat's nest of, to say the least, unsavory activity. While the full extent of it may not be known by Election Day next year, the fact that this has been causing some Democratic angst is clear in the fact that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, regarded as one of the leading candidates for the 2020 nomination, criticized the Clinton campaign and the DNC literally within hours of online publication of Donna Brazile's explosive allegations in Politico.

It is important for political observers not to get carried away with the idea that open seats — in which the incumbents, for whatever reason, are not running — represent opportunities for the parties that do not hold them. It is true in some instances, not true in others.

Take, for example, the congressional district in which I live — Texas' Fifth District, which has been represented by Republican Jeb Hensarling since January 2003. Hensarling announced recently that he won't be running for another term next year.

I have already heard some Democrats speak of how this is an opportunity for them to grab a House seat from Texas, especially since Dallas County (where the Fifth District is located) was one of the few counties to support Hillary Clinton a year ago.

I read an article in the New York Times over the weekend that didn't go so far as to say that vacancies meant easy opposition pickups but it strongly implied that the midterms will "reshape" the House.

That may be true in districts where the incumbent barely won the last time, but Hensarling has a long record of winning by wide margins. So, too, do Republican presidential candidates in the Fifth District. I feel safe in predicting that Hensarling's successor will be a Republican. The question is whether the district will choose a constitutional conservative like Hensarling or more of an establishment candidate.

Still, as I say, we're living in the age of politics of the unusual.

The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia

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Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you must know that there was a special election in Georgia's Sixth Congressional District this week.

The district has been in Republican hands for nearly 40 years.

Democrats have been eager to anoint the new House majority that they expect after the midterm elections in 2018, and every special election to fill a vacancy that was created when President Trump tapped someone to join his administration has been billed as a preview of coming attractions. After Democrat Jon Ossoff grabbed 48% of the vote in April's so–called "jungle primary" in the Georgia Sixth, millions of Democrat dollars flowed into the district from out of state, much of it from as far away as San Francisco, for the June 20 runoff.

There were high expectations. As it was in most of last year's Republican presidential primaries, Trump has emerged the winner in every special election so far. The margins have been narrow, but close doesn't count. Democrats were hungry for a victory.

And Democrats, who have gone into each contest convinced that public resistance to Trump and the Republicans was just waiting to rise up and be counted, are sounding like the fabled boy who cried "Wolf!"

They have awfully short memories.

I don't know if Tip O'Neill was the first to say "All politics is local," but I know he used the phrase as the foundation of his campaign strategy — and he knew what he was talking about.

O'Neill, a Democrat and five–term speaker of the House, represented a House district in Massachusetts for more than 30 years and rarely faced a serious challenge when he ran for re–election. In that sense, there was nothing particularly remarkable about his re–election in 1982.

But it was only two years, after all, since Ronald Reagan's landslide victory over Jimmy Carter, and the presidency wasn't the only thing the Democrats lost. After more than a quarter of a century of being in the majority in the Senate, Democrats had lost that majority, and their majority in the House was drastically reduced — by nearly three dozen seats. To say there was a certain amount of anxiety among Democrats at that time would be an understatement.

There needn't have been.

The elections in 1982 were the midterms of Reagan's first term as president — and a clear pattern of American political history is that midterms in general almost always favor the out–of–power party. We've grown accustomed in recent times to the possibility that a president's party might not lose ground in one or both of the chambers of Congress in a midterm election, but that is a rare phenomenon that usually requires unique circumstances.

George W. Bush's Republicans, for example, benefited in 2002 from the national mood following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, winning two Senate seats and eight House seats. It was the first time in nearly 70 years that a president's party gained ground in both chambers of Congress in a midterm election.

You have to go back to the 1930s — when America was in the grip of the Great Depression — to find the previous example of a time when the president's party prospered in both chambers in a midterm election. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democrats picked up 10 Senate seats (at a time when there were only 96 members of the Senate) and nine House seats. (FDR's midterms of 1938 and 1942 went against the president's party, and what would have been his fourth midterm, which he did not live to see, was a total disaster for his successor, Harry Truman, in 1946.)

While 9/11 is often compared to Pearl Harbor, FDR did not benefit the way Bush did 60 years later. In the 1942 midterms FDR's Democrats lost nine Senate seats and 45 House seats. In spite of what had happened in Hawaii less than a year earlier, voters were anxious about American involvement in World War II.

In the last century, a few presidents have seen their party make midterm gains in one chamber but not both.

Bill Clinton's Democrats benefited in 1998 from a national backlash against the Republicans' partisan impeachment proceedings. They neither won nor lost seats in the Senate, but they won four seats in the House.

Richard Nixon's Republicans lost 12 House seats but won two Senate seats in the midterms of 1970. There was still a certain amount of backlash against the Vietnam War and the Democrats' participation in its escalation.

In 1962 John F. Kennedy's Democrats gained ground in the Senate but lost ground in the House. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred a few weeks before the election, may well have played a role.

In 1914, Woodrow Wilson's Democrats gained five seats in the Senate but lost a staggering 59 seats in the House. The Republicans were more united than they had been in 1912 — when the party's two factions, led by former Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in the 1912 presidential election, reunited with a common purpose. They also gave themselves pats on the back for the booming economy — the result, they told the voters, of policies passed by Republicans in the previous quarter of a century.

Eight years before that, Teddy Roosevelt's Republicans gained seats in the Senate but lost seats in the House (although they retained a significant majority).

I could go on, but you get the idea, don't you? (Those were the best midterm years for incumbents in the last 110 years, and, in 2017, Democrats have seen the special elections to replace members of the House who were picked to join the Trump administration as targets of opportunity. Sort of a kickoff to the resounding rejection they are certain Republicans will receive next year. Only one real problem with that line of thinking — Republicans have won every special election this year. If you want to have a revolution, you have to have some victories.)

But back to O'Neill.

Even with that history, Democrats were edgy heading into the 1982 midterms. And O'Neill, facing a challenge from a Massachusetts lawyer whose campaign was being financed by out–of–state contributors (primarily oil interests in Oklahoma and Texas), emphasized that point in his campaign.

In November O'Neill won with 75% of the vote, and Democrats recaptured more than two dozen seats in the House, padding the majority they had held since 1955.

But going into that election year, Democrats were anxious. They had taken a beating two years earlier, and, even though O'Neill had won 15 straight congressional races, he was a consummate politician who knew all too well that Massachusetts — the only state to reject Nixon's bid for a second term in 1972 — had voted (narrowly) for Reagan in 1980 (Massachusetts voted for Reagan again in 1984). Was it a symptom of an emerging shift to the right in a state long known for its liberal politics?

Reagan's approval rating in late 1982 was hovering around 40%. It went up when the economy started roaring back to life, but that was after the midterms.

In hindsight it is easy to see the uphill climb that was facing the Republicans in 1982, but it wasn't so easy to see from ground level at the time.

O'Neill took the campaign to the voters. The people who are backing the Republican in this race, he told the voters, don't live here, but they think they can tell you what to do. And he addressed the district's kitchen–table concerns while his opponent — and his opponent's backers — spoke about more national themes.

Does that sound familiar? Democrats wanted to make the Georgia election about cultural issues. The Republicans and their candidate, Karen Handel, wanted to make it about the issues that affected the daily lives of Georgians — taxes and jobs.

On top of that, Ossoff didn't even live in the district.

It wasn't surprising that he received about the same share of the vote that he received in the first vote.

Many Democrats were fooled into believing Ossoff had a good chance to win by his showing in that first vote. The previous congressman, now–Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, was re–elected there last year with more than 61% of the vote. Ossoff already had done better than any of Price's challengers.

Except in his first election.

Price needed a runoff to win the GOP nomination when his predecessor, now–Sen. Johnny Isakson, decided to run for the Senate. After winning the runoff, Price was unopposed in the general election. He won all his re–election bids without breaking a sweat.

And that is really what is so deceptive about special elections. They are held to fill vacancies — which means there is no incumbent.

Incumbents are notoriously difficult to defeat. They have all the advantages of incumbency at their disposal. Their primary obligation is to be aware of and responsive to the needs of a typically concentrated geographical area. As long as they do that, they tend to win re–election with little trouble.

The best chance to "flip" a House district usually comes when the seat is open.

I have heard all the talk of how Handel will face another tough challenge when she seeks a full term next year, but as long as she keeps her focus on her district, I predict that she will win re–election easily.

It's the way it is.

Will Control of the House Flip in 2018?

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I've heard a lot of talk recently — mostly from hopeful Democrats — that control of the House of Representatives will flip next year after eight years of Republican rule.

Given the current party division in the House, that would require the Democrats to make a net gain of two dozen seats.

Can it happen? Historically speaking, yes, of course. It has happened before. It is mathematically possible that it could happen again.

But will it happen again? Ah, that is a different question. To answer that question in May 2017 when the election won't be held for another 18 months requires a crystal ball — after all, who, at this point in the last election cycle (i.e., May 2015), predicted that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States?

No one knows in which kind of world voters will be living when they go to the polls 18 months from now, and that will play an important role in the elections.

Now, it is true that, historically, a president's party loses ground in Congress in a president's first midterm elections, but all midterms are not created equal. Sometimes a president's party loses ground in one chamber but not both — Richard Nixon, as disliked as he was even by many who voted for him, lost ground in the House but not in the Senate in the midterm elections of 1970. In fact, Nixon's Republicans actually gained a couple of Senate seats but remained in the minority.

Four years later voter backlash over Watergate led to a loss of 48 House seats for the Republicans.

And, while sometimes presidents lose House seats in bunches, as Obama did in 2010, other times presidents lose only a handful of seats. In 1990 George H.W. Bush's Republicans lost only eight House seats. Four years earlier Ronald Reagan's Republicans lost only five House seats.

One–term presidents — Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush are recent examples — only have one midterm election. For presidents who have been elected to two terms, second midterm election results have been decidedly mixed. Barack Obama's party lost control of the Senate in his second midterm after losing control of the House in his first. George W. Bush's Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in more than a decade in his second midterm. But Bill Clinton's Democrats picked up seats in the House and saw no change in the Senate in the midterms of 1998.

Clinton's experience was rare for presidents and seems to have been fueled by voter backlash over the impeachment proceedings against Clinton. That is what seems to be necessary for a president's party to gain ground in the midterm elections — extraordinary circumstances that offset the natural enthusiasm that comes from being the party that is outside the White House looking in.

Prior to the Clinton years double–digit losses in the House — at least at the level that Democrats need next year — were uncommon in American politics. They did happen from time to time but not as regularly as they have since Clinton came to power.

Reagan's party lost 26 House seats in the midterms of 1982, but the party of his predecessor lost only 15 seats four years earlier. In between Reagan defeated Carter by 10 percentage points.

American democracy is a dynamic thing, always shifting in response to economic, social and political conditions — and the elected officials' responses to those conditions.

Such conditions are always changing. That is why it is a disaster waiting to happen if a candidate campaigns on the assumption that simply because a party has been winning for years in a state or district it will continue to do so. History is a pretty good indicator, but it is not foolproof, as Hillary Clinton should have learned on election night.

No modern president has faced an economy as horrendous as the one Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited in 1933, but the conviction that he was trying to right the ship enabled his party to make gains in both chambers in the midterms of 1934.

It runs deep in the American DNA to reject the notion of single–party rule in which one party controls all the levers of the federal government. Such a situation existed in the first two years of Obama's presidency — Democrats even held a seldom–seen veto–proof (and also filibuster–proof) majority in the Senate.

But the passage of Obamacare led to the voter backlash that resulted in Republicans seizing the majority in the House.

As much as Americans tend to reject the concept of single–party rule, though, it is important to remember that House races usually favor the incumbent. Congressional districts are concentrated, as small constituencies are wont to be, and tend to be the perfect examples of Tip O'Neill's pearl of wisdom that "all politics is local." Most House incumbents, regardless of party, keep their fingers on the pulses of their districts — if they don't they are almost sure to lose in the next election.

A few states have populations that are small enough that they are entitled to only one member of the House; in those instances, the House members are, essentially, statewide representatives like the state's two U.S. senators. But most states have more than one House member, thus concentrating the constituents' interests. A largely rural district can co–exist next to a largely metropolitan one — and, thus, different issues will matter to the constituents in each.

Even within districts, there can be pockets where the prevailing interests are different than in the rest of the district.

Currently Charlie Cook, perhaps the foremost observer of House politics, says Republicans hold 197 solid seats. That leaves 44 Republican–held seats, of which Democrats need to win 24 to seize a slim majority, that represent far more plausible takeover opportunities.

Of those 44 seats, though, Cook says 19 are likely to remain in Republican hands, which trims the Democrats' margin for error considerably.

Based on that, if the elections were being held today, Republicans most likely would hold on to a majority in the House.

But the elections are not being held today.

Stay tuned.

The Death of a Patriot

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"The thing that's so appalling to me is that the president, when this whole idea was suggested to him, didn't, in righteous indignation, rise up and say, 'Get out of here. You're in the office of the president of the United States. How can you talk about blackmail and bribery and keeping witnesses silent? This is the presidency of the United States.' But my president didn't do that. He sat there and he worked and worked to try to cover this thing up so it wouldn't come to light."

Lawrence Hogan Sr. (1928–2017)

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One of my most vivid memories of the Watergate era is of Maryland Republican Lawrence Hogan, who died earlier this month at the age of 88 following a stroke.

Hogan was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1969 to 1975. He left the House to run for governor of Maryland in 1974 — and lost his bid for the Republican nomination.

Maryland is known as a blue state today, but it had two Republican senators and four Republican members of the House (half of its delegation) at the time — and a recent Republican governor, Spiro Agnew, was elected vice president in 1968 but had resigned less than a year before the House Judiciary Committee considered Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon.

There was considerable backlash against Republicans in the 1974 elections, and Hogan may well have been a victim of that — but Hogan, while regarded as a strong challenger to incumbent Democrat Gov. Marvin Mandel, may have been hurt in the primary by the stand he took against Nixon's behavior in office.

Hogan, as I say, lost the party nomination, not the general election. He may well have been a more effective candidate in the general election — Maryland was part of the 49–state landslide that re–elected Nixon in 1972, but it had never supported Nixon for president before that time, and there may well have been Democrats who would have supported him against Mandel.

But the members of his party apparently believed, in spite of all that had happened since the Judiciary Committee's hearings, that Hogan had abandoned the president.

His son, who carries Hogan's name, now occupies that office.

Hogan's political career was essentially over by then — although he did serve as county executive for Prince George's County for four years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But he left an impression on me in 1974. Although I now consider myself an independent, I definitely would have called myself a Democrat in 1974. I was raised by Democrats, and I shared their distaste for Nixon.

Then as now America was a polarized nation — just not quite as extreme as it is today. There were many Democrats who were eager to see Richard Nixon impeached, and there probably were just as many Republicans who tried to defend everything he said or did, even when defending Nixon made no sense. It does seem to me that there was more willingness on the part of some elected officials to seek compromise — on both the issues of the day and the question of Nixon's fitness for office.

On the latter, Hogan served on the Judiciary Committee, whose televised hearings were as widely watched as the Senate's Watergate Committee hearings, which laid the groundwork for the impeachment proceedings, had been the previous summer.

There were other members of that committee who gained more national notoriety, mostly Democrats — Peter Rodino, Barbara Jordan, Father Drinan, John Conyers — but I will never forget watching Hogan's anguished lament over the gaping difference between his belief in what should have been and his recognition of what was.

My memory is that Hogan was criticized by many in his party for being what would now be called a RINO — Republican in Name Only.

He didn't believe his obligation was to his party. He believed his obligation was to his country. He preferred principle to pandering — and most likely knew when he gave his eloquent speech denouncing Nixon that his political career was over.

He was vindicated when the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the infamous White House tapes — and the "smoking gun" that proved Nixon's involvement was discovered. Many House Republicans who had opposed the Articles of Impeachment then said they were prepared to vote to impeach the president — and he resigned.

But Maryland's Republicans were still furious with Hogan.

We need more Lawrence Hogans today.