Why Power Changes Hands Constantly in American Politics

Republicans are rightfully ecstatic. They’ve won the popular vote at the presidential level for the first time in 20 years. Donald Trump improved his margins from 2020 in a large majority of counties across the country, while gaining strength among nearly every demographic group aside from college-educated women.

Democrats have to worry that their coalition is coming apart, with continuing losses among working-class voters, recent problems with Latinos and a growing gender gap that ultimately worked against them.

All of this makes it possible that Trump’s victory will usher in a new era of Republican strength. The GOP could enjoy enduring power, as it did for decades following the Civil War or like Democrats after the New Deal of the 1930s.

More recent history, however, suggests that control of Washington will remain fleeting. In every election since 2006 except one, control has changed hands in the White House or at least one chamber of Congress. The sole exception was 2012, which preserved a status quo at the time of divided government. “I understand the disappointment of the Democratic Party, but they’ll be back and they shouldn’t despair,” says William Connelly, a Washington and Lee University political scientist. “Trump is riding high now, but I’m quite confident the country will be sick of Trump two years from now and place curbs on him and his party.”

It's almost a given that the president’s party will lose congressional seats in midterms. And presidential parties are quickly shown the door in this era. Since World War II, the White House has only stayed in one party’s hands for more than eight years during a single run (that of Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush from 1980 to 1992). Trump’s victory means neither party has been able to win re-election to the presidency over the past dozen years.

Many other elections before this one have prompted talk about “permanent” or “emerging” majorities. Those expectations have been dashed time and time again. Rather than realigning, voters have acted like fickle shoppers, continually buying clothes but then quickly returning them for something else in another size or color. “Frequent oscillations in party power are pretty much a mainstay of contemporary U.S. politics,” says John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.

Turn Down the Heat

Political scientists have a term for this: thermostatic politics. After a party takes power and moves the country in a new direction, voters quickly put on the brakes. Rather than being rewarded for their successes or keeping their promises, they’re punished.

There’s always another election and the next one turns into a referendum, with the public deciding the president or Congress has pushed things too far right or too far left, says Christopher Wlezien, a political scientist at the University of Texas. “It’s way too hot or a little too cool and people turn on the heat or turn on the air,” he says. “That seemed to be a lot of what this election was about.” 

This has happened time and time again. Voters throw the bums out and — after the new bums claim a mandate and try to do things — voters throw them out in their turn. They didn't want what they had but they don't like change, either.

Think about Republicans scoring a net gain of 63 seats in the 2010 midterms, after the passage of Obamacare. Or Democrats winning control of Congress in 2006 after George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. Two years after Lyndon Johnson won the biggest majority in presidential voting history in 1964, Republicans gained 47 House seats as part of the backlash against his Great Society programs.

Vice President Kamala Harris was punished last Tuesday for all the flaws, real or perceived, of President Joe Biden, including his various trillion-dollar industrial policy packages that helped drive up inflation. “This election is a broad-based reaction against the incumbent party,” says Sides. “This is why Trump gained support in so many places and with so many groups.”

The vast majority of the public believes that the country is on the wrong track. That’s a major reason why Democrats lost. But general dissatisfaction with how things are going has been nearly constant throughout the 21st century, helping to explain the ongoing volatility. “Unhappy people want a change,” says John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. 

Don’t Stay the Course

Pitney and Connelly coauthored a book back in 1994 called Congress’ Permanent Minority? The question mark was important; that year, Republicans won the House majority for the first time in 40 years. During the 20th century, majorities didn’t last forever but they often had a pretty long shelf life.

That hasn’t been true lately, for several reasons. The parties are more cleanly sorted along ideological lines than they used to be. For decades, conservative Democrats from the South shared power alongside liberals from the North. Now, conservative Southerners are Republicans, joining hands with conservative Republicans from around the country, leaving nothing to tug Democrats internally to the right. “With the parties further apart, there’s reason to expect even greater backlash,” Wlezien says. “Presidents come in and push things further to the right or to the left.” 

The media and social media environments are fragmented, allowing people to live in information and ideological cul-de-sacs, tearing their hair out at the stupidity of the other side. That kind of noise has driven many voters from identifying with either party. “You’ve got parties giving us greater choice at a time when more of us are becoming independent,” Wlezien says. “Maybe they’re not liking the choice.”

Since the 1970s, parties have nominated their presidential candidates through the primary process, which has encouraged more ideologically extreme nominees than in the old days when professional decisions made at party conventions played the decisive role. It’s possible, as Connelly suggests, that if one of the parties were to nominate more moderate candidates it could maintain power longer.

But some contemporary politicians have recognized that, given voters’ unslakable thirst for change, their time in power is likely to be short, so they might as well go for it. Having already served one term, Trump cannot be re-elected, so he and his party will likely come out swinging in January.

“The odds are that Republicans are going to have a hard time in the midterms,” Wlezien says. “Even with few districts being competitive, Democrats could get 10 or 20 or 30 seats in the House pretty easily in 2026 if the public reacts to what Trump undertakes.”