The 1994 House Elections in Perspective
The 1994 elections set off a political earthquake that will send aftershocks rumbling through national politics for years to come. For the first time in forty-two years, Republicans captured the House of Representatives. The fifty-two-seat gain that gave them a 230-204 majority was the largest net partisan swing since 1948.' Republicans also took control of the Senate, taking eight seats from Democrats, immediately adding a party-switching opportunist (Richard Shelby of Alabama) to end up with a 53-47 majority. After a two year hiatus, the United States again has divided government-one party controlling the presidency, the other party controlling the Congress. But in a startling reversal, this time the White House belongs to the Democrats, while Congress belongs to the Republicans. The Republican congressional triumph led a national sweep for the party. Indeed, the only reason the election brought divided government rather than unified Republican control is that Bill Clinton was not on the ballot. Clearly the results of the 1994 elections-particularly the House elections, which are the focus of this article -were extraordinary. The question for political scientists who study elections, however, is whether the process that produced them was also extraordinary. Does the Republican victory mean that the electoral world depicted by the conventional literature changed fundamentally in 1994? Or can we account for it within the framework of currently accepted ideas about congressional elections? These are the questions I begin to address here. My answers must be far from definitive at this date, before all the relevant data are in hand for analysis. Nonetheless, the evidence available so far suggests that