How significant are mid term elections?
Mid term elections are congressional elections which occur half way through a presidential election. These elections are quite significant because congress is the legislative body in the USA and therefore makes legislations. During mid term elections all 435 members of the US House of Representatives and one third of the US Senate are up for grabs. However, this is not the case because incumbency rates are very high. This means that congressmen and senators are more likely to keep their job, and because they have the right to stand for as long as they want this is almost always the case. Mid term elections tend to have the same trend with a few outstanding. The trend being that the party in power tends to do bad in mid term elections. For example 1966, 1974, 1994 etc.
During the 1966 mid term election LBJ was the current president after winning the ’64 election with 61% of the vote. LBJ was a democrat and had a huge majority in congress of the congressional election which coincided with the presidential election. LBJ was popular in ’64 mainly for his ‘Great Society’ program, which was also known as the ‘war on poverty’. This included the civil rights and voting rights act, as well as medial care, housing programs etc. However, he became very unpopular soon after this because of the white backlash he suffered from the southern racists, as well as the Vietnam War and the ghetto riots in the north. This resulted in the democrats losing 47 seats in the HoR and 3 seats in the Senate. Furthermore southern conservative democrats and conservative republicans teamed up to form an unofficial ‘conservative coalition’. In 1968 LBJ failed to win the New Hampshire primary convincingly and had to stand down as presidential candidate. This concluded in the Democrats losing the 1968 election and a new republican president Richard Nixon.
In 1972 Nixon was re-elected as president with a landslide win of 60% of the popular vote....