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An Excerpt from The Long Red Thread
Center for PoliticsThe Long Red Thread tells the story of House elections since the early 1960s — when a series of Supreme Court decisions enshrined the principle of “one person, one vote” into the congressional redistricting process — and explains why Republicans now hold more advantages in the battle for control even as Democrats retain the power to win majorities.
In the excerpt below, Kyle lays out the big-picture arguments from his book and notes the importance of electoral nationalization, political realignment, and congressional redistricting and reapportionment in helping Republicans both break the Democratic hammerlock on the House majority in 1994 and win majorities more often in the roughly 3 decades since that pivotal election.
— The Editors
Four days before the 1994 election, President Bill Clinton heard a prediction from a top advisor that he didn’t believe. Dick Morris, a Republican operative whom Clinton’s staff found so distasteful that the president hid his relationship with him, told Clinton that Democrats were going to lose their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. “No way, no way,” Clinton responded, according to John Harris’s biography of Clinton, The Survivor.
Few could blame Clinton for being incredulous about Morris’s prediction. Democratic control of the House had been a given for decades. Save for brief two-year majorities the Republicans won in 1946 and 1952, the Democrats had held the House uninterrupted since they took a majority in a series of special elections in 1931, allowing them to capture the gavel when the House opened that year in December.
And yet Morris, of course, was right.
In the excerpt below, Kyle lays out the big-picture arguments from his book and notes the importance of electoral nationalization, political realignment, and congressional redistricting and reapportionment in helping Republicans both break the Democratic hammerlock on the House majority in 1994 and win majorities more often in the roughly 3 decades since that pivotal election.
— The Editors
Four days before the 1994 election, President Bill Clinton heard a prediction from a top advisor that he didn’t believe. Dick Morris, a Republican operative whom Clinton’s staff found so distasteful that the president hid his relationship with him, told Clinton that Democrats were going to lose their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. “No way, no way,” Clinton responded, according to John Harris’s biography of Clinton, The Survivor.
Few could blame Clinton for being incredulous about Morris’s prediction. Democratic control of the House had been a given for decades. Save for brief two-year majorities the Republicans won in 1946 and 1952, the Democrats had held the House uninterrupted since they took a majority in a series of special elections in 1931, allowing them to capture the gavel when the House opened that year in December.
And yet Morris, of course, was right.