Republicans make gains, but the Democrats still rule the roost
Even in years of presidential landslides, members of the House of Representatives who run for re-election usually win. Their success rate is more than 90%, compared with the more hazardous 68% success rate of their Senate colleagues. This year the powers of incumbency were sorely strained by the surprising Reagan-slide, the Abscam bribery scandal and the harrowing problems of inflation. The Democrats, nevertheless, hung on to control. Although at least 26 incumbent Democrats were defeated, and the Republicans had a net gain of 32 seats, the final breakdown of the 97th Congress will be about 245 Democrats and 190 Republicans.
The fallen Democrats included several of the chamber's most powerful leaders and esteemed veterans, who fell partly because Ronald Reagan proved to have unexpectedly broad coattails, and partly because so many voters were in such a throw-out-the-Administration frame of mind that they did not hesitate to extend their anti-Carter ire to Democratic Congressmen. Lamented House Speaker Tip O'Neill: "It was a broad brush they tarred us with."
The Republican leaders were elated by their gains. Said Michigan's Guy Vander Jagt, who as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee was partly responsible for the G.O.P. House election strategy: "It's the most crushing rejection of a President and his party in Congress since Herbert Hoover. Democratic leaders who managed to survive had the bejesus scared out of them."
The Democrats' tattered majority will be a meager bulwark against a Republican Administration and a Republican-controlled Senate that probably will be intent on dismantling major elements of the social legislation passed during the Democrats' nearly half-century of dominance in both the House and Senate. In addition, the Democratic majority has turned more conservative. Most of the Republican newcomers are on their party's right wing, and most of the Democrats who survived did so only by shifting during the campaign away from the Big Government liberalism that was clearly in disfavor on Election Day. Indeed O'Neill could become a classic political anachronism—the liberal Speaker of the House, crying the old progressive song in a Capitol wilderness of conservatives.
Fall of the Mighty. Until this year, the House leaders on both sides of the aisle have had an unspoken agreement that they would not try to unseat each other. But this summer Vander Jagt met with other Republicans and decided to break with tradition by mounting stiff challenges to high-ranking Democrats. It worked.