1994: The Republican Revolution Was Built in 1993

Republicans gained 54 House seats in the 1994 midterm and took the chamber for the first time in forty years. The Office of the Historian of the US House records the division moving from 258 Democrats and 176 Republicans in the 103rd Congress to 204 and 230 in the 104th, and its profile of that Congress states that Republicans won control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years. Thirty-four Democratic incumbents were beaten. No Republican incumbent lost a general election.

The standard account credits the Contract with America, a message document signed six weeks before the vote. The evidence points at recruitment and retirement decisions made in 1993. A message cannot win a seat where no credible candidate filed, and the seats that changed hands in 1994 were overwhelmingly seats where the Democratic incumbent had already gone.

What would prove this wrong is a 1994 result driven by Republicans beating sitting Democrats across the board. That is measurable, and the measurement runs the other way.

What the 1994 midterm produced

The 1994 midterm gave Republicans the House, the Senate and a majority of governorships in a single night. The Senate moved from 56 Democrats and 44 Republicans to 48 and 52, a gain of eight, which became nine the following day when Richard Shelby of Alabama changed his party affiliation on 11/09/1994 without facing an election. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado did the same on 03/03/1995. Republican governorships went from 19 to 30, on the Census Bureau's compilation of National Governors' Association figures.

House figures from the Office of the Historian of the US House, which states that its counts are the party divisions as of the initial election results. Senate figures from the United States Senate's party division table. Governorship figures from the US Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract, Table 446, compiled from National Governors' Association data, which reflects figures after inaugurations.

Chamber or office	Before	After	Change
House Republicans	176	230	+54
House Democrats	258	204	-54
Senate Republicans	44	52	+8
Senate Democrats	56	48	-8
Republican governors	19	30	+11
Democratic governors	29	19	-10

The House before and after the 1994 midterm

Seats by party in the 103rd and 104th Congresses, as the House's own historical table records them.

On the Clerk of the House's official recapitulation, Republicans took 36,325,809 votes to the Democrats' 31,542,823 in House races, a margin of 6.79 points. Brookings records 48 House members retiring, 387 incumbents seeking reelection, four beaten in primaries and 34 beaten in the general election. Every one of the 34 was a Democrat.

The symbolic result came from Washington's 5th district. George Nethercutt beat Speaker Tom Foley 110,057 to 106,074 on the Clerk's official count, a margin of 3,983 votes or 1.84 points. The House's own list of Speakers who lost their seats while serving contains three names: William Pennington, Galusha Grow and Tom Foley, so Foley was the first sitting Speaker beaten since Grow in 1862. Some contemporaneous accounts put the gap at 134 years by confusing Grow with Pennington; the correct figure is 132.

What the 1993 off-year elections showed

Republicans won four contests for Democratic-held offices between 06/1993 and 05/1994, and three of the four were not close. Kay Bailey Hutchison beat Bob Krueger by 34.68 points in the Texas Senate runoff on 06/05/1993, taking a seat that had been Lloyd Bentsen's since 1971. George Allen beat Mary Sue Terry by 17.38 points for the Virginia governorship on 11/02/1993. Christine Todd Whitman beat the sitting governor Jim Florio in New Jersey by 1.04 points the same day.

Republican margins in the off-year and special elections before 1994

Republican winning margin in four contests for Democratic-held offices between 06/1993 and 05/1994.

The fourth is the most informative and the least remembered. William Natcher of Kentucky died on 03/29/1994, having held the state's 2nd district since 1953. Ron Lewis won the 05/24/1994 special election with 40,126 votes to Joe Prather's 32,625, a margin of 10.30 points, on certified returns from the Kentucky State Board of Elections. The seat had been Democratic since 1865.

Specials are small samples with local stories attached. What made this set readable was the direction. No House seat changed party in any 1993 special election, and then two Democratic House seats went Republican within a fortnight in May 1994: Oklahoma's 6th on 05/10/1994, after Glenn English resigned, and Kentucky's 2nd two weeks later.

The national conditions were visible in the same period. Bill Clinton's Gallup approval reached the lowest point of his presidency, 37 percent, on 06/05 to 06/06/1993. The 1993 budget reconciliation bill passed the House 218 to 216 on 08/05/1993, with 175 Republicans voting against and not one voting for it, and passed the Senate the next day on Vice President Al Gore's tie-breaking vote. The health care plan was introduced that autumn and abandoned in 09/1994 without a floor vote.

Bill Clinton's Gallup approval through 1994

One Gallup reading per month through the midterm year, against his lowest reading of the presidency.

Clinton's approval through the midterm year is worth looking at closely, because it does not tell the story people remember. He was at 54 percent in January 1994, 39 percent in August and September, and 46 percent in the final Gallup reading before the election, interviewed 11/02 to 11/06/1994. The last six weeks of the campaign showed recovery. The seats moved anyway, which is a useful corrective to the idea that a midterm is a referendum settled in its final month.

How Republicans recruited for 1994

The Republican recruitment operation for 1994 ran through two organizations with different jobs, and it was running hard in 1993 while the committee responsible for House races was close to broke. Federal Election Commission figures show the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $9,238,015 during 1993, held $355,795 in cash at year end and carried $3,397,101 in debt. Its 1993 receipts were lower than in 1991, 1989 and 1987. On money alone the party entered the cycle in its worst shape in at least four cycles.

The recruiting itself sat largely outside that committee. GOPAC had been founded in 1979 by Governor Pierre du Pont of Delaware to build a farm team of state and local Republican candidates, and Newt Gingrich became its general chairman in 1986. The Library of Congress essay accompanying the GOPAC tapes' addition to the National Recording Registry describes what it did: instead of writing candidates checks, Gingrich sent them information, distributing thousands of cassettes and videotapes to potential candidates, and spent more than $8 million identifying the strongest potential Republican challengers and supplying them with themes and language. John Boehner, quoted in that essay, said he started getting the tapes in 1986 or 1987 and that without them he probably would not have run for Congress.

That is the part of 1994 worth studying, and it is the part that cannot be done in an election year. A candidate who files in the spring of 1994 made the decision in 1993 or earlier, usually after somebody asked, often more than once. Gingrich was minority whip throughout the cycle, and Bill Paxon chaired the congressional committee for the 1994 and 1996 cycles.

One caution belongs here, because the recruitment story attracts invented precision. No institutional source gives a count of how many candidates the committee or GOPAC recruited for 1994, and figures in circulation trace back to secondary accounts without underlying records.

Why open seats decided the 1994 House

Republicans won 71 percent of the open Democratic-held House seats in 1994 and 15 percent of the Democratic seats where the incumbent was still on the ballot, which is the clearest evidence that 1994 was decided by who was running rather than by what was said in September. Of the 31 open seats previously held by Democrats, Republicans won 22 and Democrats held nine. Of the 21 previously held by Republicans, Republicans held 17 and Democrats won four.

Republican win rate in Democratic-held seats, by seat type

Two rates assembled by hand from four sources: the share of open Democratic-held seats Republicans won, and the share of Democratic seats with the incumbent on the ballot that they won.

Open seats produced a net Republican gain of 18 seats, a third of the total, and they are the one category a party can influence years in advance.

Who won the open House seats in 1994

The 52 House districts with no incumbent on the ballot, split by which party had held the seat.

Counts of 1994 open seats differ by source. Brookings counts 48 retirements, excluding members who died or resigned before the election, while enumerations of every district with no incumbent on the ballot reach 52, and Brookings counts 21 open Democratic seats changing party rather than 22. The gap is one or two seats.

Open seats matter because incumbency is worth something real and it disappears the moment the incumbent does. In 1994, 349 of 387 incumbents seeking reelection won, a rate of 90.2 percent, in the year remembered as the worst for incumbents. Nine in ten survived a wave.

That is why retirement intelligence is worth more than almost any other early-cycle research. A member deciding in March whether to run again is making the most consequential decision in that district for two years, and it is usually knowable before it is announced.

What the Contract with America did and when

The Contract with America was signed on 09/27/1994, six weeks before the election. The American Presidency Project records that it was signed by 367 candidates for office on the steps of the US Capitol on that date, and contemporaneous accounts give numbers above 300, which appear to be rounding of the same event. The Library of Congress essay traces its ideas and much of its language back to the GOPAC tapes.

Six weeks is not enough time to build a wave and it is enough time to give one a shape. By late September the recruitment was done, the retirements were known and the open seats were fixed. The Contract gave 367 separate campaigns a common argument in the same week, which is worth a great deal to challengers with no name recognition and nothing to a party without candidates in those districts.

Turnout, often credited afterward, moved modestly. The University of Florida Election Lab puts 1994 midterm turnout at 41.1 percent of the voting-eligible population against 38.4 percent in 1990.

What 1994 says about when a cycle is decided

The 1994 result was built out of three things in place before the election year began: who retired, who was persuaded to run, and which seats therefore had no incumbent defending them. Each is settled twelve to twenty-four months out, and each is cheap to measure against what is spent on advertising afterward.

The practical sequence runs backward from the filing deadline. Identify the seats where the incumbent is likely to leave, before the announcement rather than after. Score those seats on the partisan lean of their territory rather than on who holds them. Then spend the recruiting effort where an open seat and favorable ground coincide.

Everything else in 1994 was real and most of it was downstream. Clinton's approval set the environment and the special elections confirmed what was already true. The seats changed hands where somebody had decided, a year or more earlier, that there would be a candidate worth voting for.

Questions about the 1994 midterm

How many seats did Republicans gain in the 1994 midterm?

Republicans gained 54 House seats and eight Senate seats in the 1994 midterm. The Office of the Historian of the US House records the House division moving from 258 Democrats and 176 Republicans to 204 and 230. Republican governorships rose from 19 to 30. A Senate party change the day after the election brought the Senate gain to nine.

Was 1994 the first Republican House majority in forty years?

The House Historian's profile of the 104th Congress states that Republicans won control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years. Republicans had last held a House majority in the 83rd Congress, which sat from 1953 to 1955 and was elected in 1952, so the gap measured from the last Republican-majority election is 42 years.

Did any Republican incumbent lose in 1994?

No Republican House incumbent lost a general election in 1994. Brookings records 34 incumbents defeated in the general election, all of them Democrats. One sitting Republican, David Levy of New York, was denied renomination in a primary on 09/13/1994, so the precise statement is that no Republican incumbent lost in November.

When was the Contract with America signed?

The Contract with America was signed on 09/27/1994, six weeks before the midterm election. The American Presidency Project records that 367 candidates for office signed it on the steps of the US Capitol. Contemporaneous press accounts gave figures above 300, which appear to be rounding of the same event rather than an independent count.