The Almanac of Latino Politics

Reality sets in during the non-presidential elections. Historically, the party of the incumbent president invariably loses seats in the House and the Senate, the only exception being after 9/11 when the nation rallied around George W. Bush and spared him from the experience of an American tradition. Despite the fanfare and exhilaration that follow popular elections like those of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, their parties suffered huge losses in the first non-presidential election cycle following their own elections. In 2010, in the first mid-term after his election in 2008, Barack Obama blew the 30-seat gain Democrats had made in 2006, and lost control of the House. In 2014, in his second mid-term election, Obama also lost control of the Senate. Democrats regained control of the House in 2018 following Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, costing Republicans their total control of two branches of government. Yet, despite their mid-term losses, Reagan and Clinton and Obama were re-elected. In the case of Bill Clinton, he was the first Democrat to be reelected in 50 years, an achievement replicated by Barack Obama in 2012. This trend was disrupted by Trump, who lost control of the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020, and lost his own reelection in 2020.

This trend was broken by Trump, who lost control of the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020 plus his own reelection, becoming only the 5th president in history to lose it all in just one term and the first since Herbert Hoover in 1932. He also became the 10th president to be denied reelection in history.

In 2018, the last non-presidential election cycle, Democrats acquired a net gain of 41 House seats and regained control of the House but Republicans retained control of the Senate. While the spotlight is usually shed on presidential election years, it was actually in the 2018 mid-term elections in which Latinos came out to vote in record numbers. The Latino vote in mid-term elections went from 6.8 million in 2014 to 11.7 million in 2018, an increase of 4.9 million voters, or 42%! (see Table 4.2) One of the explanations for the surge in Latino voters is due to a young population that was more motivated to vote. Latinos have a younger population overall and consequently turn out to vote in larger numbers at a younger age compared to their non-Hispanic white counterparts (see Table 4.12). This bodes well for the Latino electorate as many of these voters will presumably be voting for the next 60 years.