Mickey Carroll of Quinnipiac and I are in Thursday’s NY Post writing about why New York resisted the Republican wave.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/unions_made_the_ny_difference_fXoANAW05YY9wnyY2B8RuJ
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/staying_dry_in_gop_flood_NKIL0jcTgWFlARbzWHZl1I
But this is not the first time this happened.
The Midterm elections in 1958 were one of the biggest victories the Democratic Party ever had. The Democrats picked up 48 seats in the House of Representatives and 13 seats in the Senate, including defeating an astonishing 10 Republican incumbent Senators. Since the Republican losses came even though they were already in the minority in both houses with 201 seats in the House and 47 in the Senate, it’s fair to say the Republican defeat was worse than that suffered nationally by the Democrats on Tuesday.
That year, New York withstood the Democratic tide. We went Republican that year in a big way. Nelson Rockefeller ousted Democratic Governor Averill Harriman. Kenneth Keating, a Rochester Republican Congressman beat Frank Hogan, the Manhattan District Attorney for an open US Senator seat, and Louis Lefkowitz, who had been appointed by the State legislature Attorney General was elected to a full-term. The Republicans also easily kept control of both the State Senate and Assembly.
My Post Op-Ed suggests that union power is crucial to New York resisting the Republican wave this year, which is somewhat ironic. As I reviewed what was the cause of the Democratic wave in 1958, it turns out unions were crucial then also. Time magazine reported in its post election edition;
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,938001,00.html
Labor unions poured in money and effort as rarely before against right-to-work laws and proposals—and the results came to exciting focus in the Democratic victories in such generally Republican states as Indiana and Ohio. Economic hotspots, e.g., Indiana's South Bend district with its hundreds of unemployed Studebaker workers, took out their resentment on Republicans.
Time tried to explain New York’s results:
In New York, Rockefeller successfully managed to blame state economic problems on Democratic Governor Averill Harriman.
Rockefeller's win was plainly personal
Does this history tell us anything about future elections?
I don’t think so.
1958 was the 6th year of a Republican Presidential administration, not the 2nd year. In 1960, the Democrats won the Presidency by a narrow margin both overall and in New York and kept control of Congress, while losing a few seats. And the Democrats lost in many of the states in 1960 that they won in 1958.