midterms
How does the president's party perform in midterm elections?
Overview
Data on the performance of a president's party in the House of Representatives during the midterm elections. (A midterm election is the election year between presidential election years, e.g. 2014.) The data covers midterm elections since 1898.
A commonly held political belief is that when unemployment is high, the president's party generally performs poorly during midterm elections in Congress. This was the primary motivation for examining this data set.
Variables
- year: Year of the midterm election.
- potus: The President of the United States (POTUS).
- party: Political party of the president.
- unemployment: Proportion of the working population that was unemployment.
- house.change: The relative proportional change in the number of seats that the president's party held in the House of Representatives based on that year's midterm elections.
Data Source
Unemployment data comes from Wikipedia and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. President information was collected from Wikipedia. House of Representative data was from Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives Party Divisions.