Comebacks Start the Morning After, Lessons From the Defeats of 1964, 1974, 2008

The morning after an election loss has a smell. It is stale coffee, a deflated balloon and the sound of a consultant explaining why none of it was his fault. Picture the memoirs already being drafted in every capital in the country, each one titled some variation on "I Warned Them." (That is a joke, and a hypothetical one.)

Folks, I want to talk about the next sixty days, and I want to do it with some cheer, because cheer is underrated and history is on our side. As of January 3, 2027, when the 120th Congress convenes, Republicans will be the minority in both the House and the Senate. Democrats won both chambers in the November 3, 2026 midterms, as reported by CBS News and other outlets in the days that followed. I will give no seat counts and make no forecasts. What I can do is tell you what the right did the last three times it lost badly, which responses worked and which did not, so that when somebody says this is the end, you can say: we have seen this movie, and it has a second act.

The claim, in numbered form

1. A comeback begins in the months right after a loss, not in the year before the next election.
2. The responses that worked in 1964, 1974 and 2008 had three things in common: new organizations, new candidates and new arguments.
3. The responses that failed had three things in common as well: recrimination, purges and despair.
4. The pattern is a tendency, not a law, and each comeback also had a share of luck and of the other side's mistakes.

That fourth point is the honest one, and I will keep returning to it. Nobody wins by being optimistic. But optimism is the condition under which people keep working, and work is what the comebacks had in common.

1964: the landslide

In November 1964 Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic president, won with about 61 percent of the popular vote against Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican nominee, and Democrats won large congressional majorities. Republicans lost 36 seats in the House. The commentary class declared the conservative movement dead, and a number of party moderates blamed the nominee's wing for the disaster.

What happened next is a case study. I will give it in a list, because the sequence is the lesson.

• Organizations. The American Conservative Union was founded in December 1964, in the immediate aftermath of the loss, to give the movement a standing organization. The Young Americans for Freedom, formed in 1960, kept recruiting on campuses. Local clubs of Goldwater volunteers stayed together.
• Arguments. On October 27, 1964, a few days before the vote, a television address titled "A Time for Choosing" brought Ronald Reagan, then an actor and spokesman, to a national audience. The speech laid out the argument for limited government in plain language, and it became the movement's best-known piece of advocacy.
• Candidates. In 1966 Reagan ran for governor of California and won. In the same election, Republicans gained 47 House seats, three Senate seats and a large net number of governorships.
• The party machinery. Ray Bliss, who became chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1965, took on the work of reuniting a party that had just lost badly.

Two years from catastrophe to a midterm in which the party gained dozens of seats. It would be foolish to say the response alone caused that result. The governing party had its own troubles, and midterm elections tend to go against the president's party. The full discussion, including three exceptions to that rule, is in Why the President's Party Almost Always Loses the Midterm, and the Exceptions, and the 1966 election in particular is told in Two Years After Goldwater, the 1966 Midterm That Put the Right Back in It. But the point stands: the party that went back to work was in a position to take advantage.

And the 1964 loss had a long tail. The candidate who lost in a landslide in 1964 had moved the argument, and the man who delivered his best speech was elected president sixteen years later. A defeat is not an end. It is an investment whose return arrives on a schedule nobody can predict.

1974: Watergate

The second defeat was uglier, because the cause was not a policy dispute. It was a scandal. Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, the only resignation of a president in American history, and in the midterm elections of November 1974 Democrats gained 49 House seats and four Senate seats. The Republican brand had been damaged, and the party had every reason to think its prospects were poor.

The response had four parts, and they overlapped.

1. New organizations and ideas. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, had begun producing policy research and was growing. Conservative direct-mail fundraising developed new methods of reaching small donors, which made the movement less dependent on a few large givers. Political action committees organized around conservative issues appeared in the second half of the decade.
2. A challenge from within. In 1976 Ronald Reagan challenged the sitting president, Gerald Ford, for the Republican nomination and came close to winning it. He did not win, but the platform of that year carried planks reflecting the challenger's arguments. The argument had moved even though the nomination had not.
3. A tax revolt. In June 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13, and in the same period a bill by Representative Jack Kemp and Senator William Roth to cut income tax rates across the board gave the movement a concrete program. See How the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut Went From a Backbench Bill to a Party's Creed.
4. A new candidate. In 1980 Reagan won the presidency, and Republicans gained twelve Senate seats and took control of the Senate for the first time since the 1950s.

That is six years from the Watergate midterm to a presidential win and a Senate majority. And notice what it was not: it was not a response that tried to erase the past. The party did not claim Watergate was a fiction. It went back to the argument about taxes, inflation and the Cold War, where it had something to say.

The second lesson from 1974 is about who did the work. The Heritage Foundation, the direct-mail operations, the new PACs and the tax-limitation groups were not run by the party leadership. They were built by people outside the formal structure, which is why the comeback did not depend on the leaders who had just lost. The longer story is in The Ideas Came First, How Magazines and Think Tanks Built the 1980 Landslide.

2008: the third defeat

In November 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency, and Democrats gained seats in both chambers, building on gains in 2006. Republicans faced a financial crisis that broke in the fall, an unpopular outgoing president and a sense that the party's brand was damaged.

The response was different in form, because the tools were different, but the elements were the same.

• New organizations. Beginning in early 2009, local groups formed across the country, many of them ad hoc and run by people who had never been involved in politics. Rallies on Tax Day, April 15, 2009, drew crowds in cities around the country. For how such groups work, see Tocqueville Saw It in 1831, Comebacks Are Built in Associations, Not Ads.
• New arguments. The argument was about the size of federal spending, the deficit and the scope of the federal government's response to the financial crisis and the health-care debate.
• New candidates. A large class of first-time candidates ran for Congress and for state offices in 2010.
• A pledge. In September 2010 House Republicans released a document they called the Pledge to America, a governing agenda in the manner of the 1994 Contract.
• A court case. In January 2010 the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC, which held that independent political expenditures by corporations and unions could not be banned under the First Amendment, and which reshaped the rules of campaign finance.

The result in November 2010 was a gain of 63 House seats for Republicans, the largest swing since 1948, plus six Senate seats. That is two years from the defeat of 2008 to a landslide in the midterm. I would add an honest qualification: 2012 did not repeat the success, and the presidential race that year was lost. A comeback in a midterm is not a comeback in a presidential year, and conservatives who confuse the two are setting themselves up for disappointment.

What paid off quickly, and what did not

Let me sort the responses into two lists, because a good analysis tells you which habits to copy.

Paid off within two to four years:

1. Local organization. The clubs of 1965-1966, the tax-limitation committees of the late 1970s and the local groups of 2009-2010 each produced results at the next midterm.
2. A concrete, simple argument. Lower taxes, limited government and a plain statement of what should change. The argument did not need to be long.
3. New candidates. Fresh names who were not blamed for the last loss.
4. Using the other side's overreach. In each case the governing party made mistakes, and the opposition was ready with an alternative.

Delayed recovery:

1. Recrimination. After 1964 and after 2008, a good deal of energy went into arguing about whose fault the defeat was. Every hour spent on that was an hour not spent on the next race. The people who did the work were rarely the people who did the blaming.
2. Purges. A movement that responds to defeat by expelling members shrinks. A party with a narrow majority in the best of times cannot afford to drive out half of its own side. The great comebacks added groups; they did not subtract them. See Why Single-Issue Voters Hold a Coalition Together, and When They Break It.
3. Despair. The most dangerous habit of all, because it is self-fulfilling. A voter who has been told that nothing can be done stays home, and the prediction comes true.

I put despair last because it is the cheapest to cure. It costs nothing to decide that the work is worth doing, and it pays almost immediately in the form of more volunteers.

The steelman: this time is different

I owe the pessimist a fair hearing. The argument goes like this. The comebacks of 1966, 1980 and 2010 were rescued by luck. The other side overreached, the economy turned, an inflation or a war or a health-care law handed the minority an issue. There is no guarantee that the next governing party will make a convenient error. Further, the media environment is different, parties are weaker than they were, and the electorate is more evenly divided than in 1964. History does not repeat; it only seems to.

I would answer in four points.

1. I agree that luck played a part, and I said so. But luck favors the prepared. The party that had volunteers, candidates and arguments ready was able to use the opening, while the party that did not was only a spectator.
2. The governing party always makes errors. The Constitution and the chambers' rules give the opposition a long list of tools: oversight, the filibuster, the purse and the pulpit. A party that uses them has something to show the voters in two years.
3. Evenly divided electorates make organization more valuable, not less. When a few thousand votes decide a seat, a committed group of volunteers can be the margin.
4. The tools of organizing are cheaper than they have ever been. A group that once needed a mimeograph machine and a church basement now needs a phone and a meeting room.

None of this is a prediction that Republicans will win in 2028 or in any year. It is the claim that the work of the next two years is the best investment available, whatever the result.

The founding anchor

The Founders built a system of short terms precisely so that a loss would not be permanent. The House is elected every two years under Article I, Section 2, and a third of the Senate every two years under Article I, Section 3. Madison, in Federalist 52, argued that frequent elections were essential to keeping the House dependent on the people. The same rhythm that exposes a party to a quick loss gives it a quick chance to recover, and a movement that understands the calendar will treat a defeat as an interval and not a verdict. The case for that kind of patience is in Calvin Coolidge Started on the Northampton City Council, a Lesson in the Ladder, where a man who lost a school committee race built a career on preparation.

What to do in the first sixty days

Practical steps, for a citizen and not a strategist.

1. Join something local. A county party, a club, a church committee.
2. Pick one argument to learn. Read the text of the relevant law, the budget or the constitutional clause. The people who win arguments are usually the people who read.
3. Look at the calendar. Find the next local election, the next filing deadline and the next county meeting. They are rarely more than a year away.
4. Recruit one person. A comeback is made of people who asked a neighbor to come along.
5. Skip the autopsy at the dinner table. Argue about ideas, not about who lost.

You can also use the scorecard to see how your own representatives voted before you call.

The case in brief

1. After the defeats of 1964, 1974 and 2008, the right rebuilt with new organizations, new candidates and new arguments, and each comeback began in the months after the loss.
2. The 1966 midterm (47 House seats), the 1980 election (a Senate majority) and the 2010 midterm (63 House seats) followed within two to six years.
3. Habits that delayed recovery were recrimination, purges and despair, and none of them won a single vote.
4. Luck and the other side's mistakes mattered, and the honest claim is that preparation lets a party use them.
5. The Founders' short terms mean a loss is an interval; the work of the interval is local, concrete and cheerful.

What you can do: find your county party's or a local civic group's next meeting and bring one person with you.