Had Enough? The 1946 Midterm That Ended Sixteen Years in the Wilderness

The best campaign slogan in the history of American midterms was a question, it had two words, and it did not contain a single policy proposal. Consultants today would call that malpractice. In 1946 it was a landslide.

The question was "Had enough?" It was printed on buttons, posters and billboards, and it worked because the voter had, in fact, had enough. Let me walk you through how a party that had been locked out of both chambers of Congress for sixteen years got back in by asking the electorate how its groceries were doing.

Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a bus

Start with the wilderness, because you cannot appreciate the comeback without the exile. Republicans lost the House in the 1930 elections, and they lost the Senate in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt carried the country and the Depression carried the Republican Party out with it. For the next decade and a half, the minority party in Washington was the party that had been in charge when the stock market fell, and the majority never let the voters forget it.

The Republicans did claw back some ground. The 1938 elections gave them dozens of House seats and made the conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats a real force on the floor. But a gain is not a majority. They remained the minority through the New Deal's expansion, through the Second World War, and through the death of the president who had held the White House since 1933. For sixteen years, a Republican who wanted to chair a committee had a simple strategy: live long enough.

Here is what sixteen years in the minority does to a party. It teaches the party to complain, because complaining is all the rules allow. It teaches the voters that the party has no record to defend, which is a comfort until the party needs one. And it teaches the majority to believe that the arrangement is natural, like the tides. That belief is the majority's weakness. A party that thinks it is entitled to govern stops noticing when the country has started to wonder what it is getting for the privilege.

What 1946 looked like from the grocery store

The war ended in 1945, and the economy of command did not end with it. During the war, the federal government had controlled prices through the Office of Price Administration. The theory was sensible in wartime: factories were making tanks instead of refrigerators, so rationing and price ceilings kept the little that remained from going to the highest bidder. The trouble is that the theory had a shelf life, and the shelf life ran out when the shooting stopped.

By 1946, the returning soldier wanted a car, a house and a steak. The price ceilings told the producer that the steak was worth less than it cost to raise the steer. Producers did the rational thing and held back their product, and the meat that did reach the market went to black markets or to nobody. Housing was tight, appliances were scarce, and the newspapers filled with stories of empty butcher cases. In mid-October, weeks before the election, President Truman lifted controls on meat. The shortage-driven anger had already done its work.

Meanwhile, labor was on strike. The year 1946 saw what one account calls the largest strikes in American labor history, with walkouts in steel, coal, autos and the railroads. In May, Truman went before Congress and asked for authority to draft striking railroad workers into the Army, a request that appalled his own party's labor allies and left everyone else wondering whether the government had lost track of how it got here. The two parties' arguments had a way of converging on the voter's kitchen: prices were up, goods were short, and the people who were supposed to be fixing it kept announcing new committees.

Notice what the voter was reacting to. It was not an ideology. It was the lived experience of a government that had been asked to run the economy and was running it into the ground. Republicans had one job in 1946, and the job was to ask whether this was working.

Two words

Here is the argument behind "Had enough?", set out in the numbered way I prefer, since it is the argument a good campaign never says out loud.

1. The government told you it could manage prices, wages and supply from Washington. That was the wartime promise, and it was extended into peacetime.
2. You can check the result yourself. The shelves, the strikes and the housing line are not abstractions. They are things a family encounters before breakfast.
3. The party that built the system owns the system. After a decade and a half of Democratic control of Congress and, since 1933, the White House, nobody else was available to blame.
4. Therefore the voter's question is not "what do the Republicans propose?" but "is this enough?" The slogan asked it plainly and let the voter supply the rest.

That is a message discipline most campaigns never achieve. It did not promise a program. It did not need to. It turned a pile of private frustrations into a single public argument, and the argument was about the reach of government: if the plan to manage the whole economy has given us shortages, strikes and lines, perhaps the plan was the problem.

I find that refreshing, and not only as a matter of technique. A party that wins by saying "look around you" is a party betting on the voters' good sense. The coverage tends to prefer the opposite approach, the thirty-point plan with a bulleted summary, and then acts surprised when nobody remembers the plan but everybody remembers the shortage.

The result

When the votes were counted in November 1946, Republicans had gained 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate. They held 246 House seats to the Democrats' 188, and 51 Senate seats to 45. It was the first Republican majority in the House since the Hoover years and the first in the Senate since the Hoover years too. The arithmetic of the shift is worth a moment: a House majority needs 218 of 435 seats, and 246 cleared that line with 28 votes to spare. It was not a squeaker.

The class of 1946 also deserves a note, because comebacks recruit. It included Richard Nixon, who won a California House seat, and Joseph McCarthy, who won a Senate seat in Wisconsin. Whatever one thinks of their later careers, and conservatives think very different things about them, the point is that a wave brings in people nobody has heard of, and a few of them turn out to matter for decades. The same election also sent John F. Kennedy to the House on the other side of the aisle, which is a reminder that a wave does not choose its beneficiaries with ideological precision.

The 80th Congress governs

Winning the majority is the easy half. The harder half is governing against a president who holds the veto, and the Republicans of the 80th Congress discovered this at once.

They had a program, and parts of it deserve more credit than the history books give. They passed a constitutional amendment limiting a president to two terms, sending the 22nd Amendment to the states in March 1947 and answering Franklin Roosevelt's four elections with the lesson Washington had taught by example when he stepped down. (I have a whole piece on that, in George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be.) They also cooperated with the president on the Marshall Plan, which is a point worth making to anyone who thinks the 1946 class was merely obstructive.

The defining fight was labor law. In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which amended the 1935 Wagner Act. Among other things it banned the closed shop, in which a worker had to be a union member before he could be hired. It let states pass what became known as right-to-work laws, through Section 14(b). It authorized the president to seek an 80-day cooling-off injunction in strikes that threatened national health or safety, and it required union officers to file non-Communist affidavits, a provision that did not last in that form. President Truman vetoed the bill in June 1947, calling it unfair to workers. Congress overrode the veto within days, by more than the two-thirds vote the Constitution requires.

Tax policy followed the same path. Republicans passed income tax cuts, Truman vetoed them twice in 1947, and the Revenue Act of 1948 became law over his veto in the spring of that year. Notice the pattern: the 80th Congress could pass its bills and could override on its biggest ones. That is a record of a majority that knew what it wanted.

The best case against all this

A fair account has to give the other side its best argument, so here it is. Labor leaders and Democrats said that the 80th Congress was using a postwar mood to roll back protections that working families had won under the Wagner Act. They said Taft-Hartley tilted the table toward employers, that the cooling-off period and the affidavit were insults to honest union men, and that the real cause of 1946 was inflation and shortages that the removal of controls would only worsen in the short run.

That is not a stupid argument, and some of its pieces are correct. Prices did rise sharply after controls ended, and the transition was rough. But the argument has three problems. First, the shortages were a product of the controls, which suppressed production; ending them was the cure, not the disease. Second, the "protection" of a closed shop was a protection of the union from the worker, and a worker's right to hold a job without paying dues to an organization he did not choose is the sort of individual-liberty argument the Founders' heirs should be glad to make. Third, the people who voted in 1946 had delivered their verdict on the matter, and in a republic a verdict from the voters counts for something.

On the merits, I would say Taft-Hartley's core, the idea that a worker should not be forced into a union as a condition of employment, has held up better than its critics predicted, and that the question of how states should handle union security remains a live one in state legislatures. Reasonable people on our side will disagree about particulars. What I am confident of is that the 80th Congress was entitled to pass the law and to override a veto on it.

"Do-nothing Congress"

Now we reach the part of the story that conservatives like to skip. In 1948, Harry Truman ran against Congress. He called the 80th Congress the "do-nothing Congress," and he campaigned on the proposition that a Republican majority had refused to do what the country needed.

The charge was unfair on the record, since the 80th Congress had passed a tax cut, a labor law, the 22nd Amendment and the Marshall Plan. It was also devastatingly effective. Truman called Congress back into a special session in July 1948, a session that became known as the "Turnip Day" session after the date he chose, and he dared it to pass his program. It did not, which gave him the visual he wanted: a president asking, a Congress declining. He then ran the length of the country on a train, giving speech after speech to crowds that came to see him, and he won. Truman carried 303 electoral votes to Thomas Dewey's 189, and the Democrats took back both chambers. The Republican majority that had waited sixteen years lasted two.

Dewey's campaign, to be fair, committed the sin that comfortable front-runners commit, which is to run a cautious campaign to protect a lead. But the deeper lesson is that Truman had found a villain, and the villain was the very Congress that had won on a slogan. A majority is a target. It cannot say "had enough?" about itself.

What a comeback that loses the next election teaches

So what do we take from a comeback that won the argument and then lost the next election? I would draw five lessons, and I would offer them as a checklist to any minority party that thinks the wilderness is the hard part.

1. A slogan wins the first election; a record wins the second. "Had enough?" is a question about the other side. Once you are the majority, the voter asks the question about you.
2. Pass the things that last. The 22nd Amendment is still in the Constitution, and the labor law it took a veto override to enact has shaped the law for decades. A majority that gets two years should spend them on durable measures, not on messages.
3. Expect to be run against. The president and the opposition will define the majority's record before it has a chance to. Explain what you did, in plain words, before the other side explains what you did not do.
4. Win with the voters' own experience. The 1946 case worked because the shelves were empty, and the argument was that government had overreached. It did not work because of an abstract theory. Tie every argument to something a family can see.
5. Do not mistake a verdict for a mandate. Voters in 1946 rejected a condition. They did not necessarily endorse every item a congressional majority wanted to pursue. A party that confuses the two over-reads its authority, and the voters correct it on the next Tuesday in November.

There is a constitutional point underneath all of this. The Founders gave the House two-year terms so that it would stay close to the people, and the verdicts of 1946 and 1948 came two years apart. I would not call that a flaw in the system. It is the design. The party that wins the House has two years to earn a second term, and the voters get to say "enough" again as often as the calendar allows. For more on the numbers behind this, see The Numbers That Run Congress, From 218 to 60 to 290 to 38 and Back, and for the regular pattern of midterm losses, Why the President's Party Almost Always Loses the Midterm, and the Exceptions.

Why this story belongs in the toolbox

The 1946 election also belongs beside other comebacks. Two years after the 1964 rout, voters again reversed a verdict, as I tell in Two Years After Goldwater, the 1966 Midterm That Put the Right Back in It, and the full comparison of how the right has come back from defeat is laid out in Five Conservative Comebacks Side by Side, and the Ingredient They All Shared. What those stories share with 1946 is that the comeback began as an argument against an overreaching majority and ended as an organization. A related piece, Comebacks Start the Morning After, Lessons From the Defeats of 1964, 1974, 2008, takes up what a party does in the days after it loses.

And a note on the media, since I promised you one. Coverage of 1946 often treats the Republican win as a mood swing, the electorate being cranky. Moods do not explain why the same voters were willing to override a veto, pass a constitutional amendment and fund the Marshall Plan. A voter who says "had enough?" is not being cranky. He is passing judgment on a system that failed, which is the one thing the republic asks of him.

The case in brief

1. Republicans spent sixteen years in the minority, from the 1930 and 1932 elections to 1946, and returned to power by asking voters a two-word question about the reach of government.
2. The 1946 result, 55 House seats and 12 Senate seats gained, grew out of lived experience: price controls, shortages and strikes that families could see.
3. The 80th Congress governed seriously, with Taft-Hartley passed over a veto, tax cuts enacted over a veto and the 22nd Amendment sent to the states.
4. President Truman's "do-nothing Congress" campaign cost the majority its seats in 1948, because a majority is a target and a slogan is not a record.
5. A comeback endures when it passes lasting measures and explains them to the voters before its opponents do.

What you can do: pull up the roll-call votes on a bill your representative voted on last session at Congress.gov, and write down in one sentence what it did, so that you can explain your representative's record in your own words.