How the president’s party has fared in every US midterm election since 1946

On Tuesday, Americans head to the polls for the United States midterm elections, held halfway through a president’s four-year term. Voters will choose all 435 members of the US House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats. The voting will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years.Although the president’s name won’t appear on the ballot, the vote is widely seen as a verdict on the presidency, and the president’s party almost always pays the price.In 18 of the 20 midterms held from 1946 to 2022, voters took House seats away from the party in control of the White House. The average loss was 26 seats. Only Bill Clinton’s Democrats in 1998 and George W Bush’s Republicans in 2002 bucked the trend.Political scientists call this the “presidential penalty”, or the “midterm penalty”. The president’s party tends to lose seats simply because it holds power as voters use the midterms to put a check on the White House.The House: 18 losses in 20 midtermsThe chart below shows how many House seats the president’s party has won or lost in each midterm since 1946 from Harry S Truman to Joe Biden.(Al Jazeera)Democratic presidents have suffered the biggest midterm defeats...