By Lawrence Summers Tuesday’s mid-term elections, with its victory for the Democrats in the House and the Senate, was a striking but not historically extraordinary event. Of the 16 mid-term elections since the second world war, Tuesday’s was the seventh that could be classified as a “repudiation election”, in which voting revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the policies of the president and his party. The varied aftermaths of past repudiation, elections show the difficulty of forecasting what will follow the Democrats’ victory. After the 1946 election, Harry Truman worked with the Republican Congress on big measures such as the Marshall Plan and won the 1948 election. The Eisenhower administration limped to its conclusion after the 1958 poll and the Democratic congressional victory that year paved the way for John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960. Lyndon Johnson’s big legislative accomplishments occurred before the election of 1966; Democrats lost the White House to Richard Nixon two years later. The post-Watergate election of 1974 was followed by the recession of 1975 and the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. Ronald Reagan recovered from his 1986 loss of the Senate and the Iran-Contra scandals, and his vice-president George H.W. Bush won the presidency in 1988. (more…)