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Forgive me if a diary of charts seems dry--the purpose behind it is anything but. I think of it in terms of things I talked about or alluded to in Dollhouse Lessons: Echoing America, like Echo's learning to read, finding ways to remind herself, and looking for ways to wake others up. The purpose is to clear our heads of ghosts and demons that scare us off from seizing the historical opportunities before us. Versailles is blinded by its own gossip and selective short-term memory. Our answer should rely on reality-based, long-term vision--a combination of deep compassion, common sense, rigorous analysis and bold imagination. To accurately see ourselves in history is key to accurately seeing how we can break the narrow bonds of short-term rear-view thinking. That is the purpose of this diary. We need to wake up.
Three weekends ago, I wrote a diary, "Reagan Did NOT Win A Realigning Election In 1980". I wanted to show conclusively that the 1980 election didn't look anything like the commonly-recognized realigning elections, such as 1932 and 1896. In addition to the macro-political event of a political party disintegrating (the Federalists in the 1820s, the Whigs in the 1850s), I identified two metrics to identify a realigning election--one for the House, the other for the Presidency. (The Senate was not directly elected for more than half our history, so it's not suitable to use.) The idea of both was simple: a realignment ought to show a significant before/after shift--and it ought to show up in both metrics. If there is no such shift, then there is no realignment. (Unless, of course, the complete collapse of one party makes use of the metric superfluous and/or problematic.) The comparisons of 1980 to 1896 showed quite clearly what this shift looked like in the House (1896), and what its absence looked like (1980):
 
Of course, simply presenting these in isolation raises the question of how significant the 11+ point shift in House balance for 1896 really is, historically speaking. And the same can also be said about my presidential metric. This was actually a rather atypical election, since the GOP didn't pick up seats that year--it lost a good number in a counter-swing election after winning two consecutive wave elections. While realigning electios generally involved two consecutive wave elections paired with a decisive party-changing Presidential election, this is the only time that the Presidential election came after both wave elections. And yet, a strong GOP majority remained even after this anomalous House election.
For me, this leads toward shifting focus to the longer patterns of political ebb and flow, a perspective from which the nature of specific biennial and quadrennial elections is more easily understood in comparison to others. Instead of cherry-picking whatever particular fact pops out of us to prove or disprove a favored or disfavored argument, we look to find a consistent guide for analyzing all in a common framework.
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