1938 United States elections

1938 United States elections

← 1936          1937         1938         1939          1940 → Midterm elections
Election day	November 8
Incumbent president	Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democratic)
Next Congress	76th
Senate elections
Overall control	Democratic hold
Seats contested	36 of 96 seats (32 Class 3 seats + 6 special elections) [1]
Net seat change	Republican +8 [2]
1938 Senate election results   Democratic gain  Democratic hold   Republican gain  Republican hold
House elections
Overall control	Democratic hold
Seats contested	All 435 voting seats
Popular vote margin	Democratic +1.2%
Net seat change	Republican +81
1938 House election results   Democratic gain  Democratic hold   Republican gain  Republican hold
Gubernatorial elections
Seats contested	33
Net seat change	Republican +12
1938 gubernatorial election results   Democratic gain  Democratic hold   Republican gain  Republican hold

Elections were held on November 8, 1938, in the middle of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term. The Democratic Party lost 72 seats, mostly to the Republican Party, in the House of Representatives. The Democrats also lost eight seats to the Republicans in the U.S. Senate. ^[3] Despite these heavy losses, the Democrats maintained control of Congress.

The election was a defeat for Roosevelt, as the conservative coalition (an alliance of Republicans and Southern Democrats) took control of Congress and stymied Roosevelt's domestic agenda. Roosevelt had campaigned openly against members of his own party who had not supported the New Deal, but Roosevelt's preferred candidates met with little success across the country. The election took place in the aftermath of the recession of 1937–38 and the defeat of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 ("the court-packing plan"), and President Roosevelt was at the nadir of his popularity. Republicans picked up congressional seats for the first time since the start of the Great Depression, and few new major domestic programs became law until the advent of the Great Society in the 1960s. ^[4]

See also

• 1938 United States House of Representatives elections
• 1938 United States Senate elections
• 1938 United States gubernatorial elections

References

1. Two Class 3 seats held both a regularly-scheduled election and a special election in 1938. These two seats are not double-counted for the total number of seats contested.
2. Republicans picked up seven seats in the regularly-scheduled elections and won an additional seat in the special elections.
3. "Statistics of the Congressional Election of November 8, 1938" (PDF). U.S. House of Reps, Office of the Clerk. Retrieved December 28, 2011.
4. Busch, Andrew (1999). Horses in Midstream. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 122–126.

Further reading

• Carson, Jamie L. "Electoral and Partisan Forces in the Roosevelt Era: The US Congressional Elections of 1938." Congress & the Presidency 28#2 (2001) 161–183 https://doi.org/10.1080/07343460109507751
• Dunn, Susan (2010). Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party. ISBN   978-0674057173. (Excerpt and text search)
• Plesur, Milton (1962). "The Republican Congressional Comeback of 1938". Review of Politics. 24 (4): 525–562. doi:10.1017/S0034670500012419. JSTOR   1405361. S2CID   145405461.
• Price, Charles M.; Boskin, Joseph (1966). "The Roosevelt 'Purge': A Reappraisal". Journal of Politics. 28 (3): 660–670. doi:10.2307/2128161. JSTOR   2128161. S2CID   154528656.
• Savage, Sean J. (1991). "Chapter 6". Roosevelt, the Party Leader, 1932-1945. pp. 129–158. ISBN   0813130794. (Excerpt and text search); also in JSTOR