This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on February 14, 2017 Many congressional Republicans who had town meetings over the last week or two have gotten an earful from constituents upset over the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act or President Trump’s immigration enforcement or both. Some of these highly unpleasant scenes don’t look too different from what congressional Democrats encountered back in 2009 and 2013, rocky years that preceded calamitous midterm elections, when they lost their House majority in the former and their Senate majority in the latter. As a group, politicians want to be loved and put on a pedestal. Getting booed, screamed at, and picketed, particularly by the ordinary middle-class people who put them in office, is more than a little unnerving. We know that midterm elections generally don’t go well for the party holding the White House. According to the indispensable 2017 Vital Statistics on Congress, by Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, Michael Malbin, and Molly Reynolds, the president’s party has lost House seats in 35 out of 38 midterms (92 percent) since the end of
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