A Marker of a Disjunctive President

We have a long-running debate on the blog about whether Donald Trump is a disjunctive president. In other words, does he represent the end of a particular party system (the Reagan coalition)? This label comes from the influential work of Stephen Skowronek, who analyzed the presidency in relation to the prevailing party system of the day.

A common theme that links the disjunctive presidents is that their party did poorly in the first set of midterm elections following their own election. This foreshadowed their defeat for reelection two years later. Skowronek identifies four disjunctive presidents (John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter). If you examine the midterm elections that followed all of their victories (1826, 1854, 1930, 1978), their parties all did poorly. They did not all lose control of Congress as a result, but the trend was unmistakable.

We'll see how the results in two weeks compare.

UPDATE: As Jack rightly pointed out to me, most Presidents see their party lose seats in their first midterm election. I didn't mean to suggest that only disjunctive presidents see significant party losses in their first midterm election. The point is that no disjunctive president led their party to victory or even just a so-so result in their first midterm election. Consequently, if the GOP gains Senate seats in November (a possibility) and holds the House (also possible), then that would tend to suggest that the collapse of the Reagan coalition is not imminent.