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In April 1894, a ragged column of unemployed men attempted to come through Pittsburgh on the way to Washington. They called themselves Coxey’s Army. It was a protest march of jobless workers led by Jacob Coxey, an Ohio businessman, and they were marching on the Capitol. The country was in the second year of a four-year depression, the worst in its history up to that time, and the city, fresh from the violence and lost lives of the Homestead Strike, did not allow the men entrance into the city limits: So they marched on along the Monongahela River.
Seven months later, the country did something the marchers might not have predicted. It voted overwhelmingly for the party of the steel tariff. Democrats lost 125 House seats, still the largest swing in the chamber’s history. In Pennsylvania they kept two of 30. In Pittsburgh, Republican John Dalzell won with more than three-quarters of the vote.
Pittsburgh hadn’t swung. It had spent two decades becoming the model of the new industrial economy, and the rest of the country was catching up to it. Between 1870 and 1890, the city’s population nearly tripled as mills pulled workers off farms and immigrants off ships. Through those same years, the House changed hands six times, sometimes by a third of its seats, as a country caught between farm and factory lurched from one party to the other with every crash.
It is worth remembering this now, because it is happening again.
The House changed hands in 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022. It may change hands again. If it does, 2026 will be the seventh straight midterm in which one chamber of Congress or the other changed parties. We are inclined to treat this as a symptom of our own era: cable news, social media, polarization, a 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’s why the House is the right place to look. The framers designed it to register the public’s mood.
So when the House swings hard, it’s worth asking what the country is going through; the first period to look at is the Gilded Age.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Americans were living through the largest economic transformation in the country’s history.
The economy also kept breaking down. The Panic of 1873 produced the 1874 wave. Voters angry about the 1890 McKinley Tariff cost Republicans their House majority that fall and cost McKinley his own congressional House seat. The Panic of 1893 pushed unemployment above 15%. That spring, Westinghouse lit the Chicago World’s Fair with the electric technology of the next century just as the economy underneath it crashed.
The voters of that era weren’t fickle. Turnout often topped 80%, and they rarely split their tickets. What they were telling Washington, through repeated wave elections, was that a country gaining enormous wealth was also losing its sense of security, and they kept looking for a party that understood the difference.
The parallels to today are hard to miss. Western Pennsylvania is again a place where the future is being built. The artificial intelligence boom has roots in a Carnegie Tech program from 1956. Robots are now tested on the old J&L steel site in Hazelwood, and the coal plant at Homer City is being rebuilt to power data centers. And the past 20 years have brought the Great Recession, a pandemic, an inflation surge and now tariffs and war-driven gas prices.
The anxieties are familiar too. The boilermakers rebuilding Homer City are glad of the work; however, 68% of Pennsylvanians would oppose a data center in their own community. Both views are reasonable, and many people hold both at once. They want the future built here, and they don’t want to pay for it.
The comparison has its limits. Today’s swings are much smaller. In 1894 about a third of House seats changed hands, while the 2010 wave moved about 15%. Fewer than 10% of House races are considered competitive now.
The biggest lesson history offers is the one the winners keep forgetting. A party that wins the House usually believes voters fell in love with its ideas. More often, voters were just angry enough at the other party to hand over the keys.