If pre-election polls prove true, President Barack Obama will have inflicted more midterm damage to his own party than any modern president, according to pollster Glen Bolger.
Obama is “likely to be [the] most destructive president to his party in mid-terms in recent political history,” according to Bolger, a founder of the GOP-aligned polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies.
He’s on track to lose 70 Democratic House seats and at least nine Senate seats that were held by his party when he was sworn into office Jan. 20, 2009, Bolger wrote in a blog post.
That’s worse than President Richard Nixon, who lost a total of 60 GOP-held House seats and three GOP-held Senate seats in the 1970 and 1974 midterms.
President Bill Clinton cost his party eight Senate seats and 47 House seats, largely because of his disastrous loss to Rep. Newt Gingrich in the 1994 midterm, when the GOP gained control of the House after a decade of Democratic control.
Obama has already lost 63 seats in his disastrous post-Obamacare midterm in 2010, when the tea party swept the GOP’s populist legislators and establishment leaders back into power.
That “shellacking” gives him a comfortable lead over Nixon’s 60-seat House loss.
Obama also lost six Senate seats in 2010, and he’s expected to lose another five to nine seats on Tuesday.
If he loses five in 2014, he will have lost 11 seats, giving him a large lead over Clinton’s loss of eight seats.
If Obama loses seven Senate seats, he’ll have a commanding lead of minus 13 Senate seats that may last for decades.
Surprisingly, George W. Bush has a much better record than Obama in midterm losses. He only lost 22 GOP House seats and four GOP Senate seats in 2002 and 2006.
