Why Presidents Lose Midterms

Since the Civil War the president's party has lost ground in Congress in every single midterm election bar four. What's going on? Are voters punishing the administration they put into office just two short years earlier? Is it an attempt to balance power in Washington? Or is it just that the president's party's supporters don't turn out? To explore this issue, Adam is joined by Ursula Hackett, the Churchill Associate Professor of US Politics at the RAI. Adam and Ursula discuss some of the most dramatic midterm elections of the past -- from the 1874 repudiation of President Grant to Obama's 2010 "shellacking" to try to work out what explains a remarkably consistent phenomenon-- the President's party losing.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukJoin Adam Join Adam Smith, Molly Ball, Galen Druke and Ursula Hackett for The Midterm Elections: What Just Happened? on 5 November at 2pm UK time, in Oxford or online. Event details and registration.If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is an American political party? Unlike in parliamentary systems, they're not private organisations but quasi-public bodies, with no membership dues and with their candidate selection regulated by public law. And how do we explain the paradox that in an era of intense 'partisan' division, the parties themselves -- as organisations -- are by some measures weaker than ever before? Adam is joined by Sam Rosenfeld Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, and, with Daniel Schlozman, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As the United States gears up to mid-term elections, which may once again shift the political trajectory of the country, the Last Best Hope? returns for a brand-new season on the 8th of October.“Adam Smith is one of the UK’s foremost historians of America, and communicates his expertise with zest, wit and unforced passion. The Last Best Hope? brings him together with fellow scholars to provide a unique insight we can’t do without.” — Phil Tinline, BBC radio documentary-maker and author“The Last Best Hope is an absolutely brilliant podcast. Thoughtful, clever, engaging and accessible, Adam Smith always gets the best out of his guests, and I’ve learned an enormous amount from every episode. I love it.” — Dominic Sandbrook, historian and co-host of The Rest is History“The must-listen US podcast” Nick Bryant, former BBC Correspondent in New York.Presented by Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of American Political History at Oxford. Each episode explores history to understand what makes America what it is.In this season Adam asks what constitutes a U.S political party, and how they differ from parties in parliamentary democracies? And he takes the long view of midterm elections, going back as far as 1874, a contest in which the Republicans lost half their House seats. Why do these midterm contests so reliably go against the President's party?And 80 years after Winston Churchill delivered his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he used the phrase special relationship, Adam explores how that phrase has distorted British perceptions of the US. And he takes a deep dive into the surprising history of the Supreme Court as a highly political body.The Last Best Hope? Is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui.For details of RAI programming, go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/eventsProducer: Emily Williams Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the bicentennial summer of 1976, the United States staged what was, by some measures, the largest single celebration in the country’s history. Tall ships in New York harbor. Fireworks over the Mall. Specially-minted bicentennial quarters. A made-for-TV reconciliation after Vietnam and Watergate, after the assassinations and the riots and the burnings of the long sixties. The country told itself, for a few weeks at least, that it was still the country it remembered being.Fifty years on, the United States is preparing to mark a quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, and it cannot even agree on who is meant to be in charge of the party. There is the official commemoration, America 250, which has been preparing for this moment since 2016, when Congress set up a statutorily bipartisan commission to do the work. And there is, as of last year, a rival: Freedom 250, a Trump White House task force set up by executive order and run by the president and his appointees, which has been quietly siphoning funds and branding from the official commission and staging its own splashier, more overtly partisan events. Meanwhile, the historic sites (Mount Vernon, Monticello, Independence Hall, Boston’s Freedom Trail) are each navigating the politics of all this in their own way, depending on their donors, their visitors, and their nerve.What does an anniversary do, exactly? Does it suspend our quarrels for a moment, or sharpen them? In a country whose civil religion has always run along the rails of the jeremiad (the sermon that calls a fallen people back to their founding promise), what kinds of jeremiads are being preached in 2026, and by whom?To discuss whether there is any chance of a consensual 250th celebration in such a polarised environment, Adam is joined by James Morone, the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He’s the author, among other books, of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. And by Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent book, A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic, came out last year. He is also editor of a new collection, The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding, published this spring.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is there anything more distinctively American than its sports culture?In a previous episode of this podcast, we discussed the tragic decline and partial revival of American cricket. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off in the US Adam asks why a sport that took over the world has been so marginal for so long in America – and wonders if that’s finally changing.In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a form of football that had begun in English public schools became a global phenomenon, played almost everywhere except in the United States.There, a strange alternative form of football was played instead, one in which men in helmets stand around for long periods, interrupted by occasional violent bursts of energy.This is a story about culture, gender politics, race, class and migration – and, as with the story of cricket’s demise -- about nationhood.Guests on this episode: Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History at Columbia. His most recent book is The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) which tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice over the last 150 years. And by Uta Balbier, Professor of US History at Oxford, a transnational historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in sport history. The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The rebels who tried to break up the United States in the 1860s thought of themselves as the rightful heirs to the spirit of 1776. The South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession took the Declaration of Independence as its template. Washington’s face appeared on Confederate banknotes and the Confederacy’s Great Seal. Many of the leaders of the Revolution of the 1860s were the literal grandsons of the men who had made the Revolution of the 1770s.In this episode, Adam explores an alternative legacy of 1776. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence launched the United States. It also licensed the greatest-ever effort to break it up. In conversation with Caroline E. Janney of the University of Virginia and Robert Hancock, Senior Curator at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Adam discusses how the Confederacy built a national identity in four short years out of the material the Founding had left lying around: the flags, the seals, the songs, the textbooks, the sermons, the fast days and the inaugurations.A century and a half later, as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Confederates remain among that document’s most committed readers.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For 250 years, the idea of America and the fact of American power have unsettled British politics. Is America of us, or apart from us? Rival or special friend? In the British political imagination, America has provoked envy, resentment, condescension, and neediness. It has also divided us, because America has so often illuminated or distorted our understanding of ourselves. Since the radical Whigs of the 1770s, one strand of the British left has looked to the United States for democratic inspiration. Another has seen America as a plutocratic, imperialist hegemon. Conservatives, meanwhile, have alternately recoiled from America in horror and embraced its go-getting freedom.In this episode of The Last Best Hope?, Adam discusses the place of the US in the British political imagination with the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. He reported from Washington early in his career and now presents the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast. The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, it was “an expression of the American mind”; to the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, it was "absurd and visionary". The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago, is so layered in myth, so foundational to the idea of America as the last best hope of earth, that it is a challenge, now, to put it into its gritty historical context -- a document that served to justify an act of rebellion, to garner support for it by listing grievances, but which also embedded, perhaps inintentionally, some powerful emancipatory claims. In this two-part episode of The Last Best Hope, Adam asks why the Declaration of Independence said what it did and why it mattered. Contributors: Professor Lige Gould (University of New Hampshire), author of Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire; Professor Steven Sarson (Jean Moulin University Lyon 3) author of The Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States; the intellectual historian, biographer of James Harrington, Professor Rachel Hammersley (Newcastle University); Dr Grace Mallon (University of Oxford), Clive Holmes Fellow in History at Lady Margaret Hall; and Bradford Skow, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT, author of American Independence in Verse.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, it was “an expression of the American mind”; to the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, it was "absurd and visionary". The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago, is so layered in myth, so foundational to the idea of America as the last best hope of earth, that it is a challenge, now, to put it into its gritty historical context -- a document that served to justify an act of rebellion, to garner support for it by listing grievances, but which also embedded, perhaps inintentionally, some powerful emancipatory claims. In this two-part episode of The Last Best Hope, Adam asks why the Declaration of Independence said what it did and why it mattered.  Contributors: Professor Lige Gould (University of New Hampshire), author of Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire; Professor Steven Sarson (Jean Moulin University Lyon 3) author of The Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States; the intellectual historian, biographer of James Harrington, Professor Rachel Hammersley (Newcastle University); Dr Grace Mallon (University of Oxford), Clive Holmes Fellow in History at Lady Margaret Hall; and Bradford Skow, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT, author of American Independence in Verse. The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For much of the twentieth century, progressives in America wanted to expand the Federal Government. They created regulation, bureaucracy, and agencies capable of managing a complex industrial society. And often state governments were the obstacles they had to flatten – that was most obviously true of the movement for racial equality: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 empowered the Federal government to step in and override the racist laws and practices that state governments implemented or failed to prevent. The working assumption of liberal politicians was that rights should be equally protected everywhere – from women’s access to abortion, to criminal justice, to the right to vote – and that idea even justified Federal government action in areas like education, which were otherwise clearly the preserve of the states.But today, things look different. The right is in control in Washington; maybe the states and state courts provide alternative pathways for liberals, in the way that they once were for conservatives? Can states not only resist federal power but also pioneer new forms of governance? Adam is joined by Emily Zackin, Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins and currently the Winant Professor of American Government at Oxford. And by Judge Daniel Korobkin, who sits on the Michigan Court of Appeals.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.