They bled governerships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures under him. What exactly was taken for granted?
Yes, though honestly that almost always happens. What modern president *hasn't* bled governships, Congressional seats, and state legislatures for his party? At some point, you've got to conclude that the incumbent president's party loses ground during his presidency for structural reasons, rather than because every president who gets elected is somehow bad at politics.
Yet some lose more ground than others, and some leave their party at a much wider disadvantage. It's a rule based on a small group of presidents and that leaves a wide degree of variation unexplained.
Republicans had never held the kind of advantage that they do in state houses today until the end of Obama's presidency, and the last time when they controlled Congress so persistently was during the Great Depression, a period when national politics were so different as to be barely worth comparing to those of the present day.
Even if it is mostly a matter of geographic polarization between large urban cores and the country's economic periphery, something unique seems to be happening.IMHO, the main thing that’s different now is the geographic distribution of the Democratic vote. Compare, say, the 2000 election (after two terms of Clinton) with the 2016 election (after two terms of Obama): The GOP in 2000 won the national House popular vote by 0.5 percentage points in 2000, which was enough to retain their majority, but just barely. A small shift in votes that year would have seen the Dems retake the House. Six seats were won by Republicans by 2 points or less, and if five of those had gone the other way, you end up with House Speaker Dick Gephardt. Whereas in 2016, the GOP won the national House vote by 1.1 percentage points (a slightly better margin than in 2000, sure, but not by much). However, their structural advantage is vastly greater now, to the point where a uniform swing of as much as 10 points isn’t enough to dislodge them from the majority (swings aren’t going to be uniform, obviously, this is just a benchmark). Heck, the Dems’ 5 point House popular vote win in the 1992 election would not be enough to give them a majority of seats if you replicated that today, because of the geographic distribution of votes.
And then you’ve got the presidential level, where the Dems won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in both cases, but the mismatch was much greater in 2016 than 2000. Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by much more than Gore beat Bush, yet no Florida recount scenario could have bailed her out of her electoral college loss.
And similar issues with state legislatures. I don’t have the numbers in front of me now, but it’s obviously problematic to simply count up the number of state legislative seats in the country held by each party, as if they all count the same. Democratic votes are far more concentrated in California, the most populous state, than they’ve ever been, for example. California’s State Assembly has 55 Dems vs. 25 Republicans., while Wyoming’s House of Reps has 51 Republicans vs. 9 Dems. So on a raw count of who has more legislative seats between those two states, it’s the Republicans, yet obviously the Democrats represent many many more voters if you’re combining the vote tallies of those two states.
