November 28, 2018 09:45 AM UTC

Special Elections to Congress 1971-2018

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• by: DENependent

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Past performance is no guarantee of future value and other disclaimer like things. However, this is what we have to go on to predict the future. From the 92nd Congress in 1971 to the present the average number of special elections to the House of Representatives has been 8.46 per session or 4.23 per year. There is no real trend up or down that is obvious from eyeballing the data. Throwing out the highest and lowest number as outliers produces nearly the same result of 8.45 per session.

Excluding the 115th the average is exactly 9 per congress from 2001-present. If I were going to predict the number of special elections for the 116th congress it would be between 5 and 13 with 9 being my best guess.

The mere three special elections during the last two years of the Clinton presidency were unusual. Only the 1st congress had fewer special elections with only 2 being called. Other than the 1st and 106th there have never been fewer than 5 special elections. On the other hand the 14 in the 115th congress was not so unusual with that number or higher happening many times over the last century. Fifteen times to be precise and in both good times and bad.

92nd    1971-1972   10
93rd     1973-1974   10
94th     1975-1976   10
95th     1977-1978   6
96th     1979-1980   7
97th     1981 1982   9
98th     1983 1984   9
99th     1985 1986   5
100th   1987 1988   8
101st    1989 1990   12
102nd  1991 1992   6
103rd   1993 1994   7
104th   1995 1996   6
105th   1997 1998   9
106th   1999 2000   3
107th   2001 2002   9
108th   2003 2004   5
109th   2005 2006   6
110th   2007 2008   13
111th   2009 2010   11
112th   2011 2012   10
113th   2013 2014   11
114th   2015 2016   7
115th   2017 2018   14

Total: 203 over 24 sessions.