Much less well remembered are the midterms where the president’s party escaped serious damage. There are, of course, the two elections where they actually gained seats — 1998, thanks to a booming economy and Republican impeachment overreach, and 2002, when the post-9/11 “rally round the flag” sentiment was still high. But many other midterms were effectively a wash.

In 1962, just weeks after the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy’s Democratic Party only lost four House seats and gained four Senate seats. In 1970, with dissent over the Vietnam War, and with Vice President Spiro Agnew denouncing “radical liberals” and a biased news media, the GOP lost 12 House seats while the Democrats lost three Senate seats — one to Conservative Party New Yorker James Buckley. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter saw Democrats lose 15 House seats and three Senate seats. Meanwhile, 1990 provided the “Seinfeld midterms” where more or less nothing happened. George H.W. Bush’s Republicans lost only seven seats in the House and one in the Senate.

What unites all of these contests is not only the relatively small change in the lineups, but also the fact that none of these elections changed control of either chamber of Congress. This is where Democrats can take little if any comfort from the midterm elections where the president’s party took only political flesh wounds.