Election to the United States House of Representatives in 1938

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On November 8, 1938, the House of Representatives in the United States was elected. In the state of Maine , the elections took place on September 12th. The election was part of the general election to the 76th United States Congress that year, which also elected a third of US Senators . Since the elections took place around the middle of the second term of office of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt ( midterm election ), they were also considered a vote on the previous policy of the president.

At the time of the election, the United States consisted of 48 states. The number of MPs to be elected was 435. The distribution of seats was based on the 1930 census .

In the election, the Democrats lost seats for the first time since 1928. They had to give up 72 seats and could only put 262 congressmen. But that was still enough for an absolute majority. On the other hand, the Republicans gained 81 seats and now had 169 seats. The Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota and the Progressive Party of Minnesota also lost seats and only came up with one or two seats. The reason for the reversal in favor of the Republicans was for a slight economic crisis in 1937. Some voters the memory returned to the world economic crisis at the beginning of the decade back and it created doubts about the previously vaunted New Deal policies of the federal government. On the other hand, there was also resistance to an increasingly strong federal government under President Roosevelt. The government had exceeded the constitutional limits in some cases under the New Deal policy. In these cases, the Supreme Federal Court of Justice rejected the planned bills. President Roosevelt also introduced the so-called Court-Packing Plan, a judicial reform that aimed to increase the number of federal judges and thus indirectly resulted in the president influencing the courts, since the judges are appointed by the president. The plan was rejected by the Senate on July 22, 1937, but had a negative effect on the Democratic Party in the 1938 elections.

In the southern states in particular, the right to vote was restricted by laws that linked the right to vote to a certain tax revenue. As a result, poor whites, but above all many African-Americans, were excluded from the right to vote. These restrictions lasted until the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed in 1964.

Election result

Total: 435 (435)

The results of the last election two years earlier are in brackets. Changes during the legislative period that do not affect the elections as such are not included in these figures, but are noted in the article on the 76th Congress in the section on the members of the House of Representatives under the relevant names of the representatives. The same applies to elections in states that joined the Union after the beginning of the legislative period. As a result, the sources sometimes contain different information, as changes during the legislative period were sometimes incorporated into the figures and sometimes not.

See also

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