Fox News' Shepard Smith keeps talking about a "six-year itch" -- no, nothing you need to see your doctor for -- and I was curious about his suggestion that what may or may not be happening with the Democrats today is just something that happens six years into every administration (except, apparently the Clinton administration, where voters may have just gotten itchy early).
A Nexis search turned up a Roll Call piece from Sept. 12, 2005, by Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Report, in which he attributed the "itch" to Kevin Phillips, who wrote for the Christian Science Monitor in 1984 that "U.S. voters have invariably found themselves beginning to sour on administrations after six years."
Not so invariably, argued Rothenberg, who seemed to think other factors were at work in some of those elections and that Phillips' stats don't constitute a trend. (In newspaper parlance, though, three is the magic number, trend-wise, two being either a coincidence or a trend waiting to be identified.)
The point that's getting hammered pretty hard on Fox, by Smith, at least, is that history dictates that the Democrats should win big tonight -- big being more than just winning the House by a seat or two -- and that anything less than big will be a "moral victory" for Republicans (though so far, Smith's efforts to put the words "moral victory" into a Republican's mouth appear to have been unsuccessful).