PITTSBURGH — In April 1894, a ragged column of unemployed men attempted to come through Pittsburgh on the way to Washington. They called themselves Coxey’s Army. Led by Jacob Coxey, an Ohio businessman, the jobless workers were marching on the capital. The country was in the second year of a four-year depression, the worst in its history up to that time, and the city, still scarred by the violence and deaths of the Homestead Strike, did not allow them to enter its limits, so they marched on along the Monongahela River.

Seven months later, the country did something the marchers might not have predicted. It voted overwhelmingly for the party of the steel tariff. Democrats lost 125 House seats, still the largest swing in the chamber’s history. In Pennsylvania, they kept two of 30. In Pittsburgh, Republican John Dalzell won with more than three-quarters of the vote.

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Pittsburgh hadn’t swung. It had spent two decades becoming the model of the new industrial economy, and the rest of the country was catching up. Between 1870 and 1890, the city’s population nearly tripled as mills pulled workers off farms and immigrants off ships. Through those same years, control of the House changed six times, with some elections shifting roughly a third of its seats between parties, as a country caught between farm and factory lurched from one party to the other with every crash.

It is worth remembering this now because it is happening again.

The House changed hands in 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022. On Election Day, it may change hands again. If it does, 2026 will be the seventh straight midterm in which one chamber of Congress or the other changed parties. We are inclined to treat this as a symptom of our own era: Cable news, social media, polarization, broken politics. History suggests something else. The country has been here before, and the reasons were less about politics than about the people doing the voting.

That’s why the House is the right place to look. The framers designed it to register the public’s mood. In Federalist No. 52, James Madison wrote that this branch........

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