House Democrats used heavy-handed tactics in infamous disputed election fight, party lawyer says

Former members of Congress generally emphasize their bipartisan credentials. Instead of discussing pitched battles of years past pitting Democrats against Republicans and vice versa, they’re prone to reminisce instead about legislation they sponsored, foreign travel with lawmakers from the opposition party, and other efforts to work across the aisle.

But ask any House Republican who was in office during a winter-to-spring 1985 recount fight for Indiana's 8th Congressional District, and they’re likely to get their partisan dander up. The episode remains a source of partisan rage nearly 40 years later, with Republicans contending Democrats stole a House seat rightfully won by the GOP candidate.

Now, a Democratic lawyer involved in that fight says Republicans had a right to be angry — over political optics, if not the facts of the case. Bob Bauer, a longtime, leading Democratic lawyer who was former President Barack Obama’s White House counsel and is President Joe Biden’s personal attorney, reflects on the long-ago “Bloody Eighth” political brawl, which took place halfway through former President Ronald Reagan’s eight-year White House tenure, in his new book, The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis.

As Bauer’s book title suggests, in hindsight, not every pitched Washington battle was a political hill to die on. Bauer’s nuanced, reflective look at increasing partisan tensions extends to the January-May 1985 fight over who won the southern Indiana House district in dispute — then-first-term Rep. Frank McCloskey, 45, or his Republican rival Rick McIntyre, then a 28-year-old state representative and GOP rising star.

The then-lopsided Democratic House majority eventually declared McCloskey the winner — the result, Republicans howled, of deception and outright theft. Bauer doesn’t say seating McCloskey was the wrong outcome but acknowledges House Republicans had reasons to be angry about the process and that the episode helped contribute to the nation’s deep political divisions today.

The fight is “an example of how partisan passions unleashed might overcome better judgment,” Bauer writes.

After all, back then, the Republicans and Democrats never did agree on who won the first bitterly contested fight for the Evansville-area district, across the Ohio River from northern Kentucky. The rural Indiana district had long been one of the most evenly split in the House and was dubbed the “Bloody Eighth” for its tradition of hard-fought, close contests. Voters here were divided between rural populists, and city-dwellers and academics in Bloomington, home to Indiana University. By spring 1985, the district had elected five different congressmen over the previous decade, representing both parties.

The 1984 contest, one of the closest congressional races in history, ended up in a virtual tie that came down to whether local election officials would validate a handful of ballots, out of about 233,000 cast. McIntyre was first declared the winner by Indiana’s Republican secretary of state, but Democrats cried foul, and the Democratic-controlled House refused to seat him.

For a time, both McIntyre and McCloskey drew congressional pay, but neither was officially seated. Finally, after months of ballot recounts, the House voted in May 1985, to declare McCloskey the winner, approving the recommendation of a Democratic-controlled House task force sent to Indiana to examine vote-counting procedures.

Republicans were outraged by what they claimed was the theft of the seat, and the House GOP delegation walked out of the Capitol when McCloskey was finally sworn into office. A leader in that effort was a then-backbench Republican from Georgia, Rep. Newt Gingrich, who a decade later became a national figure as the first GOP House speaker in more than 40 years.

While Democrats won the political battle for Indiana's 8th Congressional District, eventually, Republicans were victorious in the larger war. GOP lawmakers complained about that recount for years, pointing to it as a sign of House Democrats’ heavy-handed tactics to keep their long-standing majority.

By spring 1985, after all, Democrats had held the majority for 30 years, in a fraying coalition of liberals from the Northeast and other regions and southern moderates and conservatives dating back to the New Deal era in the 1930s.

House Republicans' seemingly "permanent minority" status was exemplified by their agreeable, often-smiling leader, Rep. Bob Michel of Illinois. Michael became minority leader in January 1981 and had been in the House since 1957 — including the party's low points after the 1964 and 1976 elections, when Democrats held majorities of 2-1 over Republicans, with more than 290 seats in the 435-member chamber.

Throughout Michel's time in leadership, he remained committed to legislative compromise in the practical view that, so long as his caucus had fewer votes than the Democrats, appealing to the spirit of bipartisanship was the best way for his side to lay claim to a few crumbs off the negotiating table.

“When you’re in the minority,” Michel once said, “you’ve got to make up your mind: Are you going to be a player or are you just going to be a constant carping critic?”

By the mid-1980s, though, it was clear the House Republican Conference had become dominated by younger members, such as Gingrich, who favored much more confrontational conservatism and much less Midwestern amiability.

Meanwhile, House Democrats by the 1980s, convinced that Republicans would be forever in the minority, regularly abused their majority power. Democrats denied minority legislators adequate staff, excluded them from committee deliberations, gerrymandered their districts, and even, Republicans were convinced, stole elections.

When it came to the recount in Indiana's 8th Congressional District, what ticked off Republicans was that Democrats didn’t even need the seat to keep their firm control of the House, because they had a commanding 258-177 majority. Democrats, in their view, just stole the seat because they could.

It was, in this view, a stark departure from the magnanimity that Reagan, months earlier, had shown his battered 1984 presidential rival, former Vice President Walter Mondale. Reagan won 49 out of 50 states, with Mondale claiming only the Democratic stronghold of Washington, D.C., and his home state of Minnesota. Though Mondale barely eked out a Gopher State win, emerging the victor with 49.72% over the vote to Reagan’s 49.54% — a difference of 3,761 votes out of more than 2 million cast. Reagan didn’t visit Minnesota until near the campaign’s end, and a more concerted effort there likely would have won him the state, considering his popularity nationally.

Democrats did not lose control of the House until the 1994 midterm elections, by which time Republicans had been in the minority for 40 years. McCloskey was among the Democratic House members washed out in that year's Republican Revolution, losing to a GOP first-time candidate. McCloskey was one of 34 Democratic incumbents unseated. Since then, Republicans have had the upper hand in House elections — at the end of the 118th Congress in January 2025, they’ll have held majorities for 22 of the previous 30 years.

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Which points to Bauer’s book warnings about unceasing partisan battles. Either side can end up on top eventually. Rank-and-file Republicans, Bauer writes, and not necessarily fans of former President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, reasonably “seek some recognition that over that time that American political polarization has generated intensifying conflict over the results of elections, Democrats have played their part.”

Bauer adds that these good-faith Republicans "cited the case of the Democratic House majority’s refusal in 1985 to accept a Republican victory in Indiana’s Eighth Congressional District.”