Following heavy Democratic losses in the 2010 congressional elections, Barack Obama announced that he was reading a biography of Ronald Reagan to see how the great man had handled his party’s whopping 1982 midterm defeat. With the country mired in a deep recession, Republicans had lost twenty-seven seats in the House of Representatives. But Reagan maintained that recovery was around the corner. By the following year, the economy had bounced back and the unemployment rate, which in 1982 averaged nearly 10 percent, had begun falling sharply. Reagan easily won reelection in 1984. Having experienced even greater losses in the…