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1988 United States House of Representatives elections

House elections for the 101st U.S. Congress

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ7890195 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1988 United States House of Representatives elections was an election for the United States House of Representatives on November 8, 1988, to elect members to serve in the 101st United States Congress. They coincided with the election of George H. W. Bush as president. Although Bush won with a strong majority, his Republican Party lost a net of two seats to the Democratic Party, slightly increasing the Democratic majority in the House. It was the first time since 1960 that an incoming president's party lost seats in the House.

Overall results

409 incumbent members sought reelection, but one was defeated in a primary and six were defeated in the general election for a total of 402 incumbents winning. This was the highest number and percentage of incumbents who won reelection between 1954 and 1992.

The Republicans did not field a candidate in one-fourth of the seats in the Southern United States. This is the last congressional election in which Republicans won a House seat in Hawaii for a full term and the last time they won a seat in Vermont.

Source: Election Statistics – Office of the Clerk

Retirements

Democrats

Florida 6: Buddy MacKay retired to run for U.S. Senate.

Florida 14: Dan Mica retired to run for U.S. Senate.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1988 United States House of Representatives elections” is house elections for the 101st U.S. Congress. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through United, States and House, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1988, 1960, 1954, 1992—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, United, States and House is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “house elections for the 101st U.S. Congress” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7890195. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1960, 1954 and 1992.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “1988 United States House of Representatives elections” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.