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1994 United States House of Representatives elections

House elections for the 104th 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 revisionAug 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ1771218 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1994 United States House of Representatives elections were held on November 8, 1994, to elect U.S. Representatives to serve in the 104th United States Congress. They occurred in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term. In what was known as the Republican Revolution, a 54-seat swing in membership from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party resulted in the latter gaining a majority of seats in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952. It was also the largest seat gain for the party since 1946, and the largest for either party since 1948, and characterized a political realignment in American politics.

Democrats had run the House since 1955, and for all but four years (1947–49 and 1953–55) since 1931. In 1994, the Republican Party ran against President Clinton's proposed healthcare reform. The Republicans argued that Clinton had abandoned the centrist New Democrat platform he campaigned on during the 1992 presidential election and reverted to big government solutions. The GOP ran on Newt Gingrich's Contract with America.

The incumbent Speaker of the House, Democrat Tom Foley, lost re-election in his district, becoming the first sitting speaker to be defeated since Galusha Grow in 1863. Other major upsets included the defeat of powerful long-serving representatives such as Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski and Judiciary chairman Jack Brooks.

Editorial summary

“1994 United States House of Representatives elections” enters the record as house elections for the 104th U.S. Congress. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what United, States and House can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1994, 1952, 1946, 1948—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around United, States and House.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“1994 United States House of Representatives elections” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, United, States and House provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1771218. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1952, 1946 and 1948.

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This entry incorporates text from “1994 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.