According to party lawyers, Democrats in the House of Representatives used tough tactics in the notorious, controversial election campaign

Former members of Congress generally emphasize their bipartisan achievements. Rather than talk about the bitter disputes of recent years between Democrats and Republicans and vice versa, they prefer to reminisce about legislation they sponsored, trips abroad with members of the opposition party, and other efforts to work together across party lines.

But ask any Republican in the House of Representatives who served during the battle over the recount in Indiana's 8th District from the winter to the spring of 1985. Congressional district, and they will likely be angry along partisan lines. The incident remains a source of partisan anger nearly 40 years later, with Republicans claiming that Democrats stole a House seat that the Republican candidate deserved.

Now a Democratic lawyer involved in that fight says Republicans had a right to be angry — if not because of the facts of the case, then because of the political optics. Bob Bauer, a longtime leading Democratic lawyer who was White House counsel to former President Barack Obama and is President Joe Biden's personal attorney, reflects in his new book on the long-ago political brawl of the “Bloody Eighth,” which took place in the middle of former President Ronald Reagan's eight-year tenure in the White House. The solution: Reflections on politics without ethics and democracy in the crisis.

“The Bloody Eighth”

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

The then-lopsided Democratic majority in the House eventually declared McCloskey the winner – the result of deception and outright theft, Republicans fumed. Bauer does not say that McCloskey's nomination was the wrong result, but he acknowledges that House Republicans had reason to be angry about the process and that the incident contributed to the deep political divisions that exist in the country today.

The fight is “an example of how unleashed party-political passions can gain the upper hand over sound judgment,” writes Bauer.

After all, Republicans and Democrats never agreed on who would win the first, bitterly contested election for the Evansville district, which lies across the Ohio River from northern Kentucky. The rural Indiana district had long been one of the most evenly divided in the House of Representatives, and was nicknamed the “Bloody Eighth” because of its tradition of hard-fought, close elections. The electorate here was split between rural populists and urban residents and academics in Bloomington, home of Indiana University. By the spring of 1985, the district had elected five different congressmen representing both parties over the previous decade.

The 1984 election, one of the closest congressional elections in history, ended in a virtual tie, with the deciding factor being whether local election officials would validate a handful of the roughly 233,000 votes cast. McIntyre was initially declared the winner by Indiana's Republican Secretary of State, but Democrats cried foul and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives denied him certification.

For a time, both McIntyre and McCloskey received congressional salaries, but neither was officially seated. After months of vote recounts, the House of Representatives finally declared McCloskey the winner in May 1985, following the recommendation of a Democratic-controlled House task force that had been sent to Indiana to investigate vote-counting procedures.

Republicans were outraged by the alleged seat-stealing, and the Republican delegation walked out of the Capitol when McCloskey was finally sworn in. A leader of that effort was then-Georgia Republican backbencher Newt Gingrich, who became a national figure a decade later as the first Republican Speaker of the House in over 40 years.

Political tyranny of a decades-long democratic majority?

While Democrats won the political battle for Indiana's 8th congressional district, Republicans ultimately won the larger war. Republican lawmakers complained about the recount for years, pointing out that Democrats in the House were using harsh means to retain their long-held majority.

By the spring of 1985, the Democrats had held the majority for 30 years, in a crumbling coalition of liberals from the Northeast and elsewhere and moderates and conservatives from the South, whose roots went back to the New Deal era of the 1930s.

The Republicans' seemingly “permanent minority status” in the House was exemplified by their affable, often smiling leader, Representative Bob Michel of Illinois. Michael became minority leader in January 1981 and had served in the House since 1957 – including the party's low points after the 1964 and 1976 elections, when Democrats had a 2-1 majority over Republicans and controlled more than 290 seats in the 435-member chamber.

Throughout his term, Michel remained committed to legislative compromise, believing that as long as his group had fewer votes than the Democrats, appealing to the spirit of bipartisanship was the best way for his side to secure a few crumbs from the negotiating table.

“When you are part of the minority,” Michel once said, “you have to decide: do you want to be a player or just a constantly nagging critic?”

By the mid-1980s, however, it was clear that the House Republican Conference was increasingly dominated by younger members like Gingrich, who favored a much more confrontational conservatism and much less of the friendliness typical of the Midwest.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives during the 1980s, Democrats routinely abused their majority power because they were convinced that Republicans would remain in the minority forever. They denied minority members adequate staff, excluded them from committee deliberations, gerrymandered their districts, and even, Republicans believed, rigged elections.

In the recount in Indiana's 8th Congressional District, Republicans were upset that Democrats didn't even need the seat to maintain their firm control of the House, as they had a convincing majority of 258 votes to 177. In their view, Democrats had simply stolen the seat because they could.

In this view, it was a stark contrast to the generosity that Reagan had shown months earlier to his beleaguered rival in the 1984 presidential election, former Vice President Walter Mondale. Reagan won 49 of 50 states, while Mondale could only claim the Democratic stronghold of Washington, D.C., and his home state of Minnesota. Mondale narrowly eked out a victory in the Gopher State, however, winning with 49.72% of the vote to Reagan's 49.54%—a difference of 3,761 votes out of more than 2 million cast. Reagan did not visit Minnesota until shortly before the campaign ended, and given his nationwide popularity, a stronger effort there would likely have won him the state.

Democrats did not lose control of the House until the 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans had already been in the minority for 40 years. McCloskey was one of the Democratic representatives who left in the Republican Revolution that year, losing to a Republican first-time candidate. McCloskey was one of 34 Democratic incumbents to lose their seats. Since then, Republicans have dominated House elections—by the end of the 118th Congress in January 2025, they will have held the majority in 22 of the last 30 years.

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This points to Bauer's book's warnings about incessant partisan fighting. In the end, either side can gain the upper hand. Rank-and-file Republicans, Bauer writes, and not necessarily fans of former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, “reasonably demand credit for the fact that Democrats have done their part at a time when America's political polarization has led to increasingly intense conflict over election results.”

Bauer adds that these gullible Republicans “pointed to the refusal of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in 1985 to recognize a Republican victory in Indiana's Eighth Congressional District.”