With the election of
Paul Ryan to Speaker of the House, we've had four speakers since we launched this blog in 2006. In fact, for the last 10 years, we've had twice as many Speakers as Presidents. Incumbent Representatives have a notoriously high reelection rate. That makes the House of Representatives the most stable partisan cornerstone among our three elected branches of government and historically the most difficult to flip. As a consequence, from a
dividist perspective, the party in majority control of the People's House pose the greatest risk to maintaining a divided government. The often polarizing figure of the Speaker of the House is the key to the majority party maintaining or losing partisan control. In anticipation of Ryan's regime, it is instructive to look back at how the Dividist Papers assessed the three prior speakers.
