voting was the norm, and winners in presidential elections often had long coattails. They almost always began their term with majorities in the House and Senate. In modern times voting machines have replaced the party-column ballot with the office-column ballot: candidates are grouped by office rather than party. Often there is no way to cast a party-line vote, and each office must be voted on separately. The proportion of voters choosing House and presidential candidates of different parties increased from 13 percent in 1952 to more than 40 percent in the elections of 1972, 1980, and 1988. Consequently, Presidential coattails have been virtually eliminated in most elections, and a number of Presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, have begun their terms with one or both chambers of Congress controlled by the opposition party. Presidents may suffer from a "reverse coattail" effect in which their party's candidates for the House or Senate get more votes than the presidents themselves. In 1976, for example, Jimmy Carter won the White House with 40,831,881 votes, but Democratic candidates for the House that year received 41,749,411 votes. In 1992, almost all Democrats elected to Congress won more votes in their congressional districts than the party's presidential candidate, Bill Clinton; that may have had to do with the presence of a strong third-party presidential candidate, Ross Perot. There is also the "negative coattail" effect in which a controversial presidential candidate may hurt candidates on the party's ticket running for lower offices. Goldwater's poor showing in the presidential election of 1964 led to the defeat of dozens of Republicans in the House of Representatives, leaving Johnson a large Democratic majority to pass his agenda. The negative coattail effect is also common in midterm elections - when a President associated with unpopular policies is not up for re-election, the electorate will often respond by punishing Congressional candidates from the President's own party. The Presidential elections of 1948 and 1952 are the most recent elections in which the same party both won the White House and took control of the House from their opponents. Since 1952, control of the House has changed hands six times, all of which were in midterm elections (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022) and all of which were at the expense of the incumbent President's party. Since the end of World War II, there have been a total