How good was it?

The President's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections.  But is it normal to lose a lot of seats, or do people just remember those cases better than those in which the president's party loses a few seats?  That is, did the Democrats have an outstanding performance this year, or just a pretty good one?  I looked at all midterm elections since the House of Representatives went to 435 members (1914 was the first).  The mean loss of seats was 31; the median was 28.  It looks like the Democrats will lose 5-10 this time, which would be the 6th or 7th best out of 28.  But we should also consider the starting point--when you come in with a lot of seats, it's hard to gain and easy to lose.  The figure plots the change against the number of seats the party had in the previous House:

"X" is the approximate location of the 2022 election.  Whether or not you consider the number of seats coming in doesn't make much difference for 2022--either way, it's a good but not exceptional performance.  But it makes a significant difference in some cases:  the big losses for the Democrats in 1966 were a normal performance and the small losses in 1978 were an unusually good one.  I'm not old enough to remember the 1966 election, but I do remember 1978 (it was the first election in which I was eligible to vote) and I had thought of it as a very bad year for the Democrats.  I think that's partly because the late 1970s were a conservative period in some respects (e. g., Proposition 13 passed in 1978), and partly because the Carter administration ended in failure, so there's a tendency to remember it as an unbroken series of failures.  Similarly, I had remembered 2006 as a bad year for the Republicans, but their losses were only a little worse than you could expect.  Like Carter, Bush ended badly, and that colors the memory of everything that happened in his presidency.  And 1934 is a much more impressive accomplishment than 2002 or 1998, although all three involved similar gains for the incumbent party.