I thought I'd post some excerpts from a NY Times article summarizing the 1982 election.  Just remember, what happened yesterday need not be permanent nor long lasting. 

Democrats scored major victories in House races yesterday and seriously damaged President Reagan's ability to push his legislative program through Congress.

Late returns indicated that the Democrats might pick up as many as 30 seats, enough to retake effective control of the House from the coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats that gave Mr. Reagan so many victories in his two years in office.

and...

In an interview last night, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas said that the Republicans ''were really taking a bath'' in the House races. Representative Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., the Speaker of the House, called the results ''a disastrous defeat for the President'' and predicted that many conservative Democrats who sided with Mr. Reagan in the last Congress would now drift back to the party leadership.

and...

''Some of them,'' he said, ''received a message from home that they shouldn't be so strident in supporting the President.'' Mr. O'Neill suggested that the lame-duck session of Congress that convenes Nov. 29 should immediately take up a $1 billion public works bill to repair the nation's bridges and put thousands of jobless workers on the public payroll. But he insisted that the issue of Social Security should be put over until the new Congress, with its strengthened Democratic membership, opens in January.

and finally...

Democratic challengers were also running well in many Southern states, where Republicans have made major gains in recent years and had talked confidently of permanently altering the region's traditional Democratic orientation.