Until then, despite a dreadful economy, Ford had enjoyed approval ratings as high as seventy per cent. But the Nixon pardon was political poison, for both Ford and the G.O.P. His popularity plummeted by more than twenty points. And, in the midterms, the Democrats gained forty-nine seats in the House and four seats in the Senate. The incoming class of rookie Democrats—among them Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, John Glenn, and Patrick Leahy—became known as the “Watergate babies.”