page_title: John Dingell
section_title: Elections
hierarchical_section_title: John Dingell / U.S. House of Representatives / Elections
context_page_description: John David Dingell Jr. was an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1955 until 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he holds the record for longest-ever serving member of Congress in American history, representing Michigan for more than 59 years. He most recently served as the representative for Michigan's 12th congressional district. A longtime member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Dingell was the chairman of the committee from 1981 to 1995 and 2007 to 2009.
  Dingell began his congressional career by succeeding his father, John Dingell Sr., as representative for Michigan's 16th congressional district on December 13, 1955; his father had held the seat for 22 years. He left office on January 3, 2015. Having served for over 59 years, he has the longest congressional tenure in U.S. history. Together with Jamie Whitten and Joseph Gurney Cannon, he served in the House under more presidents than anyone else: 11. He was also the longest-serving Dean of the U.S. House of Representatives and Dean of the Michigan congressional delegation.
context_section_description: In 1955, John Sr. died and John Jr. won a special election to succeed him. He won a full term in 1956 and was reelected 29 times, including runs in 1988 and 2006 with no Republican opponent. Dingell received less than 62% of the vote on only two occasions. In 1994 when the Republican Revolution swept the Republicans into the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954, Dingell received 59% of the vote. In 2010 when the Republicans re-took control of the House of Representatives, Dingell received 57% of the vote. Between them, he and his father represented the southeastern Michigan area for 80 years. His district was numbered as the 15th District from 1955 to 1965, when redistricting merged it into the Dearborn-based 16th District; in the primary that year, he defeated 16th District incumbent John Lesinski Jr.
  In 2002, redistricting merged Dingell's 16th District with the Washtenaw County and western Wayne County-based 13th District, represented by fellow Democratic Representative Lynn Rivers, whom Dingell also bested in the Democratic primary. The 15th District for the 109th Congress included Wayne County suburbs generally southwest of Detroit, the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti areas in Washtenaw County, and all of Monroe County. For many years, Dingell represented much of western Detroit itself, though Detroit's declining population and the growth of its suburbs has pushed all of Detroit into the districts of fellow Democratic representatives, including John Conyers. Dingell always won re-election by double-digit margins, although the increasing conservatism of the white suburbs of Detroit since the 1970s led to several serious Republican challenges in the 1990s. With the retirement of Jamie L. Whitten, the death of William Natcher, and the defeat of Texas Representative Jack Brooks at the start of a new Congress in January 1995, he became the Dean of the United States House of Representatives. (Fellow Representative Sidney Yates had entered the House earlier and, at that time, had served almost five years longer than Dingell, but Yates's service had been interrupted when he ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 1962.) He was one of four people to serve in the House for 50 years, the others being Whitten, Carl Vinson, and Conyers, the last of whom had worked in Dingell's congressional office.
caption: Dingell sworn in by Speaker Sam Rayburn in 1955
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "150", "Image YResolution": "150", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2005:09:16 15:16:15", "Image ExifOffset": "156", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5535", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1017", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "838"}