There may not have been the much-anticipated red wave last week, but there was a fair-sized Republican tide in terms of the popular vote that doesn’t seem to have been reflected in the number of congressional seats the party won. Don’t hold your breath waiting for an outraged media to tell us how American democracy is fatally flawed.
There are still votes to be counted (thanks, California, technology capital of the world, which tallies ballots at the pace of an 18th-century English rotten borough) and the final number may change, but as it stands, Republicans are leading the aggregate vote in the 435 House races by about 52% to 47%.
In the 2020 election, Democratic House votes exceeded Republican ones by 3 percentage points. If this year’s numbers hold, that represents a swing in the margin of almost 8 points. For comparison, in 2018, which was generally reported as a wipeout for the Republicans and a repudiation of President Trump, the two-party swing was about 9.5 points. That time the Democrats gained 41 seats. This time the Republican gain may be held to fewer than 10.
Put another way, on the last two occasions in which Republicans received between 51% and 52% of the House vote in a midterm election, they won 242 seats in 2010, and 247 seats in 2014, for majorities of 49 and 59 seats. This year, with a similar vote share, they may end up winning 219 or 220 seats, a majority of three or five.
It’s even possible that the Democrats could hold their House majority in an election in which a majority of voters seem to have chosen Republicans. Surely principled Democrats must now start to demand changes to the way Americans pick the House as they have insisted must be done with the Electoral College and the Senate.
There are qualifications. Not all House seats are contested, and more Republicans than Democrats ran without opposition this year. That will have suppressed the total Democratic vote. But there were six districts in California where, because of the top-two “jungle primary” system, only Democrats were on the general-election ballot. That would have suppressed the GOP vote. Still, it seems likely that there was a mismatch this year between Republican gains among voters and gains in seats.
So what happened?
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