[EL] 2012 first time since 1952 when US House popular vote majority ends up as minority

[Rob Richie]

FairVote's analysis is even more telling. Because of "vote inflation" for
incumbents, the party with more incumbents is going to get an inflation in
votes. If you look at races without incumbents the advantage for Democrats
over what they likely would have gotten in a 50-50 national election
averages a little over 2%. We suspect the underlying preference between the
parties in House races closely tracked the presidential race, with Obama
likely to end up winning by 3.0% or more once all the votes are counted.

House races are a distinctly uneven playing field, as we laid out the
report we published earlier this year, Monopoly Politics 2012 (one in which
we projected winners in 333 seats, with all of them winning -- the report
is accessible through our nifty map at FairVotingUs.cOM. If Obama and
Romney had tied in the popular vote, for example, Romney likely would have
carried about 50 more congressional districts.

This bias is only partially due to the GOP having more power of
redistricting maps, and much more due to the Democratic vote being
naturally more concentrated -- and  now few of its "blue dogs" being able
to win in conservative districts any more. (As an indicator of that
challenge, not a single US House Democrat won in a white-majority district
in the adjoining states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri,
Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.)

Bottom line: Democrats likely would have not have secured even a slim
majority in the House this year without being preferred by more than 54% of
voters. The same math is likely in play for 2014. We'll be posting on our
blog how we determine this shortly and where that 54%-plus number comes
from.

I should emphasize that we write this as nonpartisan backers of a level
playing field!
Rob

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Richard Winger <richardwinger at yahoo.com>wrote:

>
> http://www.ballot-access.org/2012/11/12/only-four-u-s-house-elections-in-the-last-hundred-years-gave-one-party-a-house-majority-even-though-the-other-major-party-polled-more-votes-for-u-s-house/
>
> Richard Winger
> 415-922-9779
> PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
> _______________________________________________
> Law-election mailing list
> Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
> http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
>



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