2014 House

In an earlier thought experiment for this site, I examined the history of multiple-member and statewide at-large districts in congressional elections, and wondered whether a movement away from the near-universal use of single-member districts (SMDs) in American legislative elections might be advisable and politically feasible. Electoral systems that feature SMDs with plurality rule — like the United States and Great Britain — tend to gravitate into two-party duopolies, a situation that frustrates third-party supporters and self-identified independents. Despite being paralyzed by polarized politics, policy gridlock and low approval ratings, the furthest thing from the minds of members of Congress is a reform campaign to alter an electoral system that, by definition, has made them winners already. District magnitude is only part of the equation, however. Given pervasive gerrymandering and a shrinking number of competitive districts, any serious reform of congressional elections might also entail changes to our voting rules — that is, how votes are cast by voters and aggregated to determine winners. Voting rules reform wouldn’t automatically guarantee better candidates, more electoral competition, higher voter turnout, lower citizen apathy or a more responsive and responsible Congress. But it almost certainly couldn’t make matters worse. So what sort of voting

After the 2004 election, a map showing President George W. Bush’s (R) reelection map by county became a notable Republican souvenir and bumper sticker. Entitled “Bush Country,” the map showed a largely red map with the election results shaded by county. Of course, Bush only beat John Kerry (D) by about 2.5 percentage points, but the map made Bush’s triumph look much bigger because Republicans do well in rural counties and Democrats do well in urban ones. Even in last year’s election, Mitt Romney won more than three of every four counties against President Obama, despite losing the popular vote by about four percentage points. The rural/urban divide in American presidential politics is pronounced, and it extends to the U.S. House. Generally speaking, Republicans win the districts that are geographically large, and Democrats win the districts that are geographically small. This squares with the national political scene — as we noted right after the election last year, Obama won more than 90% of the nation’s 50 most populous counties, while Romney won more than 90% of the counties in rural Appalachia. This helps explain the Republicans’ structural advantage in the House. Yes, redistricting in many states has something to do

In winning his special election victory on Tuesday night, incoming Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) joined a dubious but sizable bipartisan House caucus: The Underachievers. Many House observers — including the Crystal Ball — have focused, understandably, on the small number of House members elected from districts won by the other party’s presidential nominee. These represent obvious targets for the other party, although there are only a handful of these districts (nine Democrats reside in seats won by Mitt Romney, and 17 Republicans occupy seats won by President Obama). So in an effort to expand their maps, strategists from both parties will also look at The Underachievers, who ran behind their party’s presidential nominee in their districts. Sanford is in the club because he won about 54% of the vote in the special election, but Mitt Romney won about 58% in the district in last November’s presidential election. Close to three of every 10 House representatives are members of The Underachievers. These 60 Democrats and 63 Republicans could be vulnerable in a primary or general election, but there are plenty of extenuating circumstances that explain their underperformance, too. Chart 1: House Democrats who ran behind President Obama in their districts Chart 2:

A former Republican governor of a deeply Republican state is running for a deeply Republican U.S. House seat, but he is best known for claiming to be walking the Appalachian Trail while he was actually visiting his mistress in Argentina, and he has a court date two days after next Tuesday’s special election because he allegedly trespassed on his ex-wife’s property. His Democratic opponent has never run for office and would be totally unknown, except that her brother is one of the nation’s most popular comedians. They aren’t called special elections for nothing. The circumstances in the race for South Carolina’s 1st District between ex-Gov. Mark Sanford (R) and Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D), sister of comedian Stephen Colbert, are so odd that the result, no matter what it is, won’t have much predictive value for next year’s midterm. What future race will look like this? But that’s just the thing with special elections: They are all unique in some way, because they are generally not waged on regular election days, they generally have poor turnout, and they come about because the previous occupant of the office either died in office or resigned, oftentimes under duress. No wonder why the Crystal

The 2014 midterm elections are a long way off but one thing is already fairly clear: Democrats face an uphill battle in trying to win back control of the House of Representatives. Thanks in part to their control of redistricting in a large number of key states, Republicans easily managed to hold on to their House majority in 2012. Despite losing the national House vote by well over a million votes, the GOP suffered a net loss of only eight seats in the House. So Republicans will go into the 2014 midterm election with 234 seats to 201 seats for the Democrats. This means that Democrats would need to pick up at least 17 seats to regain control of the House. In order to win back control of the House in 2014, Democrats would have to overcome one of the best known regularities in American politics — the tendency of the president’s party to lose House seats in midterm elections. Since World War II, that’s what has happened in 15 out of 17 midterm elections, including eight out of nine midterms under Republican presidents and seven out of eight midterms under Democratic presidents. In the nine midterms under Republican presidents,

It has been about two decades now that the two major parties switched roles in Washington. For much of the last half of the 20th century, Republicans dominated the White House while Democrats enjoyed a virtual monopoly on both chambers of Congress. But since 1994, their basic spheres of influence have changed. It is the Democrats that can be considered the “presidential party” after a pair of clear-cut victories by both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, while the Republicans can best lay claim to being the “congressional party.” Certainly the latter is the case in the House of Representatives, where the GOP has controlled the lower chamber for 14 of the last 18 years. Just as the electoral map has favored the Democrats in recent presidential elections, so has geography and a good bit of crafty cartography positioned the Republicans on the inside track in maintaining House control. Geographically, the starting point for Republicans is the South, nearly as solidly for the GOP now as it was for the Democrats in the century following the Civil War. Republicans hold 108 of the 149 House seats across the region (which by definition here includes the states of the old Confederacy plus