Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
A point I haven't seen at all in this forum is the impact of gerrymandering.
Let X = (Republican votes) / (Republican votes + Democrat votes)
Let Y = % of House seats for Republicans
After an essentially tied election in 2000, Y averaged* 0.6pp higher than X during the 2000s.
After a historic Republican victory in 2010, Y averaged 3.8pp higher than X during the 2010s.
After a medium Democratic victory in 2020, Y is (based on this election so far) 1.5pp lower than X.
During the 2000s and 2010s, X was only lower than Y once: during the historic 2008 Democratic victory, which, iirc, overwhelmed gerrymandering defenses such that it made them counterproductive. As a result, Democrats were advantaged a whopping 3.5pp during that election.
tl;dr - it looks like Republicans successfully gerrymandered the 2010s and gained about 17 seats each election in the House as a result. Based on this election, it looks like gerrymandering has shifted this advantage to Democrats and will give them about 8 seats each election during the 2020s.
[ /u/zeke5123 you may be interested in this regarding republican under/over-performance relative to the popular vote ]
*I'm using the median here
It's way too early to make this computation. The national popular vote always trends Democratic in the weeks after election day, mainly because California has a lot of votes that they count slowly and they tend to be heavily Democratic, but also just more densely populated areas in general tend to count slower and tend to be more Democratic.
I'm certainly interested in these numbers, but come back in a few weeks to a month after the results are certified to do any kind of meaningful analysis on vote counts or turnout.
(I've seen a lot of talk on the left about how the Democrats would be holding the House if Florida and a couple other states hadn't been illegally gerrymandered (just passing along the Culture War vibes, I haven't looked into these claims in detail). Florida counts quickly, so it's possible there's enough data to do this analysis at the state level there.)
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Interesting, but can we ascribe this all to gerrymandering?
The capped size of the House means a rep from Rhode Island represents half as many people as one from Montana. It's not as obviously politics-aligned as the Senate, but could still have some distortion of the popular vote ratio. Likewise, the floor of one seat per state constitutes a small Republican bias due to the redness of more rural states. I think there might also be room for a shifting bias due to purple states--whichever way they fall decides how these distortions are aligned.
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It is an interesting dynamic and not really discussed.
Part of it may also reflect an incorrect census (the census screw up cost southern states some additional districts) and post census migration by red to red states like Florida.
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You can't just compare the % of votes and % of
senatorsrepresentatives and say any discrepancy is gerrymandering. Republicans are more efficiently spread to low population states which have more reps per person. The advantage isn't as significant as it is in the senate, but people in Wyoming need ~500k per representative, whereas California needs closer to 750k per rep.Democrats did indeed benefit from congressional map changes, but the change was modest and mostly came at the expense of competitive districts instead of R leaning ones.
I didn't. I compared % of votes to % of representatives in the house... not the senate
That was a typo on my part, the rest of my post stands.
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