Thanks To Gerrymandering, Democrats Would Need To Win The Popular Vote By Over 7% To Take BacK House

[octoberlib]

As of this writing, every single state except Hawai’i has finalized its vote totals for the 2012 House elections, and Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1,362,351 votes in the overall popular vote total. Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only 48.03 percent — meaning that the American people preferred a unified Democratic Congress over the divided Congress it actually got by more than a full percentage point. Nevertheless, thanks largely to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have a solid House majority in the incoming 113th Congress.


A deeper dive into the vote totals reveals just how firmly gerrymandering entrenched Republican control of the House. If all House members are ranked in order from the Republican members who won by the widest margin down to the Democratic members who won by the widest margins, the 218th member on this list is Congressman-elect Robert Pittenger (R-NC). Thus, Pittenger was the “turning point” member of the incoming House. If every Republican who performed as well or worse than Pittenger had lost their race, Democrats would hold a one vote majority in the incoming House.
Pittenger won his race by more than six percentage points — 51.78 percent to 45.65 percent.
The upshot of this is that if Democrats across the country had performed six percentage points better than they actually did last November, they still would have barely missed capturing a majority in the House of Representatives. In order to take control of the House, Democrats would have needed to win the 2012 election by 7.25 percentage points. That’s significantly more than the Republican margin of victory in the 2010 GOP wave election (6.6 percent), and only slightly less than the margin of victory in the 2006 Democratic wave election (7.9 percent). If Democrats had won in 2012 by the same commanding 7.9 percent margin they achieved in 2006, they would still only have a bare 220-215 seat majority in the incoming House, assuming that these additional votes were distributed evenly throughout the country. That’s how powerful the GOP’s gerrymandered maps are; Democrats can win a Congressional election by nearly 8 points and still barely capture the House.

Partisan gerrymanders, like the one that now all but locks the GOP majority in place, have been the subject of repeated court challenges. America can thank the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court for allowing these gerrymanders to continue

.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/01/02/1382471/thanks-to-gerrymandering-democrats-would-need-to-win-the-popular-vote-by-over-7-percent-to-take-back-the-house/

[graham4anything]

1. Major financing needed to turn current repub into at very least mod. repub

instead of needing to beat them, finance an opponent for each position needed and spend mega money on that

money good if you get good politician out of it

same way Mike Bloomberg is financing any candidate, hopefully democrats, who go against the NRA and are anti-gun in the street.
Any and all amounts of money are welcome, the house can be bought with enough ads for repetition
and as the other side already plays this game

a winner does what a loser won't, so let's do it
winning is the only thing that matters, matters little how one gets there

if they play in the mud, bring alot of towels because it will get dirty.

you gotta be in the house to win the house

Or do like Lincoln, find a point where you can get them to vote your way.
With that bridge they want to build in Kansas or Wyoming

politics make strange bedfellows...let's all sleep together and win

[newfie11]

2. Something wrong with a party that has to cheat and lie to win. Nt

And they are so religious

[ReRe]

3. Well, thanks to the behavior of the GOP in the 112th Congress....

...and possibly the 113th, just maybe it will be easy for the Democrats to rise above that 8% mark in 2014 and overcome the gerrymandering problem. Oh yeah, plus more anti-American decisions by the majority GOP Supreme Court. And oh yeah, the continued changing demographics problem they are facing isn't working in their favor either. And is there any doubt how the teabagger NRA-controlled 113th Congress will handle the assault weapon & high capacity ammunition issue? Just let them vote down that legislation while more mass killings occur. The American People will NOT be in a good mood come 2014.

[Laelth]

4. Interesting. k&r n/t

-Laelth

[PoliticalBiker]

5. Gerrymandering

Needs to be illegal. It is NOT democracy. It's cheating, lying, stacking the deck.
If you can't win with who you are and your message, you don't deserve to be in there.
Resorting to convoluted district lines in order to get a seat in office is dishonest, immoral and unAmerican.
I know both parties do it to some extent, but not like the republicons.
Districts should be assigned by county regardless of likely voter turnout.
Republicons need to stop being afraid of democracy. Stop being cowards.

[bornskeptic]

6. The gerrymandering is atrocious, but 7% is an exaggeration.

The article bases its claim that more than a 7% margin is needed for Democrats to win on the 218th race on their list, which the Republican won 51.78% to 45.65%, a margin of 6.13%. The claim is that the Democrat would have to improve by more than 6% to win, but actually an improvement of 4.36% would be enough, as it would put the Democrat over 50%. Using the article's reasoning, that would put the margin Democrats needed nationwide for a majority at about5.7%. Of course, voters are not going to switch uniformly across the country, so no number obtained this way is going to have much precision, but I think 5.7% is more reasonable than the article's 7.25%.
It makes a big difference where the added votes come from. The Democrats would need to add far fewer voters if those added were voters switching from the Republican candidates. In the highlighted race, the Democrat would only need to take 3.07% from the Republican to attain a plurality, which would extrapolate to about a 4.4% margin needed by Democrats nationwide for a majority.. On the other hand, if all the added votes came from previous nonvoters, the 7.25% estimate would be the closest. In reality, if the Democrats were to put together enough votes for a majority, the additions would include voters from both categories, and also some voters switching from third parties, so 4.4% is too low and 7.25% is too high. 5.7% looks like it's about right.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. No, their figures are correct

When they say "win the popular vote by over 7%", that means "win over 7% more than the Republicans".

If 3.1% of the Republican vote in that district went to the Democrat instead, it would be R 48.68%, D 48.75% - just enough for a Dem win. If the national figures changed the same amount, the Democratic 49.15% becomes 52.25%, and the Republican 48.03% becomes 44.93%. So the margin would be 7.28%.

You seem to think the article claims the Dem vote has to go up by 6%. It never says that. Its terminology is correct. They use "win by" and "margin" correctly.

[former9thward]

7. The OP ignores the biggest problem.

The Voting Rights Act requires minorities to be put in 'super-majority' districts (normally 70% or more) in order to ensure minority representation. This means that Democrats are crammed into urban based districts in high numbers leaving Republicans to be spread around more evenly. As an example: Say you have 3000 voters and want to make 3 districts of 1000 each. One district might be 700 Ds and 300 Rs. The other two might be 550 Rs and 450 Ds. So you have a total of 1600 Ds and 1400 Rs but you wind up with only 1 D district and 2 R districts. This is just a simple example but that is how it works out in states with large urban areas.

[grantcart]

9. AZ and CA both had independent commissions for state redistricting, and Dems picked up seats

in both states.

AZ, that really right wing red state now has 6 Democratic Congressman and 5 Republicans.

[budkin]

10. 2010 really screwed us

Gonna be a long time before we have the house back.

[BlueDemKev]

11. We can thank all the liberals who stayed home in 2010

They thought they'd "teach Obama a lesson." All they did was shoot themselves in the foot.