I am extending the simple model I presented in 2012 relating the proportion of House seats won by Democrats against that party’s share of the (two-party) national popular vote for Congressional candidates. It uses dummy variables to represent each redistricting period (e.g., the 2000 Census was used to redistrict elections from 2002-2010), and a slope change that starts with the Republican House victory of 1994.
To review, the earlier model showed this pattern of partisan advantage for elections conducted since 1940:
The results for the 2010 redistricting were based solely on the 2012 election. As we’ll see in a moment, adding in 2014 and 2016 only made that result more robust.
As I argued earlier, not all of this trend results from partisan gerrymandering. Americans have sorted themselves geographically over the past half-century with Democrats representing seats from urban areas and Republicans holding seats from suburban and rural areas. As partisans self-segregate, the number of “safe” seats rises, and electoral competitiveness declines.
Partisan self-segregation also makes gerrymandering easier. Opponents can be “packed” into districts where they make up a super-majority. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi routinely wins 80 percent or more of the voters in her tiny, but densely populated San Francisco district. Many of these seats are held by minority Members of Congress because of our national policy of encouraging “majority-minority” districts. These efforts were well-motivated as a response to racist gerrymandering that would “crack” minority areas and distribute pieces of them in a number of majority-white districts. Unfortunately for the Democrats these policies have meant that too many of the party’s voters live in heavily-Democratic districts.
Here is the result of an ordinary least squares regression for the share of House seats won by the Democrats in elections since 1940:
If I plot the predicted and actual values for Democratic seats won, the model unsurprisingly follows the historical pattern quite closely:
The Democrats routinely won around sixty percent of House seats between 1940 and 1992. Since then they have only held a majority in the House twice, in 2006 and 2008. Notice, too, that both the actual and predicted values for 1994 to the present show much less variance than the earlier decades. The results above show that the “swing ratio” relating seats and votes has become much smaller falling from 1.92 before 1994 to 1.33 (=-0.59+1.92) since. A smaller swing ratio indicates that House elections have become less competitive since Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992. Changes in vote shares are still amplified in seat outcomes, as they are in all first-past-the-post electoral systems like ours, but the effect has been diminished because of the increase in the number of safe seats on both sides of the aisle.
We can use this model to estimate the share of votes required in order for the Democrats to win a majority in the House. This chart shows the predicted relationships between seats and votes for two historical periods, one through the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, and the other beginning with the Republican victory in the House election of 1994 under Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America.”
The slope in the latter period is substantially flatter than in the earlier period, meaning that Congressional elections have become somewhat less competitive since 1992. Changes in vote shares have a smaller effect on changes in seat shares than they did before 1994.
Finally, the third line represents an estimate for the relationship in 2018, using the 1994-2016 slope and only the post-2010 intercept shift. The chart shows that for the Democrats to win half the seats in 2018 they will need to garner a bit over 53 percent of the two-party popular vote for the House.
*The intercepts in these charts represent weighted averages of the adjustments for the various Census years. For instance, the 1994-2016 line includes the coefficients for the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Census weighted by the number of elections in each decade. So in this case the 1990 and 2000 adjustments would have weights of five, and the 2010 adjustment a weight of three. The 2018 line applies only the 2010 redistricting adjustment.
