Note: I acquired the data for this post on November 5th, 2014 at 1:00 pm. A handful of election results were still not fully updated.
In this post, I briefly describe the outcome of the House of Representatives elections. I only analyze elections where there was one Democrat on the ballot and one Republican on the ballot. In total, I analyze 355 House elections.
- Republicans won about 53.4% of the nationwide popular vote in the 355 House elections and won 59.7% of the seats.
- Republicans won 210 of the House seats. If the results were proportional to the Republican vote share, they would have only won 190 of the seats.
- In Pennsylvania, Republicans won a much higher percentage of the seat share than their vote share (73% seat share versus 53.9% vote share), even though a Democrat won the gubernatorial election. There was a similar result in North Carolina, where Republicans won 75% of the seats but only had 53.1% of the vote.
- In Maryland, Democrats won a much higher percentage of the seat share than their vote share (87.5% seat share versus 57.9% vote share).
- If the number of seats Republicans won in each state had been proportional to the vote percentage they received in each state, they would have won 19 fewer seats.
I would have analyzed the Senate elections as well, but other political scientists/bloggers have already done so. I will note, however, that many of these discussions focus on how the Senate’s partisan composition really does not reflect the partisan composition of the nation. Republicans may control the Senate, but they represent less than half of the US population in terms of partisan representation.
