The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Aggregate Two-Party House of Representatives Vote Was 51.36% Republican, Yielding 50.57% of House Seats
The 51.36% fraction is of the voters who voted either Democrat or Republican.
This suggests that, whatever one thinks of gerrymandering and of geographic representation (as opposed to proportional representation), they didn't seem to have a particularly distortive effect on this year's race. (For the aggregate House vote totals, I'm looking at the Cook Political Report totals.)
As it happens, I don't much like gerrymandering, though I'm not sure what the optimal solution to it would be. (I'm not sure what I think on balance of geographic vs. proportional representation, if we were redesigning our political system from scratch.) I also appreciate that it's possible that, under some fair systems of district drawing, the 51.36% Republican vote would cash out into a minority in the House, while under other fair systems it would cash out into an even bigger majority. But I think these numbers should put into proportion arguments that Republican control of the House is the fault of "unfair maps."
Thanks to Richard Winger (Ballot Access News) for pointing this out. (His aggregate numbers are slightly different from the Cook Political Report's, but only slightly.)
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