In the post immediately below, I expressed puzzlement at the Republican Party’s underperformance in this year’s House elections. The conventional wisdom has long been that Democrats are concentrated in urban centers, where they rack up Soviet-like majorities. Republicans, on the other hand, are spread out. They win seats by smaller margins but win more of them. That wasn’t the case in 2022: GOP candidates got more votes in toto, but the resulting minuscule majority of Congresscritters was in many ways the product of good luck, such as the New York Court of Appeals’ unanticipated rejection of a Democratic gerrymander (turning a likely five seat loss into a three seat gain), rather than good demographics.
Michael Barone, whose knowledge of the American electorate is unsurpassed, suggests that the demographics are shifting beneath the parties’ feet. He contrasts 2022 with 2012, when Republicans won 234 seats in the House while narrowly losing the overall popular vote. This year, a popular vote lead of about four percentage points yielded somewhere between 220 and 222 seats, just over the majority threshold of 218.
The most important reason for the Republicans’ reduced harvest of House seats has been a reduction in clustering. Previously, heavily Democratic voters – Blacks, Hispanics and gentry liberals – have been clustered geographically in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns, while Republican voters have been spread more evenly around the rest of the country.
The effect of clustering can be seen in the number of House districts carried by different presidents. Both Bush and Obama were reelected with 51% of the popular vote. That enabled Bush in 2004 to carry 255 of the 435 House districts. But Obama in 2012 carried only 209. Biden, with 51% in 2020, raised that number to 226. . . .
You can see the evidence [of reduced clustering] from which party won seats with supermajorities. In 2012, 71 Democrats and only 32 Republicans were elected to the House with 70% or more of the vote. Twenty-eight Democrats got 80% or more, whereas only three Republicans did.
This year, by my preliminary count, the 70-plus percent districts moved closer to parity – 58 Democrats and 39 Republicans. Only 18 Democrats and five Republicans won with 80% or more.
Why has Democratic clustering diminished? For reasons that aren’t hard to fathom. People who can are leaving the misgoverned central cities, and those who remain are less likely to see any reason to vote, when their choices are criminal-friendly Democrats or demonized Republicans.
Central city turnout was way down, as compared to the last off-year election in 2018 – down 19% in New York City but up 0.3% in the suburbs and upstate; down 13% in Philadelphia, but up 8% elsewhere in Pennsylvania; down 15% in Detroit’s Wayne County, but up 6% elsewhere in Michigan; down 12% in Milwaukee County, but up 1% elsewhere in Wisconsin; down 24% in Chicago’s Cook County, down only 8% in Chicago’s collar counties and downstate.
Where do people who leave failed cities like Chicago and Detroit go? Moving to another central city is hardly likely to be attractive. What’s the point of trading Chicago for Philadelphia? The realistic alternatives are either purplish suburbs around the big cities or red areas like Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Mr. Barone notes that blacks have been moving in large numbers to the Atlanta suburbs, a big reason why the Democratic Party is more viable in Georgia than anywhere else in the Deep South.
What the voting data suggest is unsurprising: Conservatives emigrate to areas where conservatism is already strong. Liberals have few well-governed liberal bastions to choose from, so they go to politically marginal jurisdictions, where most of them retain their voting habits and help Democrats win swing districts.
While it appears that the era during which the GOP could leverage small overall vote advantages into large House majorities is over, Mr. Barone sees a bright silver lining:
Thus, the Republicans’ 51% of the total House vote produced a disappointing number of House seats.
However, it also signaled a residual Republican strength. Republican House candidates had a hard time dislodging Democrats in marginal districts. But relatively few were weighted down by highly publicized endorsements of Donald Trump’s backward-looking insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; the few identified with that view ran significantly behind the many who didn’t.
Instead, Republican House candidates ran ahead of their party’s Senate candidates in such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. They also ran strongly in tandem with landslide winners Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio in Florida.
Republican House candidates won 58% of the popular vote in the South and 53% in the Midwest, two regions that together account for 298 of the 538 electoral votes. Duplicating that support is one way an unproblematic Republican nominee could top 270 electoral votes in 2024.
A Republican President with a closely divided Congress wouldn’t be Paradise, but there are plenty of less attractive scenarios.
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