I’ve seen in a couple of places a contention that returning Republicans to control of the U.S. House was an endorsement of their policy goals. Like the mandate talk for Barack Obama, I view that claim as dubious to start with. The voting booth just isn’t a very good tool for a voter to communicate much of anything other than possibly, “this is the candidate I hate least.”
But the claim of mandate or endorsement for the House of Representatives becomes even less defensible now that we learned that House Republicans, despite winning a majority of the seats (234 – 201), received a minority of the vote.
Democrats got 54,301,095 votes while Republicans got 53,822,442. That’s a close election — 48.8%-48.5% –but it’s still a popular vote win for the Democrats.
Mark Small noted that, in Indiana, Republicans constitute 7/9 (78%) of Indiana’s Congressional delegation on the strength of 53.1% of the vote.
Redistricting is a powerful tool. I am not claiming that Republican control of the House is illegitimate in some fashion. They won that control under the current rules of the game. But, to claim it’s a mandate from the people to hold the line on taxes for the wealthy, is – as it turns out – slightly sillier than your garden variety mandate talk.
I’ve written 2 (of an anticipated 3) posts on this subject: http://blog.wallack.us/2012/11/does-legislative-representation.html & http://blog.wallack.us/2012/11/does-legislative-representation_13.html.
Ironic, that the people’s house could be so unrepresentative of the people
The fact is we don’t know the methodology to reach a conclusion about the numbers. Incumbents running for re-election sometimes don’t have any opponent. There may have been more Democratic incumbents without opponents than Republican. Or they could have had a token third party in a lot of races In those races where a candidate is unopposed, that person is likely going to get 100% of the vote. In the latter case, the incumbent might get 97% of the vote.
Those unopposed races could well skew the numbers in one direction or the other when you look at total vote. So absent information on how many uncontested races there are and who benefited, it’s hard to make a judgment on the numbers.
The average voter is probably not overly ideological, supporting candidates for a number of poorly understood reasons, including voting for “the least hated choice”. A smart politician correctly reads the voting public, but our winners are inclined to see victory as their mandate to overreach. When Tony Bennett won the education supt. vote, I doubt that voters hoped he (and the legislature) was going to sponsor vouchers and the gutting of the public schools, among other behaviors discussed on this site. That sort of behavior tends to end badly, and the sooner the better.
It will not be diffcult to develop data based upon the number of unopposed candidates from each party and other relevant variables and give a better picture of the respective percentages of the vote. I googled it but did not find anything relevant. But it will be assembled.
I opposed candidates skew the results. But so too do districts with overwhelming majorities for one side or the other. The results are emblematic of numerous problems in our electoral system.