Republicans have a majority in the House because they won a majority of the vote.
Republicans have a majority in the House because they won a majority of the vote.
T he 119th Congress is sworn into office today. It will be the 38th such Congress to feature a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and the twelfth Republican House of the last 16. But before that, Democrats held a 40-year hammerlock on the House between 1954 and 1994, culminating an era in which they held the House for 60 out of 64 years since 1930. Democrats have never really gotten over the end of that era, in which they considered a House majority their birthright. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, James Clyburn, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin all entered the House before 1994.
For Democrats, if Republican majorities seem unnatural, they must be unfair. A hardy perennial of progressive critics of the American system since 2010 is to claim that gerrymandering is a pernicious scheme practiced by Republicans to give the party an unfair advantage in the House that its popular support does not deserve. The theory is willfully amnesiac about how Democrats benefited from gerrymandering all those years. And it hasn’t stopped even as the argument has grown increasingly disconnected from current electoral reality.
No holiday season would be complete without the annual post-election tantrum from Democrats and the press about how rigged and unfair the American system is. So, North Carolina Democrat Wiley Nickel has been retailing the claim that Republicans have a congressional majority because they “threw fairness out the window.” His column in the Charlotte Observer was headlined, “Republicans stole fairness from the nation in giving GOP a House majority.” Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe echoed Nickel’s claims: “The gerrymandered election maps did more than silence voters in North Carolina. They reshaped the balance of power in Washington, D.C., costing Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives. . . . It’s clear that gerrymandering in North Carolina tipped the scales in [Republicans’] favor, and cost Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives.” Joe Scarborough added, “A rigged gerrymandered map in North Carolina was the difference between Democrats controlling the House of Representatives for the next two years and Republicans.”
Let’s pollute this particular tantrum with some data, shall we?
A Skewed Map
Before we even get to the 2024 election or how the maps were drawn and redrawn following the 2020 Census, we should acknowledge that the apportionment of House districts by state after that census was itself skewed in ways that disadvantage the GOP. The 2020 Census, if properly counted, would likely have given one fewer seat apiece to Minnesota and New York, and one more apiece to Texas and Florida. On balance, that likely would have yielded one or two more Republican seats. There are substantial legal obstacles to a Census redo or revision, and much of the error in the 2020 Census (the part not attributed to the Covid pandemic) can be laid at the feet of red state Republican governors and the Trump administration. So, I’m not crying partisan unfairness here. But we should recall that perfect justice in district line-drawing would demand something more favorable to Republicans than the lines we currently have.
A National Majority
When looking at the election returns, start at the big picture level. Republicans won a popular majority of the votes cast for the House, 50.3 percent to the Democrats’ 47.5 percent. Counting just the two party vote, Republicans won 51.4 percent. It was the highest popular vote showing for House Republicans in a presidential election year since 1928. It is not always the case that the party that gets the most votes nationally also gets the most seats, although it is a curious thing to complain that the will of the people has been somehow thwarted by the system when that happens. But so far back as we have popular vote records, you know how many times a party has won a national majority of the votes for the House and not won a majority of the seats? Never. Not once in American history.
It’s hardly unusual that this vote performance delivered Republicans a House majority. It would be extraordinary if it hadn’t. It is extraordinary, in fact, that it yielded only a five-seat majority — 50.6 percent of the seats. In 2020, for example, Democrats won 50.8 percent of the vote and 51.6 percent of the two-party vote, and this gave them a 222–213 majority, 51 percent of the seats. In 1992, Democrats won 50.1 percent of the vote and 52.6 percent of the two party vote, and this gave them a 258–176 majority, 59.5 percent of the seats. In 1980, Democrats won 50.5 percent of the vote and 51.4 percent of the two-party vote — almost identical to the Republican performance this year — and this gave them a 242–191 majority, 55.9 percent of the seats.
Problems of Measurement
Of course, this year as every year, there are complexities in drawing conclusions from the aggregate votes of multiple House districts. The main complexity is that around one in ten districts didn’t hold a normal two-party election. There were 41 such districts out of 435:
- Two districts where no votes were cast, due to the election being entirely uncontested. One (OK-3) elected an unopposed Republican, while the other (FL-20) elected an unopposed Democrat.
- Eighteen other districts where a Republican ran without a Democratic opponent. In twelve of the 18, the Republican got 95 to 100 percent of the vote. In one (LA-4, Mike Johnson’s district), there was a Republican opponent in a jungle primary, who got 14 percent of the vote. In another (CA-20), the spring jungle primary sent two Republicans to oppose each other in the fall. A few others had Libertarian or Constitution Party candidates who drew voters determined to oppose the incumbent. The most contested of these was NV-2, where Democrats effectively backed the independent candidate, and he got 36 percent of the vote. The others on this list: AL-3, AL-4, AL-5, IL-15, IL-16, KY-4, KY-5, MS-3, NC-3, NC-6, TX-1, TX-11, TX-13, TX-19, and TX-25.
- Fifteen other districts where a Democrat ran without a Republican opponent. Five of these involved two-Democrat general elections produced by the jungle primary system: CA-12, CA-16, CA-34, CA-37, and WA-9. Two (MA-1 and MA-2) drew significant third-party candidates. The rest of the list was likewise dominated by Massachusetts: MA-3, MA-4, MA-5, MA-6, MA-7, PA-3, TX-20, and TX-30. Republicans, who contested most of the districts nationwide, fielded only two candidates in the nine districts in Massachusetts.
- Five districts, all in Louisiana, had jungle primaries on Election Day where one party’s candidate won a majority or more of the vote, but did not win all of the candidate’s party’s vote. Republicans won three of these races (LA-1, LA-3, and LA-5), and Democrats won two (LA-2 and LA-6).
- Alaska’s at-large district uses ranked-choice voting. Unlike Maine’s two districts, which do as well, it produced no majority first-choice winner, and so had to go to additional levels of rankings before Republican Nick Begich was declared the victor.
On a national level, this is all something of a wash. If you remove all 41 districts from the national totals, Republicans’ share of the national popular vote grows to 50.4 percent, although the GOP share of the two-party vote declines a bit to 51.0 percent. If you remove only the 35 uncontested districts, Republicans again got 50.4 percent of the vote in the remaining districts, and 51.1 percent of the two-party vote — while winning 50.3 percent of the contested seats. Either way, Republicans got fewer seats than you would project just from a pure proportional share of the vote.
Racial Gerrymanders
Before we can consider the effect of partisan gerrymandering, we need to consider racial gerrymandering — which should not exist in the America of 2025, and which cost Republicans some seats. For example, Democrats gained a seat in Alabama when the Supreme Court required a race-based district be drawn up that could be won by a black candidate; sure enough, while Republicans hotly contested Alabama’s second district, Democrat Shomari Figures carried the district by nine points.
Following the Alabama decision, the lower courts created an additional racially gerrymandered district in Louisiana — the new sixth district is a thin ribbon cutting clear across the state from Shreveport to Baton Rouge — and the Supreme Court allowed that map to be used in the 2024 election (the Court has since taken up the case). As in Alabama, the district exists for the sole purpose of discriminating among voters on the basis of race. As in Alabama, the district was won by a Democrat in 2024, Cleo Fields, who carried it by 13 points. The two districts shaved two seats off the narrow margin of Johnson’s caucus.
New York, New York
Another state where the map changed to the disadvantage of Republicans between 2022 and 2024 was in New York. Republicans won eleven of the state’s 26 House seats in 2022; the state alone provided the margin of Republican control of the House. Republicans thus collected 42.3 percent of New York’s House seats with 43.8 percent of the statewide House popular vote — slightly less than their proportionate share. But they accomplished this because the state’s highest court threw out a Democratic gerrymander. Republicans won a lot of close races in 2022, and when further litigation allowed for a more Democrat-friendly map, that (plus George Santos being expelled and Democrats winning the special election for his seat) netted Democrats a four-seat pickup in New York in 2024.
Nassau County on Long Island is populous enough for its own district: Nearly 700,000 votes were cast there in House races in 2024. Republicans won 50.4 percent of the House vote in Nassau, and 56 percent in neighboring Suffolk, the other half of Long Island. But the new lines were drawn so that the two Suffolk-based districts, NY-1 and NY-2, went 57.2 percent Republican, while Democrats won both of the Nassau-based districts by a combined 51.4 percent to 48.4 percent. They did that by incorporating enough voters from blue areas of Queens into each district (Santos’s former third district and Anthony D’Esposito’s fourth) to tip the scales. Upstate, Marc Molinaro fell off from 50.8 percent of the vote in 2022 to 48.9 percent, and Brandon Williams fell off from 50.5 percent to 45.4 percent in 2024 — in each case, in a district substantially redrawn to make their reelections harder.
Republicans lost ten House seats in 2024 relative to 2022: Besides the two racial gerrymanders and the four in New York, there were three in California and one in Oregon (the loser of which, Lori Chávez-DeRemer, has been nominated by Donald Trump to be secretary of labor). They made up ground by gaining three seats in North Carolina, two in Pennsylvania, one each in Michigan and Colorado, and the at-large seat for Alaska (which they lost in 2022 because of the state’s ranked-choice voting system). The essential complaint of Democrats is that they should have been able to keep all of their own advantageous maps plus the map imposed by the Democrat majority on the North Carolina supreme court, which was reversed after Republicans gained control of that court in 2022. Under that map, in 2022, Democrats won half of the state’s House seats with 47.3 percent of the statewide popular vote.
First Past the Post
Of course, we do not live in a system of pure proportional representation. Each district holds its own election, and a win by the tiniest margin gets you 100 percent of that district. It’s theoretically possible that if a state’s districts were all equally politically balanced, a party winning 51 percent statewide could win exactly that in each district and win all of its seats — fair and square. The one state where this sort of thing happens fairly regularly is New Hampshire: In 2024, Democrats won 53.5 percent of the vote statewide, winning the first district with 54 percent and the second with 52.9 percent.
That’s much rarer in states with more than two districts, but there were five other states with multiple districts where one party won all the seats with less than 60 percent of the statewide House vote in 2024: Democrats won all five Connecticut districts with 58.9 percent statewide, both Maine districts with 58.7 percent, and all three New Mexico districts with 55.1 percent, while Republicans won both Montana districts with 58.6 percent and all four Iowa districts with 56.2 percent. Add those states up, and that’s twelve Democratic seats and six for Republicans.
If we divide the election results by the delegations they produced, we see that the states with Republican-majority delegations did, in fact, deliver more Republican House seats than you’d project purely from the party’s share of the two party vote. Republicans won 36 more House seats in those states (rounding off to whole numbers) than their share of that vote, and trailed their share of the two-party vote only in Alabama, and there only fractionally:
Before assessing those 36 “extra” seats, however, consider that the smaller number of states with Democratic or (in Colorado and Minnesota) evenly divided House delegations, Democrats won 39 “extra” seats:
Only in two states (Florida and Texas) did Republicans pick up more than two seats above their share of the popular vote, and Florida’s popular vote is (as noted above) skewed by the fact that one of its districts reelected an unopposed Democratic representative (Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick) without bothering to count votes. By contrast, California alone delivered twelve more seats to Democrats than their share of the statewide popular vote: Democrats won 58.4 percent of the vote but 82.7 percent of the seats.
A good deal of that is all the multiplier effect that happens as a party gets further above 50 percent of the vote. But notice that more of the “extra” Republican seats were in states with really lopsided (over 60 percent) popular votes for one side. In states where one side won 55 to 60 percent, Democrats gained 20 extra seats; Republicans gained 18. In states where one side won less than 55 percent, Democrats gained 14 extra seats, Republicans gained eight.
I’ll get further into the weeds in a later installment. But from the overall picture of the House popular vote, this doesn’t look like a House Republican caucus that has more seats than the party earned at the ballot box.