So is the 1.35 million number just the absolute difference between all votes cast nationally? Doesn't there have to be so e adjustment for districts in which many D voters elected an easy winner but in which excess votes don't really do much since it is an easy win?
And of course, there's other explanations besides gerrymandering...it could be that the RNC and its financial allies spent more savvily in tight races and pulled through. The problem of money is of course its own discussion
> And of course, there's other explanations besides gerrymandering...it could be that the RNC and its financial allies spent more savvily in tight races and pulled through.
Yes, this issue is incredibly complicated to analyze - for example, in the House, contentious bills like the ACA are oftentimes passed with ~220 votes (usually ~217 defines a majority). That doesn't mean that only 220 people would have been been willing to support the bill; just that the winning party didn't need to waste any resources whipping another ten votes in excess of what was needed to secure a victory.
Just looking at the final vote tally is misleading, because if the threshold for passage were higher, it's very likely that the actual vote tallies would miraculously adjust accordingly.
> That doesn't mean that only 220 people would have been been willing to support the bill; just that the winning party didn't need to waste any resources whipping another ten votes in excess of what was needed to secure a victory.
If they had votes to spare, they'd make the bill worse and lose those votes. Contentious bills have close vote totals because they do as much damage as possible while still passing.
Contentious bills have close vote totals because they do as much damage as possible while still passing.
I think it often works the other way in practice. To secure votes on contentious bills they have to slip in riders (ie pork) to secure specific votes. Therefore the fact that it is contentious means that they have to make it worse.
This would only be the case if policy were linear, which it isn't.
ACA is a good example of this. I forget what the exact count when it passed in the House in March 2010 was, but Pelosi had several "backup" votes to spare. Kucinich, for example, voted against the bill in protest, but if they had known that the bill had less support, she could have counted on his vote towards passage.
Whipping votes takes resources - you don't want to use up any more favors than you have to, because that means one less favor you can call on for the next bill. It's better to call in exactly as many favors as you need to guarantee passage, and then let the rest slide so you can maintain leverage against them next time.
You had districts in California that were Democrat vs Democrat, meaning Republicans couldn't pick up any popular votes in those districts. That alone makes for a mighty skew in the popular vote totals.
Not as big as you might think. Looking nation wide for districts that only voted Democrat or only voted Republican, I saw 1041261 Democratic votes and 775970 Republican ones. (I could have missed a district.) If you eliminate those from the tally, we're still around a million excess Democratic votes. And those districts are all going to be very safe for their party, so even if they did have the opposite party as an option, it is likely that most of the votes would have been for the party that won that district.
So that source of skew does not explain much of the difference.
The 1.35 million is just the absolute difference between all votes cast nationally. The result of all of the adjustments you could try to make, taken to the limit, is the 233/200 margin of Republican control of Congress.
Incidentally I credit the win in the popular vote for Democrats to a very good get out the vote operation for Obama. I am sure that future incarnations will specifically target every marginal Congress seat as well.
And of course, there's other explanations besides gerrymandering...it could be that the RNC and its financial allies spent more savvily in tight races and pulled through. The problem of money is of course its own discussion