I've been turning my attention recently to the House, which is almost certain to be the more active of the two chambers in the first 30-60 days of the Obama Administration. One thing I've determined is that the Democrats turned in a truly dominant performance in elections for the Congress this year, to an extent understated by the 79-seat advantage they now claim in the House.
We can calculate an aggregate popular vote for the Congress simply by adding up the raw vote totals from the 435 elections for the House of Representatives across the country. The Democrats won this year's House popular vote by 8.9 points, roughly matching the 7-8 point advantage they had in partisan identification on national exit polls.
That figure, however, tends to understate the Democrats' advantage. The reason is that in 40 of the 435 Congressional Distrcts across the country, the Republicans did not field a candidate. (This is actually a modest improvement for them; the Republicans failed to compete in 46 races in 2006). By contrast, the Democrats failed to field a candidate in only 14 races.
What happens when a candidate runs unopposed varies from state to state. Some states automatically award him the seat without putting him on the ballot or tallying his votes. The House popular vote total, therefore, will not give any credit to the Democrats when this happens. Other states will put the candidate on the ballot by himself (or against third-party opposition), let the voter punch the card for him, and then tally the results. When this happens, though, there is often a rather severe undervote, since there's not much reason to vote in a contest where you have only one choice.
The upshot of this is that the House popular vote tends to discount those areas where a party is so dominant as to discourage competition, because less competition in a district also means fewer votes in that district. Congressional Districts have roughly the same number of people as one another, and so a fairer way to evaluate the House might simply be take the average of the vote share received by each party across all 435 districts (giving a candidate credit for 100 percent of the vote when he runs unopposed). If we do things this way, then we find that the Democrats won, on average, 56.0 percent of the vote on November 4th, and the Republicans 41.3 percent. That's a difference of 14.7 points, far more formidable than nominal 8.9 point advantage that the popular vote total gave them.
Even in districts where the Republicans did compete, moreover, they were often not truly competitive. The Democrats had 126 districts that they won by 40 points or more (including races that they won uncontested); these are what I call Democrat-Dominant Districts (DDD's). These districts represent approximately half of the Democratic seats in the House, and nearly 30 percent of the House in its entirety. By contrast, the Republicans had only had 30 districts that they won by 40 or more points, of which 22 are in the South.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/12/are-republicans-still-national-party.html
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