Republicans are now a minority party wielding near-absolute power
By Paul Waldman November 16 at 1:45 PM
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The Republican advantage doesn’t stop at the White House. It continues in the Senate, which is of course a profoundly anti-democratic institution by design, giving 600,000 residents of Wyoming the same two representatives as 40 million Californians. If Democrats and Republicans were equally present in small and large states, then this inequality would wash out, but they aren’t — more of the small states lean Republican, and more of the large states are Democratic.
If we look at the Senate that will be in office next year, we can see the disparity. Presuming the GOP candidate wins a runoff election in Louisiana in December, Republicans will enjoy a 52-48 advantage, but when we add up the votes Democratic and Republican candidates got in the three elections that put them there, we see almost a mirror image: In 2012, 2014 and 2016, Democratic Senate candidates got a combined 114.8 million votes, or 52.8 percent of the total, while Republican candidates got 102.6 million votes, or 47.2 percent.
There’s a similar distortion in the House, though it doesn’t cross the 50 percent mark as it has in the past, particularly in 2012, when Democrats got nearly 2 million more votes than Republicans but still found themselves in the minority. While there are a couple of races awaiting final results and two runoffs that have to be held in Louisiana, it looks as though the final divide in the House will be 241-194 in favor of Republicans. To put that in percentage terms, Republicans have 55.4 percent of the seats, while Democrats have 44.6 percent. Yet Republicans got only 51.5 percent of the two-party vote this year, while Democrats got 48.5 percent.
Those few percentage points of difference between the number of votes the parties get and the number of seats they wind up with translate into a huge advantage for Republicans. It means that in order for Democrats to win back the House, it wouldn’t be enough to get a majority of the votes; they’d essentially have to win in a blowout. (Side note: I got the 2016 presidential and House data from David Wasserman, 2012 and 2014 Senate data from the FEC, and 2016 Senate data from Dave Leip.)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/11/16/republicans-are-now-a-minority-party-wielding-near-absolute-power/?utm_term=.b3cf315eb91f&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
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