2006 Democratic House Victory Larger Than Previously Thought

[babylonsister]

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1282

Democratic House Victory Larger Than Previously Thought
by: Chris Bowers
Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 16:37:32 PM EDT

We have heard for some time that Democrats won the popular vote for the US House 52%--46%. However, the final, official House results from every seat are now available from the FEC, and they show an even larger victory for Democrats than commonly thought:

Total US House Vote
Democrats: 42,255,280 (52.52%)
Republicans: 35,657,353 (44.32%)
Others: 2,542,040 (3.16%)

The official numbers show Democrats winning by 8.2%, which is noticeably more than the 6% figure that has floated around for sometime. Even if one removes D.C., Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa from the vote totals, Democrats still won 52.48%--44.35%, or more than 8%.

Why do I point this out? This larger Democratic victory margin means that the 2006 elections were decided by a larger margin than the 1994 midterm elections (6.0% victory for Republicans), or the 1988 Presidential election (7.72% victory for Bush I). This means both that our mandate was larger, and that we should have more than 233 seats. Republican gerrymandered maps and poor performance in close elections are the culprit for the latter.

Anyway, for the real political junkie, this new release from the FEC is a goldmine, as it contains the official results for every 2006 federal election, broken down and organized in many different ways. I'll spend more time looking through it later today. I'd love to see further analysis of this data from fellow junkies in the comments.