In yesterday’s blog entry I looked that the swing in congressional voting nationally (House Democrats gained 5.7%, on average, compared to 2004) and by state (compared to 2004, House Democrats gained in nearly every state). My graphs elicited several interesting comments including this from Steve Sailer:

Perhaps the reason that the GOP House losses of seats were considered not so bad compared to 2006 was because in 2008 the Democrats ran up huge turnouts in black-represented Congressional districts, which were already all Democratic?

Let’s look at some district-by-district swings, starting in 2002:

Here, I’m excluding uncontested elections and those in which the challenger got less than 10% of the vote; dots indicate incumbents running for reelection, circles are open seats, and red points are those with black representatives as of 2008. (I just pulled the names off the Congressional Black Caucus website and didn’t try to go back to earlier years on this.)

What happened? Overall, the Democrats gained a bit in 2004, a lot in 2006, and some in 2008. But we knew that (see the time series plot in the blog entry linked above). We also see a bit of scatter. Beyond this, yes, there are some patterns. In 2006, the Democrats particularly gained in Republican areas–see how those dots in the lower left of the second graph are way above the 45-degree line? In 2008, the swing is more uniform. (In addition, the black Democrats did pretty well in 2008 compared to 2006, but it doesn’t seem like a big part of the story.)

Returning to the “How well did the Democrats actually do in 2008″ question, I think that one problem is that people are comparing Obama’s vote to Kerry’s vote but then comparing the congressional Democrats in 2008 to the congressional Democrats in 2006. I think it’s more appropriate to compare 2008 to 2004 in both cases. As Paul Krugman put it, “Maybe the reason people don’t see this is that the Democratic House gains were spread over two elections.”

There’s an idea going around that the Democrats turned in a disappointing performance in Congressional races this year. For example, a politically-minded friend of mine of the liberal persuasion wrote: “The election was good news, although the Democrats did not do quite as well in the Senate and House as I expected. Obama did not have very long coattails–given how anti-Republican Americans are these days.”

Some of the pros say this too; for example, Charlie Cook writes, “given the strength of the top of the ticket nationally, one might have thought that the victory would have been more vertically integrated. . . . what happened down-ballot was not proportional to what happened at the top.”

And Mickey Kaus attributes this to moderate ticket-splitters who, expecting that Obama would win, decided to support Republicans in Congress: “swing voters compensated for the bold, hopeful risk they took on Obama (including for overcoming any race prejudice) by gravitating back toward Republicans in their local Senate and House races.”

The only trouble with this theory is that it’s not supported by the data. Obama won 53% of the two-party vote, congressional Democrats averaged 56%. The average swing of 5.7% from Democratic congressional candidates in 2004 to Dems in 2008 was actually greater than the popular vote swing of 4.5% from Kerry to Obama.

Let’s look at what happened state by state. Here I’m plotting the swing in average district vote in each state, comparing the congressional elections of 2004 to those of 2008, ordering the states by Kerry’s share in 2004:

The horizontal blue line shows the average swing of 5.7%. The Democrats gained in nearly every state, with, unsurprisingly, some big swings in some of the small states that have only one or two congressional districts. Now let’s compare this to the state-by-state swing in the presidential vote:

Obama beat Kerry nearly everywhere, fairly uniformly with only a few exceptions–we knew that–but my point here is that Obama’s swings weren’t quite as large, on average, as the state congressional delegations’.

If you want, you can look at both swings at once:

In the states in the upper left of this graph, the Democrats improved more in the congressional than in the presidential vote; the states in the lower right are those where the Obama-Kerry swing was greater than the Democrats’ swing in House races.

There are a lot more states in the upper left than in the lower right. Each state has its own story–for example, I wouldn’t attribute Don Young’s squeaker in Alaska to Barack Obama’s coattails–but given the graphs above, I think it’s hard to make the case that, overall, the voters were saying No to the Democrats in Congress. On the contrary, congressional Democrats averaged 56% of the vote–their best showing since 1976 (and far more than the Republicans’ 52% in 1994).

Here’s the story in a map:

For some historical perspective, here are the Democrats’ two-party vote share in presidential elections and average two-party vote in congressional elections since 1946:

Presidential voting has been much more volatile than congressional voting (incumbency and all that). This makes the Democrats’ 5.7-point gain over two elections even more impressive.

Summary

I think Charlie Cook was closer to the mark when he wrote, “The political environment and momentum that Democrats seemed to have in recent months may have led to an unrealistic set of expectations. In this, perhaps we pundits share some blame.” I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to consider Obama’s 53% “enormously impressive” and congressional Democrats’ 56% a disappointment.

The data demolish the idea that voters in 2008 were pulling the lever for Barack but not for the Dems overall (not for “Nancy Pelosi,” if you will).

Notes

1. I thank John Kastellec and Jared Lander for gathering the data and sharing their thoughts.

2. I’m counting uncontested House candidates at 75% of the vote (see our earlier article for discussion of this and similar technical issues).

3. We use average district vote rather than total vote because congressional vote totals vary a lot, and we’re trying to assess national public opinion (as judged, for example, in Kaus’s quote above).

4. The Democrats won resoundingly; this means that the voters preferred them to the alternative; it does not necessarily mean the voters want the specific policies proposed by the Democrats. Recall the Democrats’ surprising lack of popular success after 1976 and the Republicans’ struggles after their 1994 sweep. 5. I’m talking about public opinion here, not campaign strategy. I’m sure that Democratic leaders were disappointed in their party’s performance in key congressional races, especially given their immense financial resources this year. At the level of public opinion, though, the Democrats in Congress outperformed Obama overall and in 38 states–and their swing beat Obama’s overall and in 32 states–so I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that the voters were balancing toward the Republicans in congressional voting. This is not to say that the voters have given the Democrats a blank check, but it really was a Democratic swing, not an Obama swing.

P.S. More graphs here.

P.P.S. Kaus replies (via blog):

I don’t understand Andrew Gelman and Matt Yglesias’ point. You don’t win the House of Representatives when you rack up a large percentage of the national “two party “Congressional vote, or when you win a large “average swing” vote on a “state-by-state” basis. You win when you win lots of actual House seats. That’s what can pass or defeat legislation. And measured by actual House seats the Democratic gains (of about 22) were a little less than expected. There is a reason for this.

My response:

1. As noted here, I think the appropriate comparison is 2004 to 2008. Obama did 4.5 percentage points better than Kerry; congressional Democrats averaged 5.7 percentage points more of the vote than their counterparts in 2004. And the Democrats gained many more than 22 House seats since 2004.

2. See my point 5 above. I’m willing to believe that the Democrats’ campaign strategy had problems, or that they underperformed in marginal districts. But, to return to Kaus’s original point about ticket splitters: “maybe there was a determined effort to apply checks and balances. By deciding to elect Obama president, more than a few voters may have opted to keep the Republican incumbent in place, just to prevent Democrats from getting carried away.” I don’t see it. If you want to talk about motivations of voters, I think it makes the most sense to look at vote shares, not just winners.

3. I don’t understand why Kaus puts “two party” and “state-by-state” in quotes. I mean, I guess I do understand, since he’s quoting me (which I appreciate), but I feel like he’s trying to say there’s something fishy about these ideas. But there’s not. “Two party” vote share just means that we exclude third parties and focus on the competition between the Democrats and Republicans. (That’s why, for example, I don’t think it makes sense to compare Obama’s 52% of the total vote to Reagan’s 50%-ish of the total vote in 1980. Reagan competed in a three-candidate race and he did much better than his main opponent, Carter.) I did my “state-by-state” analysis in order to compare Obama’s swing to congressional swings in different places.

To summarize: if the question is campaign strategy–did the Democrats do all they could’ve, or did the Republicans play a poor hand suprisingly well–then, yes, by all means, compare the election outcome to Stu Rothenberg’s and Charlie Cook’s pre-election forecasts. But if you are interested in public opinion–for example, were the voters trying to balance Obama with a more Republican congress–then I think vote swings are more informative.

I think Kaus and I could probably agree that there are two separate questions: (1) Did the voting public favor congressional Democrats (as compared to how they voted for Obama), and (2) Did the Democrats do worse in 2008 than they should have, given their lead in public opinion? I think the answer to (1) is pretty clear: the voters swung toward the Democrats in congress as well as (actually slightly more than) in presidential voting. I have no idea about (2), and I’d defer to Charlie Cook and others on this question. I’m less interested in question (2) but I agree with Kaus that such questions are important, as they affect the size of the Democrats’ majority in both houses.

P.P.P.S. Election outcome compared to anticipated seats-votes curve here.

This note by Nate inspired me to check the vote swings by county population. I don’t have the urban/suburban/rural status of counties in an easily grabbable form (maybe Boris has these and can send to me) and so as something quick I plotted vote swing vs. county population. Actually, I don’t have county population right here either and so I used total number of votes in the county in 2004. Many of the large-population counties are urban (such as Los Angeles, the largest); others are major suburban counties. Anyway, here’s what we see:

The blue line is the lowess curve fit to the data. There’s a lot of variation–county size is not such a good predictor of swing–but there is indeed a pattern of bigger Obama swings in larger counties. (The counties are already ordered by size so there’s no need to use larger circles to indicate larger counties as I did in the plots of county income posted earlier.)

To understand this better, let’s break up the data by region of the country. Also, since we’re at it, let’s look at swings in the past couple of elections as well.

Here are the swings broken up by region of the country for the past few elections. The left column shows 1996/2000, the middle column shows 2000/2004, and the right column shows 2004/2008.

What do we see?
1. The large-county/small-county differential in Obama’s gains was particularly strong in the south and did not occur at all in the northeast. For example, Obama won 84% of the two-party vote in Philadelphia–but Kerry got 80% there four years ago. This 4% swing was about the same as Obama’s swing nationally. Part of the issue here is that Obama had almost no room for improvement in these places.

2. The pattern of Democrats improving more in large-population counties is not unique to 2008. Gore did (relatively) well in big counties in all regions in 2000.

Obama gained in almost all the middle-income and rich counties but not so uniformly in poorer counties:

Breaking this up by region:

See here for further discussion and more graphs.

I wrote here here that the red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing. This raises the question of what a nonuniform swing would look like.

Here’s Ronald Reagan’s share of the two-party vote in 1980 and 1984, by state:

And here’s the swing from 1976 to 1980:

The average swing in each of these years was about the same as from 2004 to 2008, but, comparing the states, it was a lot less uniform.

1952/1956 here.

Mark Penn in the New York Times:

Sure, young people voted heavily for Mr. Obama, but they voted heavily for John Kerry . . .

The exit polls:

Yes, maybe the exit polls were wrong here, but considering Penn’s article was otherwise peppered with exit poll statistics, so I don’t think that’s the issue.

So what happened?

My guess is that Penn had a storyline he wanted to focus on–the trends among minorities and upper-income voters–and so he wanted to dismiss any alternative explanations. But I think this is a misconception–the idea that a story has to be simple. Penn’s big story can be important but there’s no need for him to try to artificially strengthen it by dismissing the big changes in the under-30 vote. Lots of things are going on at once here.

P.S. Somebody pointed out to me that the only demographic group that Kerry won in 2004 was 18-29. I don’t think this gets Penn off the hook, though. Obama’s victory among the under-30s was so much bigger than Kerry’s, that I thought it was highly misleading for Penn to write, “Sure, young people voted heavily for Mr. Obama, but they voted heavily for John Kerry . . .” His first “heavily” is over a 30-point gap; his second “heavily” is a 10-point gap. He’s using English words to equate two numbers that are much much difference. I’m not saying Penn did this on purpose, but I’d still classify it as a mistake.

Andrew posted earlier about how wealthier voters again voted disproportionally Republican. What about states? Did rich states vote Democratic in 2008, as they did in 2004? Did poor states vote Republican? In short, yes, they did.

The two raw data scatterplots show the average per capita income of states in the election year (in 2006 dollars) on the horizontal axis, and the Republican share of the vote on the vertical axis. A best-fit line is drawn in each year. The income-vote slope decreases a small amount in 2008. Overall, though, rich states are still blue, and poor states are still red.

So how can rich states vote Democratic, while rich individuals vote Republican? And is this pattern new? Buy our book to find out!

Next step: multilevel models of individuals nested in counties and states. That’s going to have to wait until we get the exit poll data.

The first thing I did after getting back from Grant Park was to look at the exit poll results on income and voting and compare to 2000 and 2004.

Up through the middle class, there was little change:

But at the high end there was a flattening out, even a turn toward the Democrats, that we didn’t see before:

Is this a real change, perhaps a move to a new era in which, at a national level, the upper middle class and rich are divided evenly between the two parties?

Or maybe it’s coming from the economic crisis, which in financial terms is hitting higher-income voters harder. (After all, who has money in the stock market?)

Or maybe it has something to do with the candidates themselves. What would the breakdown of voting by income looked like had it been Clinton vs. Romney? (There might be some poll numbers on this from the primary election season, but I don’t know that I’d trust them much.) Maybe it would’ve looked more like 2004.

P.S. regarding the first line above: Boris and I didn’t have tickets. We just observed the crowd from a distance.

We’ll have to wait until we’ve had a chance to analyze all the election returns, but so far the Democrats appear to have won 59% of the House seats, which according to the recent article by Kastellec, Chandler, and myself, suggests that Democratic House candidates averaged about 54% of the two-party vote.

Historically, both these numbers are pretty strong, bringing the Democrats to something near their position in the 1980s, and doing quite a bit better than the Republicans in 1994:

In particular, the Democrats did about as well, on average, in the House, as Obama did in the presidential tally. I haven’t yet looked at the numbers but I suspect that something similar happened with the Senate: even after just missing a few Senate seats at 51/49 and 52/48 margins, the Democrats still picked up a few.

The next thing to see is where the vote was changing; based on what’s happened before, my guess is approximate uniform swing.