What happened in the Congressional vote?

November 5th, 2008, by Andrew

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.

Similar Posts:

• More on the swing in the House vote
• The myth of poor Democratic performance in House races in the 2008 election
• How did the Democrats do in the 2008 congressional elections?
• What does non-uniform partisan swing look like?
• The Playing Field Shifts: Predicting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2008 U.S. House Election

Entry Filed under: Elections