2022 House Vote: Republicans: 51.7%, Democrats: 46.8%, a Significant Switch to Republicans

Politics & Elections
1

Here are the numbers of people who voted Democratic vs Republican in the 2022 House elections
Democrats: 47,400,328 46.8%
Republicans: 52,328,829 51.7%

Compare this with 2020 House elections
Democrats: 77,545,850 votes 50.8%
Republicans: 72,837,502 votes 47.7%
Total: 101,291,428

This is a significant shift in political preferences (even though the percent change in the number of Democratic vs Republican Representatives is much less). [Note Democrats had a 30 million vote decline while Republicans only had a 20 million vote decline.] Thus I strongly disagree with the general view of other threads in this forum that Republican gains were very minor.

Sources:

2

How does it compare to the 2018 midterms? I think that is a more valid comparison; mid-term to mid-term, rather than comparing the 2020 general election (with a large turnout to toss out Trump) to a 2022 mid-term.

Edit: To answer my own question, in the 2018 House vote, “Democrats won the popular vote by more than 9.7 million votes or 8.6%”

3

Much of California has not been counted yet, and there are a lot of Democratic votes there.

I mean, what you say might turn out to be true but without California any numbers are meaningless.

4

Gains are minor though. Currently they’re projected to gain maybe around 10-12 seats in the house, if all current leads stay the same.

5

Yeah, it’s a bit ironic. There are two main causes:

  1. Gerrymandering. The GOP largely (except FL) took the tack of making more safe seats rather than lots of seats where they had small advantages in. Thus they were somewhat inefficient in turning votes into wins…

  2. Uncontested races. There were significantly more uncontested races (with only a GOP candidate) than typical. Some of that was the environment and some of it was related to item #1 (why run in a district you have no chance in?). In every one of those races there were literally zero Democratic votes so that skews the overall picture a bit.

It will likely end up being about 1-1.5% advantage of the GOP. Not nothing, but certainly not in line with other mid-term waves. Since someone asked about 2018 - in that year the Democrats won the national house vote (as if there is such a thing…) by ~8.5% That’s what a wave looks like.

6

Yeah, I know in past elections it showed the democrats losing a national popular vote soon after an election, but it takes about a month for California’s votes to be counted.

Hovering over the districts in the map OP provided, some districts are at about ~70% voter turnout of 2020 while others are only at 40-50%. So I’m assuming total voter turnout is somewhere in the 70-80% range of 2020 because thats about the peak that some districts are at, and when all the votes are counted I’d guess 120 million or so votes.

Also most of CA is at about 35-50% of 2020 turnout right now.

Also I’ve heard, not sure if its true, that more republicans than democrats ran unopposed. If so, that could skew the national popular vote totals while the democrats still held their own in competitive races.

7

Didn’t democrats gerrymander themselves after 2020, giving them some advantages they didn’t have in 2018 or 2020? I know Illinois gerrymandered. NY tried to but was overturned. Did OR or WA?

Also some of the right wing gerrymanders were overturned. Michigan I believe has more fair maps now, PA too I believe. Ohio and NC were ordered by courts to overturn their gerrymanders but they just ignored the courts from what I remember.

So gerrymandering both went down for the GOP (who lost some of their gerrymandered maps) and got better for the democrats who I think did some gerrymandering after 2020 that they didn’t do before.

The process needs to be abolished nationally for both federal and state elections, but until it is both sides are going to use it.

8

Here’s an analysis of this point.