This may have been answered somewhere else but I’ll ask again. If every register voter voted strictly for their party candidates the 2022 and 2024 elections, what would the make up of congress (both houses) be?
That’s kind of an unanswerable question, as voters are not required to register with a party to be a registered voter.
Yeah. If we try to take that as close to literally as possible, both houses would have a lot more members listed as “independent”; but in practice not a lot of candidates run under that label, let alone under that label as meaning “not a member of any party” as opposed to “member of a party calling itself the Independent Party.”
Around a third of registered voters in the U.S. (34%) identify as independents, while 33% identify as Democrats and 29% identify as Republicans, according to a Center analysis of Americans’ partisan identification based on surveys of more than 12,000 registered voters in 2018 and 2019.
As the article says, many people registered as independents lean strongly towards either Democrats or Republicans; but this is probably partly cancelled by the fact that, in some states, it’s necessary to be registered in a party in order to vote at all in the primaries, so that some people who don’t particularly identify with a party may nevertheless register as a party member, so as to get some say in the primaries. (Some may even register as members of a party they don’t agree with, in order to vote in that party’s primaries. Registering as a party member doesn’t mean you have to vote that way.)
Another complication is that states are currently redistricting because of the 2020 census. We mostly don’t know what the congressional districts will look like at the end of the process, because both parties are gerrymandering as fiercely as they can. Trying to apply the current districts will guarantee a false result.
Got it. I didn’t realize the number of registered Independent was so high. What prompted the question was Trumps quote regarding mail in ballots and no Republican ever getting elected President again.
In fact, not all states allow you to register a partisan affiliation. Nineteen states either do not provide for partisan voter registration, or do not report that data publicly.