Adam T over at MyDD has compiled the raw totals for all the House races during the 2006 midterm elections. Here are the national results.
Total vote: 80,121,069
Democratic: 42,339,571 52.8% 420 candidates
Republican: 35,938,282 44.9% 391 candidates
Other…..: 1,843,266 2.3%
I decided to take a look at each state to see which party got more votes. I then plugged the winning party in the Electoral College calculator to see who would have won the Presidency if each state had voted the same way for the President as they did cumulatively for their representatives. Here is what I discovered. The Dems would have won the Electoral College 321-217.
These results are skewed by some anomalies. For example, the Dems easily won single races in South and North Dakota, while the Republicans took a single seat in Delaware. But some other results were surprising. For example, the Republicans comfortably won in Wisconsin, while the Dems took North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado. Indiana and Kentucky remained Republican, but by under a single percentage point. Perhaps the most significant finding was that the Dems took Ohio by a 52.6%-47.2% margin.
The Democratic nominee in 2008 should remember the states where Dems pulled a majority of votes in 2006 and they should campaign in them. It would be a mistake to look at the results of 2000 and 2004 and think that these red states are unwinnable.
