Why are there 538 Electoral Votes? The answer is that that is the number you get if you add the 100 seats in the Senate and the 435 seats in the House, and then add three more votes for the District of Columbia. President Obama won 332 Electoral Votes when he won reelection last November. Mitt Romney received 206. Because all but two states are winner-take-all, this doesn’t give us a true picture of public opinion. Obama only won 51% of the vote, but he won 61% of the Electoral College. This helps explain why the some Republicans have begun agitating to get rid of winner-take-all state-level elections. Yet, if the Democrats enjoy a structural advantage in the Electoral College, they suffer from a major disadvantage in the Senate.
If we subtract the 100 Electoral College votes that represent the Senate, we have 438 votes left. How many of those votes came from states that Obama won versus states that Romney won? The answer is that the states won by Obama (including the District of Columbia) had 278 votes and states won my Romney had 160. In other words, Obama controlled 58% of them. Yet, he only has 53 Democrats in the Senate, plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats. That’s not a terrible skew, but it shows that the Democrats suffer because the Republicans are overrepresented. The Republicans do better overall in sparsely populated states, which results in them banking three extra seats in the Senate than if the seats were distributed by population.
The situation in the House is even worse. Romney actually carried 274 congressional districts despite losing by four points and despite Democratic candidates getting more than a million more votes than Republicans nationwide. The reason is gerrymandered districts. Look how this shook out in Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvanians also voted to re-elect Mr. Obama, elected Democrats to several statewide offices and cast about 83,000 more votes for Democratic Congressional candidates than for Republicans. But new maps drawn by Republicans — including for the Seventh District outside Philadelphia, a Rorschach-test inkblot of a district snaking through five counties that helped Representative Patrick Meehan win re-election by adding Republican voters — helped ensure that Republicans will have a 13-to-5 majority in the Congressional delegation that the state will send to Washington next month.
Think about it. Romney won 274 congressional districts to Obama’s 161, yet Obama won states containing 278 districts (including DC) compared to Romney’s 160. That’s completely inverted. It perfectly expresses the effect of the gerrymander.
So, contrary to Ron Brownstein the Democrats’ advantages in presidential elections and the Republicans’ advantages in midterms are not sufficiently explained by reference to differential turnout. Winner-take-all state elections make it much more difficult for Republicans to conquer the Electoral College. But the overrepresentation of small states and the gerrymander both contribute to disadvantaging the Democrats in Congress.
It’s true that midterm electorates are older and whiter than presidential electorates, but that only compounds a pre-existing structural problem. Moreover, the congressional Democrats suffer from the skew in presidential and midterm elections alike, while the Republicans only suffer from high voter participation in the presidential elections.
The bottom line is that our elections don’t do that great of a job of reflecting the will of the people. And that’s why the people elected Barack Obama for a second term and wound up with John Boehner calling the shots in the House.
Result: dysfunction.
