A House Divided

The national vote for the House of Representatives suggests a politics stuck in neutral.

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(Photo by Getty Images.)

Elections are inherently dramatic events. There is a winner and a loser, and an urge to draw conclusions. But that urge can easily lead us to overread ephemeral blips while overlooking more durable patterns, and mistake the nature of the drama we are witnessing. 

That risk is particularly great in analyzing the 2022 midterms, because the drama that needs explaining is a story of what didn’t happen. The president’s party usually does far worse in midterm elections than the Democrats did in this one, and no one seems to think this election was different because the Democrats offered the public an appealing case for themselves. It was different because Republicans somehow failed to translate voter unhappiness with the status quo into votes for change. The question is why. 

If an answer is going to get beyond candidate personalities, which matter but can’t be the whole story, it should particularly help explain the results in the House of Representatives. Only a third of the Senate is up for election in any midterm, and not necessarily the third most representative of the country at large. But the entire House is on the ballot, and its contours are decided by a vast national electorate, which this year exceeded 100 million voters. Broad trends across that immense population might tell some useful tales. 

This year’s popular vote for the House is coming into sharp relief only now, almost three weeks after Election Day, as a number of Western states that count votes at a maddeningly glacial pace are finally completing their tallies. The overall picture is straightforward: Republicans won a raw popular majority of just more than 3 percentage points, and will likely have 222 seats in the House next year, while the Democrats have 213. This is essentially a mirror image of the Democrats’ narrow win in the 2020 House elections and their tiny majority in the current House. Since 1994, the party not holding the presidency has ended up with an average of 231 House seats in midterm elections, and the GOP’s 222 is the second-worst showing by such a party over these three decades (exceeded only by the Democrats in the 2002 elections, in the wake of September 11). 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ray Salemi

    I don't think the “voters” are sending a message because I don't think the”voters” as a thinking unit exists. Each person votes for their own representative without thinking more broadly. There is no “No” or even “Yes” based on some broad party position. There is only, “which if my choices do I choose?”

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  2. Keatonm88

    This Republican house majority is identical in size to the Democrat led house of 2020 that enacted major legislation and touted how the American people had granted it carte Blanche. Translation: a win is a win and the spin that Republican majority is meager is fake news.

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  3. Andrew M

    I think this article fails to take into account that so many districts across the country have been so severely gerrymandered that there are only a couple dozen districts (or fewer)that control the majority in Congress. The rest are effectively a lock for either party.

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    David.Link

    I'd like to add a more positive spin on the conclusion (correct as I understand it) that this No to both parties from the voters means No. What if part of the voters thinking is that the nation's asserted problems don't all reflect the lives of voters, and that the almost constant polls/surveys/questionnaires/focus groups some fraction of them are daily subjected to provide results too thin to be truly reflective of what they think the government can/should/ought to be doing.

    Or, as California Governor Jerry Brown said in several of his veto message to our legislature, maybe not every human problem has a solution that government can provide?

    I know that's my position. Neither party appeals to me mostly because they keep looking for problems to solve that are beyond the power of government, or are far too multifactorial for any of the single-focus solutions that elected officials keep offering through their press offices. I'm happy to let them say all they want to, but I wonder whether the almost unbelievably satisfactory lives the vast majority of us live -- and have a holiday to give thanks for! -- aren't near as bad as the news/politician industrial complex keeps nattering about.

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    Marty

    I understand why The Dispatch has eliminated the "Like" button for articles. But I Like this one anyway.

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  6. Jfan

    My theory, which I have not seen offered elsewhere in the last six years, is that voters only reelected a Republican majority in 2016 because they assumed that Clinton would win, and they wanted a Republican Congress to balance a Clinton Administration.

    That explains this year's election. Before the election, when considering how Republican gains in the generic vote would translate into seats, if someone wondered "Which seats, exactly, can Republicans possibly gain?" the natural short list would be the seats they lost in 2018. After all, Republicans held them in 2016, so they should be easy targets. My theory is that Trump dragged the Republican Party down so far in 2016 that even returning to a 2016 level of support, minus the desire to balance a Clinton Administration, does not translate into victories. In this view, Barbara Comstock, for example, would have lost Loudon County in 2016 on her own merits; Dana Rohrabacher would have lost in Orange County. In this view, Republicans have already undone their 2018 losses, but have yet to undo their 2016 losses which were masked.

    Admittedly this is just another way of saying that voters despise Trump and will do anything to show that until Republicans repudiate him.

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      Ray Salemi

      I don't think voters take splitting power into account when they vote for their own representative.

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      1. Jfan

        If that were true, then there would be no tendency for the party which does not hold the presidency to gain seats in the midterms, since every election result for Congress and every state legislature is the sum of voters voting for their own representatives.

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  7. Avatar photo
    Donald E. L. Johnson, Florida

    In Florida, where Republicans were not opposed by Democrats or anyone else, the incumbents did not appear on the ballot.

    As a result, those of us who wanted to send a message by voting against Trump compliant Republicans were silenced. I call that subtle fascism, and it happened or would have happened in districts where Democrat incumbents were not opposed.

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    LBernard

    Excellent analysis. Before now, the most credible theory I've seen thrown around is "voters want divided government," and I've bought into that theory perhaps more that I should have. The thesis here of "voters are rejecting both parties" makes a lot more sense and does a better job of explaining the election results, in my opinion.

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  9. Sgruenwald730

    It didn’t really seem like a vote of no confidence for both parties. That’s the spin from right of center pundits though…..

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  10. Halvor

    Mr. Yuval, it's hard to understand how conservatives can consider it a true victory to decide that the Constitution has nothing to say about the transcendent question of human life and freedom and to divide the nation by relegating such an issue to State politics.

    You say it was worth some political punishment. Bravo, I trust there's more to come! I respect that. The New Deal was worth some punishment in 1938. Civil Rights were worth punishment in 1968 (and for decades thereafter). The recession stimulus and Obamacare were worth punishment in 2010. No less, the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act were worth punishment in 2022. Despite their habitual buyers' remorse, voters will grant Democrats future opportunities to get punished all over again!

    By now, voters know exactly what Democrats do when they get elected. They descend to the vaults where Reagan put the New Deal and drag items back upstairs into the light of day where Republicans cry about moral risk, futility, perversity and "rabid cultural progressivism." Every election, voters remember their panic over the last time Democrats won, but deep down, voters share a belief in progress. They understand that Republicans have zero interest in progress at all and will tenaciously preserve the status quo. When voters elect Democrats, they choose progress.

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      Melissa

      Good grief. Many times status quo is preferable to jaw dropping spending or “progress”.

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