One of the puzzles in this year’s surprising and unpredicted off-year election results is why the Republicans’ 51% to 47% win in the popular vote for House of Representatives did not produce a majority bigger than the apparent 221-214 result.

That 51% to 47% margin is identical to Joe Biden’s and Barack Obama’s popular vote margins in 2020 and 2012, respectively. It is just one digit off from George W. Bush’s 51% to 48% win in 2004.

The big contrast is with 2012, when Democrats carried the House popular vote 49% to 48% but won only 201 seats to the Republicans’ 234. How could a party win a 33-seat majority while losing the popular vote, then win only a seven-seat majority while carrying the popular vote by 4 points? 

One answer is differential turnout. In 2012, Democrats’ popular vote edge owed much to heavy Black voter turnout to re-elect the first Black president.

This year, differential turnout worked against Democrats. Central city turnout was way down, as compared to the last off-year election in 2018 — down 19% in New York City but up 0.3% in the suburbs and upstate; and down 13% in Philadelphia, but up 8% elsewhere in Pennsylvania. 

That reflects population loss in central cities, particularly from Black voters leaving the industrial Midwest for the more economically vibrant and culturally congenial metro Atlanta ­– making Georgia, with the nation’s third highest Black percentage, a target state. It also reflects, after four years of skyrocketing crime and stringent lockdowns, waning enthusiasm among heavily Democratic electorates.

Democratic mapmakers and supposedly nonpartisan but liberal-leaning redistricting commissions have no longer felt bound by the Voting Rights Act to pack Black people into black-majority districts. 

Abandonment of this supposedly immutable principle is responsible, for example, for the fact that Michigan elected zero Black Democratic congressmen for the first time since 1952. Democrats also won a state Senate majority for the first time since 1983 by winning districts that linked heavily Black neighborhoods in Detroit with affluent, mostly white suburbs. 

The most important reason for the Republicans’ reduced harvest of House seats has been a reduction in clustering.

Democratic clustering has diminished in recent years. Part of the reason is that Democratic groups have become less Democratic. Hispanics voted 29% Republican in 2012 but 39% Republican in 2022. The Asian Republican percentage increased from 25% to around 40%, and the Black Republican percentage increased from 6% to 13%. 

Meanwhile, Republican clustering has increased in the wide-open spaces between the Appalachians and the Rockies, from far-out exurbs and in Wal-Mart and Dollar General country beyond. You can see the evidence from which party won seats with supermajorities. In 2012, 71 Democrats and only 32 Republicans were elected to the House with 70% or more of the vote.

This year, by my preliminary count, the 70-plus percent districts moved closer to parity — 58 Democrats and 39 Republicans. Thus, the Republicans’ 51% of the total House vote produced a disappointing number of House seats.  

It also signaled a residual Republican strength. Republican House candidates had a hard time dislodging Democrats in marginal districts.

Republican House candidates ran ahead of their party’s Senate candidates in such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. They also ran strongly in tandem with landslide winners Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio in Florida. 

Republican House candidates won 58% of the popular vote in the South and 53% in the Midwest, two regions that together account for 298 of the 538 electoral votes. Duplicating that support is one way an unproblematic Republican nominee could top 270 electoral votes in 2024.