As Chris Wlezien and I discussed a few months ago, midterm elections typically involve partisan balancing.
If the remaining races go as predicted, the Democrats will control 1.5 branches of the national government (executive and one house of the legislature) and Republicans will control the other 1.5 branches (judiciary and the other house of the legislature). That’s balance.
It’ll take a while before every vote is counted and we will know the national popular vote. Based on the seats-votes curves from recent previous elections, I’m guessing the Democrats won slightly more than 50%.
This is not the whole story because we have a federal system and lots of important things happen at the state level too.
“Based on the seats-votes curves from recent previous elections, I’m guessing the Democrats won slightly more than 50%.”
Curious, do you mean >50% of votes cast? Because from memory, there’s quite a few races where either the jungle primary system resulted in no major-party opposition (e.g. CA-10, which is Dem vs Green) or where one of the two majors didn’t bother running a candidate (e.g. MA-1, SC-3, SC-4, TX-11 etc). Does the historical data on the popular vote adjust for these kinds of races?
Ethan:
I was thinking of actual votes cast, but I agree there are challenges. Sometimes we have calculated average district vote, in which case we impute values for uncontested races. Sometimes we use the partisan vote in the district the last election when it was contested; other times we just impute 75% as that seemed to be a reasonable average.
From a rational voter point of view, the partisan balancing would often make the legislature harder to pass any new bill, and thereby to preserve the status-quo: But isn’t it a contradiction because the voters’ intension behind punishing-the-incumbent comes from the disappointment of the status-quo?
Yuling:
Yes, balancing doesn’t make complete sense in the context of political polarization. Implicit in the idea of balancing is that, as the pendulum swings back and forth, the government does reasonable but non-extreme things. For example, the Democrats do the good thing of passing universal health care, then the Republicans do the good thing of making sure it does not get out of control. The idea is not to have complete gridlock but to have moderate progress. In this vision, the two parties are not diametrically opposed to each other; rather, they have different approaches but common goals, and each party benefits from having the other party act as a check on its more extreme impulses.