THE NATIONAL VOTE….The average result of the five generic congressional polls taken over the final weekend before the election showed Democrats ahead by about 11%. So how does that compare to the final actual House vote? And how does that compare to the number of House seats the Democrats won?
First, the national House vote. Steve Sailer added up the votes in all the House races, did a little bit of extrapolating, and came up with the following two-party numbers:
Party
Vote
%
Democrats
40.2 million
53.7%
Republicans
34.6 million
46.3%
So Democrats beat Republicans by about 7.4 percentage points, which means the generic polls overestimated Dem strength by about four points. I think this is in line with what most people expected.
And how did this translate into House seats? Answer: Democrats won about 53.7% of the two-party vote, and assuming that they eventually win 232 seats, they won 53.3% of the seats. That’s a pretty close match.
And it’s a huge victory for simple-minded populist arithmetic vs. fancy-pants elitist poli-sci models. For yet another year, it turns out that the Democratic percentage of the two-party vote predicts the number of Democratic House seats pretty closely. Hooray for bloggy populism!
