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Predicting and Dissecting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2006 U.S. House Election

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2008

Jonathan P. Kastellec ,
Andrew Gelman  and
Jamie P. Chandler
Jonathan P. Kastellec
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Andrew Gelman
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Jamie P. Chandler
Affiliation:
City University of New York
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Extract

As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to President George W. Bush's declining popularity and the public's dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g., Cook 2006). With most attention paid to the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed (though not entirely neglected) was the fact that the Democrats faced a significant structural disadvantage in their effort to retake both houses of Congress. The Democrats faced an uphill battle to control the Senate simply due to the small number of seats that were seriously contested. Their hurdle to taking over the House was subtler but perhaps just as high: as we show here, they needed to win well over half the vote share in order to have an even chance of winning 50% of the seats, thereby overcoming a structural advantage enjoyed by Republicans leading up to Election Day.We thank Gary Jacobson and Walt Borges for generously sharing their data, Robert Erikson, Eduardo Leoni, Robert Shapiro, David Epstein, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and the National Science Foundation for financial support. Replication datasets and statistical code are available at www.columbia.edu/∼jpk2004/house2006.html.

Type
FEATURES
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 139 - 145
Copyright
© 2008 The American Political Science Association

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