The New Democratic Majority -- It's Realignment -- Part IV

[stevekamp]

On the Senate front, unlike the Electoral College each state has the same two Senators, and the District of Columbia has none.  Thus, the 21 Red Fort states have 170/538 of the Electoral College, but 42/100 of the Senate – two above the cloture number of sixty.  Senators are elected in cycles of three classes -- in 2014, Class II, the most Southern-affected of the three classes – of the 22 Southern U.S. Senate seats, 10 are in Class II, and four are held by Democrats (Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mark Warner of Virginia).  Class II also includes Alaska, three seats in the Border (West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma), three in the Wheat Belt (Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota), and three in the Republican Rockies (Wyoming, Idaho and Montana). Four are held by Democrats – Jay Rockefeller of Virginia, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Max Baucus of Montana, and Mark Begich of Alaska. The only Class II Republican seat in an Obama state is the Maine Susan Collins seat. In contrast, in 2016 Class III, there are no Democratic seats in the South and only one in a Romney-carried state: Joe Manchin in West Virginia.  Thus, Democrats could come close to losing or actually lose Senate control in the 2014 Class II year, but in 2016 again hit the sixty seat number of 2009 -- because in 2016, seven Republican Senators will be seeking reelection in Obama-carried states after winning in 2010 with fewer raw votes than John Kerry achieved in their states in 2004: Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, Rob Portman in Ohio, Mark Kirk in Illinois, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Marco Rubio in Florida, and Charles Grassley in Iowa. 
   On the U.S. House front, the current Republican majority of 234 comes 98 from the Old Confederacy and 136 from the North. It includes 27 who come from three states carried by President Obama in 2012 but where Republicans won a majority of the state’s U.S. House seats despite losing the state U.S. House vote: Pennsylvania (13-5), Michigan (9-5), and Wisconsin (5-3).  Another 29 come from three states won by President Obama but where Republicans won a majority of the House vote:  Colorado (4-3), Florida (17-10), and Virginia (8-3). Three additional interesting states are New Jersey, where Republicans have 6 of the 12 seats despite President Obama’s 58.25% and the Democrats winning the statewide House vote; North Carolina, where Mitt Romney prevailed with 50.39%, Democrats won the House vote, but only 4 of the 13 U.S. House seats; and Arizona, the one state carried by Mitt Romney where the Republicans won the House vote but Democrats won the delegation 5-4, as the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission created three marginal Democratic seats, two safe Democratic seats and four safe Republican seats. 
Some long-Republican seats are beneficiaries of urban Democratic clustering: Washington-8 in suburban Seattle has been carried by Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama, but has never elected a Democrat since it was created in 1981; it is adjacent to Washington-7 in downtown Seattle, which has elected only one general election Republican and one special election Republican since it was created in 1951.  In 2012, the combined Democratic-Republican vote ratio in districts 7 and 8 was Democratic 420,254, Republican 256,416, but 298,368 of the Democratic number was cast in district 7, and only 121,886 in district 8.  The district 8 Republican margin was 58,318, whereas the Democratic district 7 margin was 222,156.
   Democrats in 2006 flipped the House from 202-233 to 233-202 with a gain of 27 Republican seats held in 2008; in 2008 adding another 28, and in 2009 flipping two long-Republican upstate New York seats, including current district 21 centered on St. Lawrence County, where the last previously elected Democratic Member (Frances Spinner in 1854) became a Republican in 1856. In these years, Democrats won 54.11 and 55.55 percent of the two-party House vote of 77.757 and 116.841 million. These wins brought the Democrats to a mid-session 109th Congress majority of 259, 59 from the Old Confederacy and 200 from the North. The current Republican majority emerged in 2010, when the Republicans with a House vote of 44.594 million from a two-party vote of 83.448 million moved up from a 176-259 minority to a 242-193 majority after they gained 70 Democratic seats from 2008 and lost only four (the two 2009 upstate New York seats, Delaware, and Louisiana-2).  Republicans gained a net 25 seats in the Old Confederacy and the Border States -- had Republican gains in 2010 been stopped at the Ohio River,  the House would have been Democratic 234-201, a 33-seat margin that would have prevented the debt ceiling debacle.
The 2010 flip of House control was trumpeted by Republicans as a public opinion turnabout against President Obama, but in fact it was driven by the sawtooth pattern of the Democratic total House vote, which after 2008 fell by 26 million, whereas the Republican vote fell by only 7 million. This has bedeviled the Democrats as far as back as at least 1942, when a crash of 12 million Democratic votes (versus only 7 million Republican) caused the Democratic seat number to fall from 267 to 222, or 1938, when the Republican House vote actually rose by 44,000 and the Democratic fell by 6.33 million, and the Democratic seat number fell by 71 from 333 to 262.
Democrats in their Robert Kennedy moments (“I dream of things that never were, and ask, why not?”) should persuade Presidential year Democratic voters to start voting in off-years and make the off-year Democratic House vote closer to the Presidential year vote. In 2012, the Democratic total vote rose from 2010 levels by a raw 20.360 million or a two-party net 7.692 million, as Democrats won the national House vote by 59.214 to 57.622 million. However, Democrats lost 3.582 million Barack Obama votes from 2008, and 5.673 million Democratic House votes from 2008. When Democrats find these lost votes and persuade them and the 2012 voters to vote in off-years, Democrats will regain the House of Representatives majority achieved in 2006-2008. Until then, Republicans will leverage their low-turnout gerrymandered House majority into cascading obstructionism -- the Twenty-first Century equivalent of the Confederate Civil War against the Abraham Lincoln Northern Strategy of 1860.   


The End