The 46 Dem Senators got more votes than the 54 Republicans

[TTS1996]

Just to explain a little better, this would be the equivalent of figuring out the popular vote for president by only taking the number of votes each candidate got in the states they won. Pretty asinine when you think about it.

Basically this.

Using the correct method, the spread comes out to roughly 98.6 million Democratic votes and 94.3 million Republican ones.

Also interesting to note is that Democrats apparently aren't the only ones who suck at turning out their voters in a midterm environment, Republican Senate candidates actually received 10 million fewer votes in 2014 than they did in 2010.

On this point, the states in Class II are generally smaller. CA, FL, NY, PA, OH - five of the seven biggest states - are not in Class II, so turnout overall will be lower.

[muon2]

There's a more interesting statistic to glean from this graph. It shows the natural multiplier for voting power due to aggregation by state. It's the same effect that causes the Electoral College percentage margin to be much larger than the popular vote percentage margin.

This is a graph I put together after the 2008 election. It shows the electoral votes for the Pub candidate compared to the fractional difference in vote totals between the Pub and the Dem. For example -0.10 corresponds to an election where the Pub got 10% less than the Dem. In the range from -0.10 to +0.10 the points are roughly linear, but for every percent difference between the two candidates there's about a 6% difference in the number of electoral college votes. That's a multiplier of 6.

If I apply the same idea to the recent Senate races, I can compare the Pub margin in popular vote to the Pub margin in seats won.

2008 -9%/-14%
2010 +4%/+32%
2012 -9%/-50%
2014 +8%/+32%

The average multiplier for those four elections is 4.8, which is consistent with the electoral vote data given the smaller statistics for the Senate races. By comparison the multiplier for House races is only 2, due to the smaller size of a House district compared to a Senate district.

[TheElectoralBoobyPrize]

Just to explain a little better, this would be the equivalent of figuring out the popular vote for president by only taking the number of votes each candidate got in the states they won. Pretty asinine when you think about it.

Basically this.

Using the correct method, the spread comes out to roughly 98.6 million Democratic votes and 94.3 million Republican ones.

Also interesting to note is that Democrats apparently aren't the only ones who suck at turning out their voters in a midterm environment, Republican Senate candidates actually received 10 million fewer votes in 2014 than they did in 2010.

In 2010, there were elections in California, Florida and two in New York. Republican candidates got about 10 million votes in those four states that were not up for election in '14.

That's what I was thinking...of course, you could point out there was no Senate race in Texas in 2010, but was one in 2014...still, I think having those states vote (you can PA to your list of ones up in '10 but not in '14) more than cancels it out.