The Myth of Poor Democratic Electoral Performance

At the end of a somewhat rambling post, Ezra Klein observes:

Meanwhile — and this will be the last paragraph of this rambling post, I swear — Rick asked how they — the Republicans — keep winning elections. And the answer, basically, is that they don’t. Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections. They’ve enjoyed congressional gains in five of the last seven elections. Since 1992, the Republican Party has had three unambiguous wins: 1994, 2002, and 2004. In the grand sweep of American history, that’s not such an impressive record. But it’s sometimes hard to think about the sweep of history when you’re in the thick of the present, and so Democrats grew more impressed with Republicans successes than was probably warranted. But it’s time to let that go.

I would actually grow stronger than that. Check out the two-party share of the vote in House of Representatives elections:

Here you see that even though the elections of 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2004 all returned GOP majorities, most people actually voted for the Democrats. The vagaries of how congressional districts are drawn produced Republican majorities in those years but that’s not a problem of Democrats being insufficiently persuasive. Indeed, in 2004 the Republicans actually picked up seats even while securing fewer than half the votes. A lot of political commentary in the 21st century has been focused around the idea that Democrats have some sort of “problem” or other persuading voters to support them but in fact now that we’re past the 2008 election we can say that Democrats have narrowly-but-consistently prevailed in terms of voter preferences over the past 20 years.

Now of course much as close only counts in horeshoes and hand grenades, things like the Republicans securing more than half the House seats with fewer than half the votes or securing the White House with a second-place finish in the popular vote have real consequences. But if you want to understand voter behavior you need to look at voter behavior. It’s just that understanding electoral outcomes requires you to look at the intersection of voter behavior and the electoral system. That’s a different issue.