More Americans self-identify as Democrats than as Republicans. If party identification was all there is to winning elections, the GOP might as well stay home.
Yet Republicans just won the 2014 election ... convincingly. Cook doesn't explain this apparent contradiction. COTTonLINE will try to explain how a party with fewer self-identified adherents wins elections. There are two main reasons.
Voter turnout is a big part of the answer. Groups with heavy GOP identifications are also groups that vote in substantial numbers. Fewer members of groups with a heavy Dem. bias tend to vote.
This isn't a new phenomenon, it was true when I was a boy. I remember my Dad, a life-long populist Democrat, being bitter about it.
The other major factor, particularly in congressional races, is where Democrats and Republicans live. Democrat-leaning voters are highly concentrated in a few congressional districts and a few states. See National Journal's map showing where each party dominates.
As we know, each state gets two senators regardless of population. California's almost 39 million people send two Democrats to the U.S. Senate while Wyoming's roughly 600,000 people send two Republicans.
Democratic House districts tend to have supermajorities of Democrats. Republican House districts are less biased, while mostly still "safe." Thus, Republican voters are more efficiently distributed across districts. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza reports as follows:
Of the 199 Democrats in the House at the start of the 113th Congress, a majority -- 51 percent(!) -- won their race with 67 percent of the vote or higher. Among the 234 Republicans elected in the last election, 67 -- or roughly 29 percent of the GOP conference -- won with 67 percent or higher.
In the 2012 election just 31 Republicans and 31 Democrats won their seats with 54 percent of the vote or less -- just 14 percent of the entire House.
