One of the puzzles in this year’s surprising and unpredicted (including by me) off-year election results is why the Republicans’ 51 percent to 47 percent win in the popular vote for House of Representatives did not produce a majority bigger than the apparent 221-214 result. (All numbers here are subject to revision in line with final returns.)

That 51 percent to 47 percent margin is identical to President Biden’s and President Obama’s popular vote margins in 2020 and 2012, respectively. It is just one digit off from President George W. Bush’s 51 percent to 48 percent win in 2004. 

It’s almost identical to the House Democrats’ 51 percent to 48 percent popular vote margin in 2020, which yielded them an almost identical 222-213 majority.

The big contrast is with 2012, when Democrats carried the House popular vote 49 percent to 48 percent but won only 201 seats to the Republicans’ 234. How could a party win a 33-seat majority while losing the popular vote, then win only a seven-seat majority while carrying the popular vote by 4 points?

One answer is differential turnout. In 2012, Democrats’ popular vote edge owed much to heavy Black voter turnout to reelect the first Black president. But many of those votes came in overwhelmingly Black districts and did nothing to elect Democrats elsewhere.

This year, differential turnout worked against Democrats. Central city turnout was way down, as compared to the last off-year election in 2018 — down 19 percent in New York City but up 0.3 percent in the suburbs and upstate; down 13 percent in Philadelphia, but up 8 percent elsewhere in Pennsylvania. 

Turnout was down 15 percent in Detroit’s Wayne County, but up 6 percent elsewhere in Michigan; down 12 percent in Milwaukee County, but up 1 percent elsewhere in Wisconsin; down 24 percent in Chicago’s Cook County, down only 8 percent in Chicago’s collar counties and downstate.

That reflects population loss in central cities, particularly from Black voters leaving the industrial Midwest for the more economically vibrant and culturally congenial metro Atlanta — making Georgia, with the nation’s third highest Black percentage, a target state. 

It also reflects, after four years of skyrocketing crime and stringent lockdowns, waning enthusiasm among heavily Democratic electorates. That’s not a favorable sign for Democratic turnout in 2024.

The second reason is that Republicans failed to harvest significant gains in House seats from their significant gain in popular votes in redistricting. Republicans had a big advantage in partisan redistricting following the 2010 census but only a minimal advantage following the 2020 census.

In particular, Democratic mapmakers and supposedly nonpartisan but liberal-leaning redistricting commissions have no longer felt bound by the Voting Rights Act to pack Black people into Black-majority districts — a tactic Republicans have encouraged since the 1990 election cycle because it leaves fewer Democratic voters in adjacent districts.

Abandonment of this supposedly immutable principle is responsible, for example, for the fact that Michigan elected zero Black Democratic congressmen for the first time since 1952. (A Black Republican was elected in mostly white, suburban Macomb County.) 

Democrats also won a state Senate majority for the first time since 1983 by winning districts that linked heavily Black neighborhoods in Detroit with affluent, mostly white suburbs.

The most important reason for the Republicans’ reduced harvest of House seats has been a reduction in clustering. Previously, heavily Democratic voters — Blacks, Hispanics and gentry liberals — have been clustered geographically in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns, while Republican voters have been spread more evenly around the rest of the country.

The effect of clustering can be seen in the number of House districts carried by different presidents. Both Messrs. Bush and Obama were reelected with 51 percent of the popular vote. That enabled Mr. Bush in 2004 to carry 255 of the 435 House districts. Yet Mr. Obama in 2012 carried only 209. Mr. Biden, with 51 percent in 2020, raised that number to 226.

Democratic clustering has diminished in recent years. Part of the reason is that Democratic groups have become less Democratic. Hispanics voted 29 percent Republican in 2012 but 39 percent Republican in 2022. The Asian Republican percentage increased to around 40 percent from 25 percent, and the Black Republican percentage increased to 13 percent from 6 percent.

Meanwhile, Republican clustering has increased in the wide-open spaces between the Appalachians and the Rockies, from far-out exurbs and in Walmart and Dollar General country beyond.

You can see the evidence from which party won seats with supermajorities. In 2012, 71 Democrats and only 32 Republicans were elected to the House with 70 percent or more of the vote. Twenty-eight Democrats got 80 percent or more, whereas only three Republicans did.

This year, by my preliminary count, the 70-plus percent districts moved closer to parity — 58 Democrats and 39 Republicans. Only 18 Democrats and five Republicans won with 80 percent or more.

Thus, the Republicans’ 51 percent of the total House vote produced a disappointing number of House seats. However, it also signaled a residual Republican strength. Republican House candidates had a hard time dislodging Democrats in marginal districts. 

Yet relatively few were weighted down by highly publicized endorsements of President Trump’s backward-looking insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; the few identified with that view ran significantly behind the many who didn’t.

Instead, Republican House candidates ran ahead of their party’s Senate candidates in such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. They also ran strongly in tandem with landslide winners like Governor DeSantis and Senator Rubio in Florida.

Republican House candidates won 58 percent of the popular vote in the South and 53 percent in the Midwest, two regions that together account for 298 of the 538 electoral votes. Duplicating that support is one way an unproblematic Republican nominee could top 270 electoral votes in 2024.

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