Republicans captured 49.4% of the two-party vote for Congress in 2012, yet won 54% of the seats in the House.
This gap between the Republican vote and the seats they won is on the high side, but certainly not without precedent over the past 40 years. …
If you began your career as a Republican trying to win the House in the 1970s and 1980s, you would adopt, as I do, the borrowed adage “there’s no crying in redistricting.” I do not recall a series of commentators weeping then about the huge structural advantage the Democrats had drawn for themselves, and having missed that opportunity, now is not the time for lamentation. [cont. – PDF]
Bill McInturff, Public Opinion Strategies