In the roughly two and a half months since we last assessed an already-long list of House open seats this cycle — and even in the week since my colleague Geoffrey Skelley took a deep look at the pace of House retirements historically — the number of open House seats […] Read more »
The Seats/Votes Relationship and the Efficiency Gap: House Elections 1972-2016
Redistricting for the U.S. House of Representatives is not a unified process, as is the case for most national legislatures, but rather the result of the cumulative actions in the states that have more than one representative. Nevertheless, it is useful to look at the entire House to see how […] Read more »
How election forecasts confuse Americans — and may lead them not to vote at all
Where were you on the night of Nov. 8, 2016? If you’re like many political junkies, you were watching election night coverage and wondering not whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would win but might Clinton do so well that she’d win in places like Texas and Arizona. When she […] Read more »
Exit Stage Left or Right: Midterm Retirements and Open Seats in the House From 1974 to 2018
In the aftermath of now-Rep. Conor Lamb’s (D) special election victory on March 13, a constant refrain has been the stated fear among Republicans that the result would precipitate more retirements among GOP members in the U.S. House. As the Crystal Ball has noted in the past, open seats held […] Read more »
Why The ‘Liberal Tea Party’ Doesn’t Exist (And Why Some People Think It Does)
As we head into the 2018 primary election season, some reporters and pundits have raised the question of whether Democratic nomination contests will turn into activist-fueled ideological purity tests—in other words, a liberal version of the Tea Party movement that has so famously roiled the Republican Party over the past […] Read more »
Forms of polarization
We regularly hear that American politics is polarized. Those doing the talking mean very different things by the term. Some look at any 50/50 division as “polarized,” though such a definition does not comport particularly well with the history of the term. For others, polarization refers to deep differences. That […] Read more »