On Tuesday, every seat in the House of Representatives is on the ballot. The last time that happened was in the general election of 2024.
Tuesday will decide the same question: which party controls the House. If 2024 is any guide, the answer could come down to a few thousand people in a handful of districts, and nobody can know in advance which districts those will be.
The party that controls the House largely decides which bills reach the floor, who chairs its committees and what it investigates. In 2024, Republicans won that control with 220 seats, two more than the 218 needed for a majority. Their three narrowest wins were in Iowa’s 1st District by 798 votes, Colorado’s 8th District by 2,448 votes and Pennsylvania’s 7th District by 4,062 votes. Add the margins in those three together and you get 7,308 votes.
If Democrats had won just those three seats, the House would have had a Democratic majority, 218 to 217. Other combinations of seats could also have flipped the House but none had a smaller combined margin.
Close races cut both ways. The tightest House race of 2024 was a Democratic win: Adam Gray won California’s 13th District by 187 votes.
And margins don’t stay put over time. Iowa shows how fast they can swing. In 2020, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks, running in what was then Iowa’s 2nd District, defeated her Democratic opponent by just six votes. But in the 2022 midterm, in the redrawn 1st District, Miller-Meeks beat Democrat Christina Bohannan by about 20,000 votes. In 2024, in a rematch with Bohannan, Miller-Meeks won by 798 votes. Six votes, then 20,000, then 798, all in the course of just four years.
Miller-Meeks and Bohannan are running against each other again this election. Neither of them knows whether this one will be decided by six votes or 20,000.
The problem is, many eligible Americans simply don’t vote. Roughly 250 million people are eligible to vote this year. In the last midterm, in 2022, fewer than half of eligible Americans voted, which means more than 120 million did not. Survey research points to one reason: In Pew’s survey after the 2018 midterm, 44% of the nonvoters it surveyed said that at least part of the reason they stayed home was that they did not think their vote would make a difference.
After the 2018 midterm, 44% of the nonvoters surveyed said that at least part of the reason they stayed home was that they did not think their vote would make a difference.
That belief can come from many places. Sometimes it’s arithmetic: the logic that one ballot among millions can’t change anything, for example. Sometimes it’s where you live: a Republican in Manhattan or a Democrat in the Texas Panhandle might be forgiven for assuming that the result is settled before a single ballot is cast. And sometimes it’s a sense that bigger forces, like trends and demographics, decide elections, not individual voters.
But nobody really knows in advance how close the race they are voting in will be.
How many more people would have had to vote in 2024 to have given Democrats the majority in the House? The answer is not 7,308. That number measures how narrow the three wins were. And it is not the number of additional voters it would have taken to reverse them.
If every additional voter had backed the candidate who was behind, it would have taken just over 7,300, starting with 799 more votes for Bohannan in Iowa. But additional voters would not all pick the same side. Some would back the candidate who was already ahead, and each of those would cancel out a vote for the candidate running behind. If the voters split evenly, they would cancel one another out completely.
So let’s assume a lean among the additional voters. Out of every 100 additional voters — voters who otherwise weren’t planning to vote — let’s say 55 back the candidate who was trailing and 45 back the one who was ahead. That leaves the trailing candidate 10 votes better off for every 100 new voters. At that rate, closing Iowa’s 798-vote gap would take about 8,000 additional voters. Under that assumption, you would need roughly 73,000 additional voters across the three districts I noted above to reverse all three results.
Seventy-three thousand voters sounds like a lot, until you compare it to the number of people who don’t vote. Of the more than 120 million eligible adults who sat out the last midterm, 73,000 is fewer than one in every 1,000. Those additional voters would have had to come from those three districts and lean the way we assumed. Even so, the number is small next to the total number of people who skip elections.
So if your district isn’t close this year, remember Iowa. Seats that look safe don’t always stay that way. And the House race is only one line on today’s ballot. Depending on where you live, there may be races for Senate, governor, the state legislature or school board, as well as ballot measures. Any of these contests could be close, and many receive far less polling attention than the races at the top of the ballot.
If you haven’t voted yet, Tuesday is the day. If you have, there’s one more thing you can do. Think about the person you know who is planning to skip this one. Maybe they believe their district is safe, or that the result is already decided. Send them this column.
Better still, offer them a ride to the polls.
The post Think your vote doesn’t matter? The data says otherwise. appeared first on MS NOW.
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