BREAKING: Comparing the greatest House victory margins!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2018

Three years out of college: Democrats won control of the House in last month's elections. That said:

Was it the biggest such victory ever? In an admittedly snarky performance, that's what we liberals were told:

MAJOR CABLE NEWS HOST (11/28/18): The reason I'm being a little snarky is because all this comes just as Nancy Pelosi led her party to an electoral victory that will return them to power in the House with the largest margin of victory in the popular vote of any party ever in the midterm election. No party ever in the history of the country has won a midterm election by a larger margin than Pelosi's Democrats just did in the House.

Is that true? Did Democrats win the House "with the largest margin victory in the popular vote of any party ever in a midterm election?" Is it true that "no party ever...has won a midterm election by a larger margin?"

In even a slightly rational world, no, it isn't true. According to the leading authority, here's where this year's numbers currently stand:

Popular vote, 2018 House elections:
Democrats: 60.2 million votes (53.3%)
Republicans: 50.8 millions votes (44.9%)
Margin of victory: Roughly 9.4 million votes (8.4%)

That was a substantial victory margin. But in quite a few earlier midterm elections, Democrats won the popular vote for the House by even larger margins:

Victory margin for Democrats, mid-term House elections:
1958: 12.4%
1970: 8.7%
1974: 16.8%
1978: 8.9%
1982: 11.8%
1986: 9.9%

We've checked, and all those years were part of American history. Democrats won by a substantial margin last month. But they won midterm House elections by larger margins in each of those earlier years.

(None of this actually matters, of course. Unless you dislike getting conned.)

You'll note that we're going by percentage of the vote, not by the total number of votes. We're doing that for an obvious reason:

As the U.S. population grows, the electorate gets bigger every year. It doesn't make sense to compare the total vote in 2018 (population approaching 330 million) to the total vote in 1970 (205.1 million).

That would be like comparing dollar amounts down through the years without adjusting for inflation. As a general matter, it makes no sense to perform such comparisons.

Why then did a cable news star offer that pleasing message? Simple! She was providing the kind of tribal happy talk which brings viewers back for more.

Then too, her staff may have been working from this NBC News news report, in which a youngish NBC journalist performed the pointless, inadvisable "total vote" comparison.

That youngish journalist compared the total number of votes in House elections down through the years, not the victory margin by percentages. Statistically, this procedure makes no sense. But the journalist in question is only three years out of college.

The journalist in question is on the youngish, less experienced side. Such hiring tends to keep labor costs down and corporate profits high. This allows NBC to pay its dissembling cable stars millions of dollars per year, although you aren't allowed to know how big their salaries actually are.

That cable star was feeding viewers a big dish of happy talk. The Democrats' win had been substantial; she said it had been historic.

She went on to offer a silly complaint about some reporting on the House election done by the New York Times. She was comparing an apple to an orange, but her result was pleasing and therefore good. But then, perhaps due to all the wealth and fame, the work performed by this cable star has been sliding for a very long time.

(To watch the whole segment, click this.)

We liberals! We're being pandered to all the way down. Does anybody actually think this repetitive conduct makes sense?

More such tribal foofaw tomorrow. In these highly tribal times, such bullsh*t by us "rational animals" pretty much never stops.