Democrats’ Real Liability in the House
Joe Biden marked an unexpected and unwanted milestone this month when he won a clear popular-vote majority in the presidential election but saw his party suffer substantial losses in the House of Representatives.
That unusual combination of results—the first time it’s happened in more than 120 years—crystallizes the core challenge Democrats face in translating their consistent victories in the popular vote into congressional power. In geographic terms, their coalition is deep but narrow. The party has consolidated its hold on the nation’s largest metropolitan centers, which allows it to amass substantial popular-vote victories, but it has systematically declined in the smaller places beyond them—a dynamic that’s intensified during Donald Trump’s polarizing presidency.
The distortions created by this geographic sorting have been most apparent in the Senate. There, the GOP’s dominance of less populated, heavily rural states has allowed it to control the upper chamber more than half of the time since 1980, even though Republicans a majority of the nation’s population for only one two-year span during that period. Democratic senators are guaranteed again to represent a majority of the nation’s population next year, whether
