Now that states have begun to wrap up their vote counts, we can talk with more authority about the results from 2024. There’s been a fair amount of introspection already from Democrats, combined with the usual gnashing of teeth that accompanies a losing national campaign. One thing, which is important for elections analysis, that seems to be overlooked in the effort: The results were a near-perfect repeat of the 2021-23 election returns.
We can start with the popular vote. In 2022, House Republicans won the national popular vote by about 3 percentage points. There are still a lot of votes left to be counted, but this time around House Republicans look as though they will win by roughly the same margin.
We also see similarities if we dig down into the individual states. I’ve picked four states to look at more closely, all of which have received some degree of scrutiny for their supposedly surprising results in 2024. They are New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia.
I’ll use two different approaches to examine them. First, I employ a map that demonstrates the shift in vote share from either 2021-2024 or 2022-2024 at the county level. Second, I use a “histogram” of county shifts. These are just regular bar-plots that show count data – in this case, the number of counties that moved a certain number of points between elections.