(10-06-2017 11:05 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-06-2017 10:57 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(10-06-2017 06:19 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  The false myth that gerrymandering is responsible for Democratic losses doesn't hold much water when one realizes that gerrymandering starts with one party or the other winning enough seats to dominate the apportioning body.

It is definitely not a false myth. In 2012, Dems received 1 million more total votes in House races, yet the House was still retained by Republicans. The issue is a combination of gerrymandering and what Jonathan brought up.
I'd agree that there was no issue if the Reps kept holding the House the past few years and they were always on the receiving end of the total vote total. But since that isn't the case, you can't just discount these concerns as being false.

From what I've seen, the results in senate and house races pretty much mirrored those in the presidential races. Democrats won by huge margins in NY and CA, and that more than offset fairly substantial losses in the other 48 as a group. If that is mirrored in house races, then it has little to do with gerrymandering, unless one wants to claim that the state boundaries were gerrymandered.

How many states were there where one party got a majority of the house votes, but the other party got a majority of the seats? Asking for information, I really don't know. I know the answer for the senate--zero, because senators are elected on a statewide basis.

Not sure on a national level...but that's exactly what happened in the Wisconsin legislature (which is the subject of the most recent gerrymandering case in front of the court). In 2012, the GOP took 60/99 seats in the legislature while winning 48.6% of the vote.

(Source for that, which is an invaluable resource for all things SCOTUS.)