All the recent drama in the U.S. House of Representatives involving foreign aid and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to oust Mike Johnson illustrated the perils of a small and unstable House majority. But it’s better than nothing, which is what Republicans may have in terms of power in the House after the November general election. It’s still anybody’s bet which party will control the House in the upcoming 119th Congress. The Wall Street Journal recently looked at House-race ratings from three highly reputed independent handicappers and suggested Republicans should be favored to hang on to control, albeit narrowly. We don’t actually know the final map of districts thanks to litigation over a new majority-Black district in Louisiana that may or may not survive until November.
But one instrument for determining the likely outcome of House elections points toward a small Democratic advantage: the so-called generic congressional ballot. This is a polling question deployed for many years that simply asks respondents which party’s candidate they intend to vote for in an upcoming U.S. House election. Currently, Democrats lead by 1.2 percent (45.2 percent to 44 percent) in the RealClearPolitics averages of polls measuring generic congressional preferences and by 0.8 percent (44.5 percent to 43.7 percent) in the FiveThirtyEight averages. This represents a recent shift. In the RCP averages, Republicans led in the generic congressional balloting from mid-November 2023 until late April 2024, though never by more than 3 percent. FiveThirtyEight showed Democrats taking a narrow lead in mid-March.
These numbers are worth watching because the generic congressional ballot has a record of considerable (but not universal) accuracy in estimating the national House popular vote. Most recently, in 2022, Democrats won the national House popular vote by 2.8 percent after leading in the RCP polling averages for the generic ballot by 2.5 percent. On the other hand, in 2020, Democrats significantly underperformed as compared to generic-ballot polling, winning the House popular vote by just 3.1 percent after leading in the polling averages by 6.8 percent. Complicating the picture even more is the fact that the House popular vote does not always sync with the proportion of House seats won; often, Democrats don’t win as many seats as the vote totals would suggest, reflecting (it appears) a less efficient distribution of votes across House districts and/or Republican success in gerrymandering. An extreme example occurred in 2012 when Democrats won the national House popular vote by 1.2 percent but won only 201 of the 435 House seats.
There’s an increasingly strong tendency in presidential-election years for the national House popular vote to echo the presidential vote. In 2020, Joe Biden won 51.3 percent of the popular vote, just 0.5 percent higher than his party’s 50.8 percent of the national House vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s percentage of the popular vote (48.2 percent) was nearly identical to the Democratic share of the national House popular vote (48.0 percent). So trends in the presidential contest could give us a heads-up on what is likely to happen in the House and vice versa.
What the next president of the United States could really use is a trifecta, or control of Congress along with the White House. As it happens, five of the past six presidential-election cycles (all but 2012) have produced a trifecta, though the last two (2016 and 2020) have been won by exceedingly narrow margins in one or both congressional chambers. Right now, Republicans are favored to flip the Senate, but it would be foolish to place any big bets at this point on the outcome of either the presidential or House elections.
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