Political Geometry

The Senate, House, and Presidential Make-Up over the course of time

Michael Round

November 7, 2009

With Democrats seizing control of the President, House, and Senate during the 2009 political season, a thought came to mind:  how often has this happened over time?

Collecting the data, something interesting stood out immediately:  the Democrats didn't seize control of all three elements in 2009 - they had control of both the House and Senate since 2007! 

This seems the set-up our Founding Fathers may have envisioned - one branch kept in check with the other branches. 

How could President Bush have been so wrong for 8 years when, during the last two, he should have been kept in check?

But let's look at the data.  What does it tell us?

Collecting the data seems straight forward for both the Senate and the House.  Count the number of Senators and Reporesenatives by year and party, and total them up.

What about the President?  How should this be totaled?  Popular vote percentage?  Percentage of electoral college votes?  I've chosen the latter:

The data:

Here's the data, but what can I do with it?  Graph it?  Graph what?  The totals are all changing, as our country grew.  A thought: what if I graph the deviation from "a house equally divided", i.e., a 50/50 split, and calculate the deviation from an equal split.

For example:  if the totals were 40 / 60, my "under/over" would be:

40:  40/100 - 0.50 = - 10%

60:  60/100 - 0.50 = +10%

It's easy to see once I have the calculations for one party, the opposing party is symmetric about the midpoint of 0%.

The data:

The ebbs and flows are remarkable.  FDR had tremendous figures throughout his four terms with all three elements: the House, Senate, and President.  Reagan dominated the Presidential, but held only a slim Weight in the Senate, while the Democrats controlled the House.

In fact, it's remarkable viewing control of the House over time - Democrats held this body for nearly the latter half of the 20th century.

But how to graph this?  Here's a shot with:  Democrats in Blue,  Republicans in Red:

The domination of FDR is more evident here, as is the prolonged control of both the House and the Senate by the Democrats.  Despite that domination, the Presidential vote goes back and forth between the two parties.

How to bring all of this together?  How to combine these three graphs into a single "political power" graphic?  A landslide presidential election, coupled with same party control of both voting bodies, is much different than a slim Presidential victory coupled with a changing of the guard in the two bodies.

That's obvious.

But what does it look like?

And how do I weight the three bodies?  Equally?  That doesn't seem right.  The President, after all, is suppose to set the tone of the process.  Give more weight to the Presidential Weight?

To "get something on the table", let's use this:

Presidential Weight:  40%

House of Representatives Weight:  30%

Senate Weight:  30%

Before I display the results, let's challenge the process.  Is this reasonable?  Maybe the Presidential vote could be based on the popular vote, rather than the electoral college vote.  How should I properly take into account third-party results?  What about the 40/30/30 split above?

Lots of issues - lots of valid thoughts:

Let's run the data and see what we get:

We see the tremendous power FDR and LBJ both had.  What did we get?  Social Security and Medicare.  The New Deal and the Great Society. 

Elections have consequences.

Clinton's "power" dropped in half when Rupublicans gained control of both the House and the Senate.

Obama has approximately the same power ranking as Clinton's first year.

And what about George Bush?  He's taken a lot of criticism for the last eight years.  To be responsible for such chaos, one would expect a massive mandate.  Did he have it?  The data shows otherwise.

In fact, in his last two years, the power between the Presidency, House, and Senate was equally divided!  The Democrats have had equal say since 2007! 

What did President Obama inherit?  The data suggests its ridiculous to blame Bush.

Any good thoughts on improving the above analysis are welcomed.  All ignorant thoughts will be posted, but ignored.