The myth of Democrats' 20-million-vote majority

If we look at other states with mixed delegations and mismatched elections, we see the same thing. Marco Rubio won a three-way race in 2010 with 2.6 million votes representing a win of almost 20 points; Democrat Bill Nelson won in 2012 with 3.5 million votes in a 13-point win. Republican Dan Coats of Indiana won by 15 points in 2010 while Democrat Joe Donnelly won by just six points in 2012, but Donnelly is credited with 1.3 million votes and Coats just 950,000. Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Roy Blunt both won by about 15 points in Missouri, but Blunt got just 1 million votes to McCaskill’s 1.5 million (incidentally, this is the same 2:3 ratio we see in the overall numbers). Democrat Jon Tester of Montana won by four points in 2012 with 236,000 votes; two years later Republican Steve Daines won by 18 points but received just 211,000 votes. Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio won by six points with 2.8 million votes in 2012; Republican Rob Portman won by 18 points in 2010 with just 2.1 million votes.

There are a handful of states where the relationship worked in reverse (Dean Heller of Nevada won more votes than Harry Reid despite the latter’s larger margin), but overall there are huge discrepancies between vote shares won and the number of votes won even among senators from the same state. They almost all work in Democrats’ favor since 2012 was such a good year for them, and the votes cast that year were more numerous than the votes cast in 2010 and 2014.

If you are interested in what vote share can tell us — and we’ll focus on this for the rest of this article — we can just add up the total number of votes cast for all Democratic candidates and Republican candidates in the 2010, 2012 and 2014 elections, using Dave Leip’s election atlas as a source. It works out to 103 million votes for Democrats to 98 million votes for Republicans: a difference of 5 million votes, or 2.5 points. This is still a meaningful difference between the share of votes cast for Democrats and the share of seats that they won, but it isn’t the outrageous result that Vox headlined.