United States House of Representatives election 2016 — Results

Overview

The 2016 United States House of Representatives elections were held on 8 November 2016, concurrently with the presidential and Senate elections. Republicans retained their majority, winning 241 of the 435 seats to the Democrats' 194. The party won the national popular vote for the House by 48.30% to 47.30%. Although Republicans suffered a net loss of six seats from their post-2014 high, their majority remained comfortable, and Paul Ryan continued as Speaker.

The electoral system

The House of Representatives is the lower chamber of Congress, with all 435 voting members elected every two years. Seats are apportioned among the states by population, redrawn after each decennial census, and filled by first-past-the-post in single-member districts. Because there are 435 separate district contests with boundaries drawn largely by state legislatures, the House is not shown as a single national map on this page; instead the page presents the national popular vote and the resulting party composition of the chamber. A majority requires 218 seats.

The result in context

The 2016 House elections were notable for their stability amid a turbulent presidential year. Despite Donald Trump's upset victory at the top of the ticket, his coattails did not extend to the House, where Republicans actually lost ground; it was the first time since 2000 that the party winning the presidency suffered net losses in both chambers of Congress. The relatively small change reflected the entrenchment of district lines after the 2010 redistricting and the steady nationalisation of House voting, in which split-ticket districts have become increasingly rare.

Patterns

Democrats made modest gains in suburban and diverse districts, including pickups in Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and New Jersey, foreshadowing the suburban realignment that would power their 2018 wave. Republicans, meanwhile, consolidated their hold on rural and small-town districts. The result left a closely divided but Republican-controlled chamber that, together with the Senate and White House, gave the party unified control of government for the first time since 2006.

Significance

The Republican House majority was central to the first two years of the Trump administration, passing the 2017 tax-cut legislation and repeatedly attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, though that effort ultimately failed in the Senate. The narrowing of the majority, and the early signs of suburban discontent, set the stage for the dramatic Democratic recovery in the 2018 midterms.

Votes versus seats

The single most revealing figure on this page is the gap between the two totals. Republicans won the national House popular vote by only about one point — 48.30% to 47.30% — yet converted that sliver into a 47-seat cushion, 241 to 194. A margin that thin producing a majority that comfortable is not an accident of counting; it reflects two forces working in the same direction. The first is the districting cycle that followed the 2010 census, when Republican control of many state legislatures allowed favourable maps to be drawn for the decade. The second is geographic: Democratic voters are heavily concentrated in cities, so their votes "pile up" in a smaller number of lopsided urban districts while Republican support is spread more efficiently across many competitive ones. Together these effects meant that in 2016 the party lines could shift several points before the seat balance moved much — a structural tilt that makes the House popular vote and the House majority two quite different measures of who won.

Where the data comes from

Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2016 House general-election results — fec.gov.

Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.