United States House of Representatives election 2016 — Results
Election day: November 8, 2016
- Republican Party: 48.30%, 241 seats
- Democratic Party: 47.30%, 194 seats
About this election
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.
Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.
In numbers
- 1.00 points separated Republican Party from Democratic Party — 1,354,771 votes.
- Republican Party converted 48.30% of the vote into 241 of 435 seats (55.40%), 7.10 points more than its vote share.
Calculated from the official figures on this page and from the other elections of this type in our archive.
Understanding this election
- D’Hondt vs Sainte-Laguë — how a divisor formula turns vote shares into seats
- How Electoral Systems Work Around the World — first-past-the-post, proportional and mixed systems, with real numbers
- How a Constituency Map Gets Built — what happens when no boundary file matches the districts