On Wednesday, the House Democratic Caucus re-elected Nancy Pelosi, of San Francisco, as party leader, 134-63, over Tim Ryan, who represents the area around Youngstown, Ohio. This was the narrowest margin for a House Democratic leader since 1991, as Clare Malone of fivethirtyeight.com notes.
But, as Pelosi noted, she also won more than two-thirds of the votes, as she had predicted. That’s a pretty solid win, actually, particularly for a leader under whom House Democrats have, as Ryan pointed out, lost more than 60 seats.
But it’s also a sign of the weakness of today’s Democratic Party, a party which this year sought and failed to replicate Barack Obama’s 2012 voter majority. The problem is that this Obama constituency, if you will, is heavily concentrated in central cities, some sympathetic suburbs and university towns, where it consistently wins 70-90 percent of the vote.
The problem is that Republican voters are spread more evenly around the rest of the country.
Do the arithmetic: If you win 30 percent of the seats with 80 percent of the vote, but win only 40-45 percent in the other 70 percent of seats, you have a hard time winning a majority of equal-population districts.
Obama didn’t: With his 51 percent of the national popular vote, he carried only 209 House districts, while Mitt Romney carried 226. The numbers this year haven’t been tabulated, but Hillary Clinton almost certainly carried fewer than Obama’s 209.
A historic comparison is in order. Forty years ago, just after the 1976 election, there was another Democratic leadership contest, the race for majority leader between Jim Wright of Fort Worth, Texas, and Phillip Burton, of San Francisco, who held Pelosi’s current seat.
Burton lost that secret ballot contest by one vote, 148-147. Which is to say, Pelosi’s 134 votes which gave her a better than two-thirds majority were 13 fewer than Burton’s losing total.
Democrats held 292 House seats after the 1976 election, 98 more than the 194 they hold now after the 2016 election. (The totals in these contests are slightly higher, since House Democrats let non-voting delegates from D.C. and the territories vote in caucus elections). The following table shows the number of House Democrats from each of the four regions of the country after the 1976 and 2016 elections.
| Total | East | Midwest | West | South | |
| 1976 | 292 | 78 | 68 | 51 | 95 |
| 2016 | 194 | 59 | 32 | 63 | 40 |
Reapportionment reduced the total number of seats in the East and Midwest and increased the number in the West and South. But what’s striking here is that there are fewer than half as many House Democrats from the Midwest and South today than there were 40 years ago.
The East and West — largely the coasts — accounted for only 44 percent of House Democrats in 1976; they accounted for 63 percent of House Democrats today.
Another interesting comparison is to count the number of House Democrats from states carried this year by Clinton and states carried by President-elect Trump. The numbers:
| Total | Clinton ’16 | Trump ’16 | |
| 1976 | 291 | 128 | 164 |
| 2016 | 194 | 131 | 63 |
There are actually three more House Democrats from Clinton states than there were 40 years ago. But there are 101 fewer House Democrats currently representing districts in Trump states. And if you drill down, you will find that today, 28 of the 63 Trump state House Democrats are members of the Black or Hispanic Caucuses.
Interestingly, both Burton in his unsuccessful drive to become majority leader in 1976 and Pelosi in her successful drive to become House minority leader in 2003 forged alliances with coal-and-steel country Democrats — Burton with the later infamous Wayne Hays of Ohio and Pelosi with the anti-Iraq war Marine veteran John Murtha of Pennsylvania.
The Hays alliance made a certain sense for Burton, who was backed by private-sector labor unions back in San Francisco, and the Murtha alliance made sense for Pelosi given their strong anti-war views. But by 2016, there were virtually no coal-and-steel country House Democrats left; arguably the only one is Tim Ryan, Pelosi’s opponent.
In contrast, there are 39 House Democrats from California, up from 29 in 1976, plus seven from Arizona and Nevada, up from two in 1976.
Maryland, where Pelosi grew up, has two more House Democrats than in 1976, and six other states each have one more (Connectict, Delaware, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont). The other 40 states have fewer House Democrats than in 1976 or the same number. Those are the kind of results a party gets when it relies almost entirely on a geographically clustered coalition.
