I've been doing some electoral math using the Cook House popular vote tracker, and it's kind of disturbing 1/ docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
Before the election, it was widely asserted that Dems had a big structural disadvantage due to gerrymandering and geographical concentration of minority voters. In the end, though, they turned an 8.6% lead in the popular vote into a roughly 8 percent lead in seats. No problem? 2/
But Dems won the median seat by 4.1% -- i.e., they probably would have failed to take control if their margin had been less than that. That's a couple of points lower than most pre-election analyses suggested, but still a lot 3/
The reason Ds did so well in the end was that their wave was so big that it breached the GOP levee, flooding into normally safe GOP suburban districts. But what if that hadn't happened, or doesn't happen next time? We'd have a minority party in full control 4/
And if you're watching developments in WI, MI, and NC, you know that the GOP has become full-on authoritarian, willing to do whatever it takes to hold power. And if Trump had been a bit less awful, we could be seeing that scenario unfold for all of America right now 5/
So we had a narrow escape, and we're still very much at risk of being Hungary writ large 6/
