Archive: Year: 2013

01/09/2013

If Members of the House of Representatives were ranked by how many raw votes they got from people in their district last November, the top 14 would all be Democrats. The number one vote-getter in 2012 was Pennsylvania's Chaka Fattah, who won re-election with a whopping 318,176 votes--nearly ten times his challenger's total. Current apportionment rules hold that every Member of the House is supposed to represent roughly 700,000 constituents, as of the 2010 census, so Fattah's vote amounted to 45.4% of that total. That number, which we might call the "Representative Quotient" or RQ for short, varies widely across the people's house. Twenty-two Democrats, including Fattah, earned an RQ of 35% or higher in 2012. Only three Republicans got...