The House of Representatives is the lower chamber of the American Congress. They are the ones called Congressmen. They, unlike Senators, must face election once every two years in their district. Its meant to be the more populist chamber, as opposed to the Senate which was conceived as the chamber off the states. This is why until fairly recently (in historical terms) Senators were appointed by the various legislatures or Governors rather than directly elected.

The ringmaster of the whole show is the Speaker of the House. And because the American system is predicated on the balance and separation of powers, for something to get done you need the co-operation and approval of first the House, then the Senate, then the President and finally the Supreme Court. So who commands a majority in the House of Representatives (and thus the Speakership) is pretty important.

But the Democrats probably won’t take it back this cycle, even though they are likely to get more votes than the Republicans for their congressional candidates. There are two reasons for this.

Redistricting

Once every ten years the U.S performs its census. This is used to inform a subsequent redistricting to reflect changing populations. In practice, however, parties have used the redistricting to gerrymander the system or to redistrict opponents out of existence.   Republicans did this after their landslide win in 2010, which is how we ended up with the current mess. Unfortunately this is a particularly blatant example, drawing ridiculous shapes on the map to make more districts that are fairly to extremely safe Republican and confining Democratic voters to smaller, safer districts where their votes would be wasted running up huge margins for the already victorious Democratic candidate. This was made particularly easy because redistricting in the United States is done by state governments, not the federal government.

For example. Chicago has two neighborhoods that are predominantly Hispanic in demographic terms. And Hispanic Americans generally vote Democratic, right? So they wanted to put them in the same district so all those democratic votes would go to one candidate and create two fairly safe Republican districts out of the rest. But the two Hispanic areas are on opposite sides of the city. Not to be defeated, they just drew a thin crescent-shaped line on the map linking the two up. The district looks like a horse-shoe now.

So the Republican party has engineered a system of districts where the Democrats need to win by about 6 points in order to actually get a majority. This also scores to underline another reason its difficult to turn Congress blue again.

The Huddle

Democrats in the United States like to congregate.  They huddle like Emperor penguins in urban and metropolitan areas much more than they used to. There are more than three thousand counties in the United States, and Barack Obama won the election in 2012 while carrying only 689. That can work, because those 689 include most of the huge urban centers like Los Angeles county, Cook County (Chicago), and the five counties that make up New York. He got 69% of the vote in cities with over 500,000 people. The Democratic vote is heavily concentrated in urban areas. And that makes it much easier to for Republicans to gerrymander the districts.

The consequence of this is that as Republican districts got whiter, more rural and older   they also got electorally safer. They could also ensure that there were enough districts naturally tipped in their favor to give them a majority.

But on the other hand, it gave Democrats more diverse, more urban and younger electorates that were also much safer. It has exacerbated the polarization of the parties, which had up until that point been fairly asymmetrical (the Democrats not moving much further left, the Republicans moving much further to the right).

Now most Representatives only need to worry about winning their primary, because the general election is something of a foregone conclusion.

The Democrats seem to be about 4-5 points ahead now. If that gets to 6 or 7 it might make sense to start talking about them taking back the house. But the system is so stacked against that they essentially need a landslide in order to eke out any majority in the lower chamber at all.

So it looks like Paul Ryan will be holding on to the gavel. For a while, at least.