by Eric Rauchway

On yesterday's post about House Democrats since 1932, commenter moomaw1 said, "I'd like to see a comparable graph of the Dems' share of NORTHERN Representatives, given the bizarre effect that the South's peculiar history has always had...." Never let it be said that Open U isn't a full-service blog. Here's a graph showing Democrats' share of non-Southern states since 1932. (The South is defined the way the Census does--AL, AR, DE, FL, GA, KY, LA, MD, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV--so the non-South is everything else.) And just for further fun, here's a graph of the regions' contribution to Democratic delegations since 1932. For now, analysis is left to the reader. A note on data... I pulled these numbers from the Congressional Biographical Directory, except for the 110th Congress, which I got from Wikipedia. For the 110th, there were a few races still in process; they're not included. For previous Congresses, the numbers are always a little different from the data I used yesterday; this is because in the House members come and go, talking of Michel--no, wait, it's because in the House sometimes members come or go in the middle of a Congress, in which case two names would get listed for the same seat in the same Congress. Also, for the graph showing the split of the non-Southern seats, I only counted Democrats as Democrats and Republicans as Republicans; I didn't count Democratic-Farmer-Labor etc. So there would be some differences if one made all the rough spots smooth. Caveat lector.