Following the conclusion of the 2018 congressional elections, Daily Kos Elections is pleased to unveil the most comprehensive guide to the new 116th Congress' members and their districts that you'll find anywhere. This spreadsheet includes a wealth of demographic and electoral data on the members and the districts they represent, providing key insight on the makeup of Congress and statistics that play a critical role in understanding Senate and House elections.
The guide includes our own calculations of the 2008-2016 presidential elections by congressional district, the 2012-2018 House election results, and recent Senate elections by state. Additionally, it includes vital census demographic statistics, such as the racial breakdown of the population, including race by citizenship status, to provide the most accurate estimation of the eligible voter population. It also contains college-educational-attainment statistics, median household income, and an estimate of the share of eligible voters who are white without a college degree, a demographic marker that has become highly salient in the Trump era.
For each voting member of the House and Senate, we have stats on gender, race or ethnicity, age, LGBTQ status, religious affiliation, and even a name-pronunciation guide. The 116th Congress will have both the most racial diversity and the highest share of women on record, and the chart below summarizes those stats by party for the House (note that North Carolina's 9th District is unresolved, and a special election may be held after allegations of election fraud).
Indeed, the new House will have more than 100 women for the first time in history, but at 23 percent, women are still far from parity with men. However, 2018 marked a massive divergence by party when it comes to women representatives: A full 38 percent of House Democrats are women, but only a paltry 7 percent of House Republicans are. That’s a record high for Democrats and a historic low for Republicans.
People of color also make up a record 25 percent of the House, but those numbers again wildly diverge by party. Among Democrats, 42 percent of House members are people of color, but only 5 percent of House Republicans are.
In total, heterosexual non-Hispanic white men still make up 60 percent of the House, but those numbers also diverge by party: They’re just 36 percent of House Democrats but a staggering 89 percent of House Republicans.
On the other hand, the Senate is far less demographically representative of the population than the House, as shown on the chart below.
Women make up a similar 25 percent of the total chamber but only 36 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans. The Senate is dramatically whiter than the House: People of color are only 9 percent of the chamber, including just 13 percent of Democrats and 6 percent of Republicans. Heterosexual non-Hispanic white man comprise 70 percent of the Senate, but just like the House, those numbers are significantly different by party: They make up 55 percent of Democratic senators and 79 percent of Republican senators.
We’ll continue to analyze and visualize the demographics and geography of the new Congress members in an upcoming series of articles. You can also find our previous guide for the outgoing 115th Congress here.