After results from tomorrow's election are finalized, this market resolves to
(percentage of House seats held by Republicans) - (percentage of voters who voted for Republican representatives in the House).
(I consider this a proxy measure for the effect of gerrymandering -- choosing district boundaries in such a way to confer an advantage on one party.)
For example, if Republicans win 45% of the popular vote but end up with 53% of the seats in the House, this market resolves to 8.
If the true value is greater than 10, I will resolve to 10; similarly for -10.
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According to Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections
the R's won 50.6% of the popular vote and ended up with 222 seats (out of 435, for a total of 51.0%). So I will resolve to 0.4%.
If I were to make this market again, I'd do something to take into account third-party votes. R's plus D's combined make up only 98.4% of the votes cast (same source). Another way to see the issue: If I had asked "how much advantage will D's gain from gerrymandering", the result would be 1.2%. Both parties gained! Kind of silly.
Well, my best conclusion is that the affect of gerrymandering on this House election was small. If anything, it favored the D's slightly. (As @Conflux points out below: one expects the winning party to end up with a wider margin in the House than among the electorate. Given that the R's won, one would have expected them to win the House by a somewhat wider margin -- but they did not.)
@Boklam Strictly speaking, I believe @MartinRandall pointed that out - I pointed out the discrepancy in running unopposed. But that’s a technical point, thanks for the writeup!
@MartinRandall Also, I think there are more Republicans running unopposed than Democrats (maybe the other way) - regardless, it skews the result
