Does The Majority Party Have An Advantage In Congressional Ballgame?

Tonight, Congress will once again take part in its annual baseball game, an ultra-American tradition that dates back to 1909. The Democrats, led by Louisiana Ace Cedric Richmond, have won the last four, but Republicans have a new weapon in freshman Rep. Ron DeSantis. Both played serious college ball, which doesn't really seem fair for some reason.

You can check out Ben Terris's great breakdown of the game (with infographic) in the National Journal, but the chart above aims to see if the game has any sort of "home field" advantage, comparing margin of victory to the margin the party enjoys in the House, where most of the players come from.

As it turns out, there's isn't much of a benefit from drawing from the larger talent pool. Republicans lead the series 41 to 37, but the "home" team is just 38-40. If we're grasping at straws, Democrats do perform slightly worse if the House is closely divided (small Democratic or Republic margin), but this correlation is weak, to say the least:

Since 1945, most Congresses have played two games—one each year. The chart above combines the results of these games to get a clearer picture of how each Congress performed on the whole.

This year's new Congress, the 113th, has 234 Republicans to 201 Democrats. Based on this margin and this silly model, I predict that the Republicans snap the Democrats' four-game win streak and take the game by two.

[ National Journal]