This sort of question is a lot easier to answer for countries that use proportional representation in districts that coincide with states/provinces. (The answer in such cases turns out to be most, and more when districts are on the smaller side, or lists are open.)

However, your argument is indeed not compelling because you’ve ignored the historical dimension: most of that population is actually quite new—the population of California in 1940 was 7 million, whereas New York’s population was 14 million—7 million in New York City alone. (That is “gerrymandered” because there was a lot of population growth, particularly African-American, associated with war industries.) Similar trends exist in miniature for other Western states, and it would have been very strange indeed for candidates to be being chosen from such a demographically marginal area.

(BTW, there was a little bit of a joke about people who moved to the West early on in there, but I guess American humor doesn’t translate well.)

Or put another way, the western ‘half’ isn’t exactly a gerrymandered group, and when a non-gerrymandered group produces 15 candidates for one party, and 0 for the other, I think that’s kind of interesting.

Andrew, that’s a good point about Pelosi, but I think for current purposes she pretty clearly counts as western. On entirely unscientific grounds, I think of the U.S. as much more migratory than most countries. Obviously in academia things are a little skewed, but even among non-academics, it seems normal for people to have families scattered over the country. (I suspect this is related to the common American practice of moving to go to college.) If that’s right, it would be surprising if there weren’t a lot of people whose high school (say) was a long way from their current home, and, if they are in the House of Representatives, their current district.

Unrelated to the post, I wonder how many Congressional officials represent areas they did not grow up in and how many have either not left or returned to their “home” areas. (There are some definitional problems: allowance would have to be made for redistricting, and there’s some question of whether running in a nearby district should be counted as staying in the same general area. Plus I’m sure there are those who moved a lot and don’t really have “home” districts at all.)

Similarly, the Pacific time zone starts in the Pacific Ocean.

I’m not sure what the actual U.S. land areas of the time zones are in square miles (someone must have calculated this), but glancing at this map makes it clear that the two middle time zones contain more land in the US than the Eastern and Pacific time zones, with Central Time taking up the greatest space.

Made part of his fortune slant drilling in Bodie, and you can’t get much more Western (or more crooked) than that. Unless you count the other parts of his fortune that he made in China.