Showing posts with label GERRYMANDERING. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GERRYMANDERING. Show all posts

October 1, 2022

A Times analysis finds that the House of Representative has its fairest map in 40 years, despite recent gerrymandering.

 

Congressional gerrymandering is a smaller problem than it has been for much of the recent past.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Democrats have a shot

If you asked Americans to describe the ways that political power has become disconnected from public opinion, many would put the gerrymandering of congressional districts near the top of the list. State lawmakers from both parties have drawn the lines of House districts in ways meant to maximize the number that their own party will win, and Republicans in some states have been especially aggressive, going so far as to ignore court orders.

Yet House gerrymandering turns out to give Republicans a smaller advantage today than is commonly assumed. The current map is only slightly tilted toward Republicans, and both parties have a legitimate chance to win House control in the coming midterm elections.

My colleague Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains this situation in the latest version of his newsletter. “In reality, Republicans do have a structural edge in the House, but it isn’t anything near insurmountable for the Democrats,” Nate writes. “By some measures, this is the fairest House map of the last 40 years.”

Sources: POLIDATA; Daily Kos Elections; Voting and Election Science Team; PlanScore

Of the House’s 435 districts, 220 now appear to have a natural Republican lean, compared with 215 with a Democratic lean. To be clear, that three-seat margin (because Democrats must flip three Republican-leaning seats to win control) is still meaningful, especially in an election shaping up to be as close as this one.

There are two apparent causes. First, Republicans really have been more aggressive than Democrats nationwide. As the political analyst David Wasserman recently wrote for NBC News:

Thanks to reforms passed by voters, many heavily blue states employed bipartisan redistricting commissions that produced neutral or only marginally Democratic-leaning political maps — including in California, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington. And state courts in Maryland and New York struck down Democratic legislatures’ attempted gerrymanders.

By contrast, Republicans were able to manipulate congressional maps in their favor in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, among others, and the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court blocked lower court orders to draw new Black majority districts in Alabama and Louisiana. In Florida alone, Gov. Ron DeSantis overpowered his own Legislature to pass a map that adds an additional four G.O.P. seats.

The second cause is one that Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford University, has explained in his book, “Why Cities Lose.” Many Democratic voters live packed tightly together in cities. As a result, even Democratic state officials often struggle to avoid drawing districts where Democratic House candidates win landslide victories, effectively wasting votes.

In 2020, only 21 Republican House candidates won their elections by at least 50 percentage points. Forty-seven Democrats did.

226 to 209

If anything, these two factors would seem to give the Republican Party a larger advantage in the House than it actually has. Why don’t they? Courts have managed to halt some Republican attempts at gerrymandering, including in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. And Democrats have enacted their own gerrymanders in Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon.

Recent shifts in the vote — connected to Donald Trump — have also shrunk what once was the Republicans’ advantage in the House map. Rural areas that were already conservative became even more so, leading to bigger Republican margins in some House races without adding any new seats for the party. At the same time, college-educated voters in the suburbs swung toward the Democrats, helping the party flip some districts.

To demonstrate his conclusion, Nate mapped the 2020 presidential vote onto the 2022 House map, created after the recent census. When he did, he found that 226 of the current districts voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and only 209 voted for Trump.

That finding doesn’t mean Democrats are favored to hold the House, because Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points — a better showing than seems likely for Democrats this year. Recent polls have suggested roughly a dead heat between the two parties in the national popular vote. But Democrats do seem to have a legitimate chance to retain the House. (Nate will be laying out that case in his newsletter next week; Times subscribers can sign up to receive it.)

Gerrymandering is a real problem for American democracy, especially in the drawing of state legislature districts, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer recently documented. Some states, like North Carolina, are also likely to redraw their congressional maps even before 2030, especially if a coming Supreme Court case restricts the authority of state courts. Still, if you were going to rank the biggest current threats to American democracy, gerrymandering would not be at the top of the list.

The movement inside the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election would be No. 1. After that, in some order, would be the outsize and growing influence that the Senate gives to residents of small states; the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College; the lack of congressional representation for residents of Washington, D.C., and of Puerto Rico, many of whom are Black or Latino; and the existence of an ambitious Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

By contrast, congressional gerrymandering today is a smaller problem than it has been for much of the recent past.

June 29, 2019


Supreme Court Declines to Block Partisan Gerrymandering.

  • Justices: redistricting a political question beyond court’s reach
  • Critics warn court’s demurral could give ‘green light’ for abuse



GUARDIAN

November 7, 2013

FIXING THE SYSTEM


                                                                  Chris Rock


JOE NOCERA N.Y. TIMES

In Australia, people who don’t vote are fined. In America, people can go to jail for skipping jury duty, but there’s no penalty for not voting. I’m not advocating either fines or jail — not today, anyway — but I’ve got five reforms in mind that could both invigorate the electorate and encourage more responsive, and less extreme, political candidates. Here they are, in no particular order:

Move elections to the weekend. Do you know why elections fall on a Tuesday in early November? I didn’t either. According to a group called Why Tuesday?, it goes back to the 1840s, when “farmers needed a day to get to the county seat, a day to vote, and a day to get back, without interfering with the three days of worship.” Today, of course, casting your ballot on a Tuesday is an impediment: lines in urban areas are long, people have to get to work, etc. It is especially difficult for blue-collar workers — a k a Democratic voters — who don’t have the same wiggle room as white-collar employees.
Chris Rock — yes, Chris Rock — has been quoted as saying that this is the reason Election Day remains on Tuesday. “They don’t want you to vote,” he said in 2008. “If they did, they wouldn’t have it on a Tuesday.” Even if you aren’t conspiratorially minded, you have to admit that moving elections to the weekend makes a ridiculous amount of sense.
 
 
Term limits for the Supreme Court. Somewhat to my surprise, most of the experts I spoke to were against Congressional term limits. Norman Ornstein, the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that the unintended consequences of term limits would outweigh the benefits. (He cited, among other things, the likelihood that “they come to office thinking about their next job.”)
Instead, Ornstein proposes term limits for Supreme Court justices. If he could wave his magic wand, he would give the justices one 18-year term, and he would stagger them, so that a new justice joined the court — while another departed — every two years. Ornstein likes this idea, in part, because presidents would be willing to nominate older justices; now, the emphasis is on younger nominees who can remain on the court, and influence American society, for decades. I like the idea because nothing fuels partisan politics like a Supreme Court nomination. If the parties knew there would be a new nominee every two years, it might lessen the stakes just a bit, and bleed some of the anger out of politics.
 
Open primaries. Why are so many extremist Republicans being elected to Congress? A large part of the reason is that highly motivated, extremist voters dominate the current Republican primary system. Mickey Edwards, the former congressman who is now at the Aspen Institute, wrote a book last year called “The Parties Versus The People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans.” At the top of his list of reforms is open primaries — which would allow anybody to vote for any candidate. Indeed, California has already adopted an open primary system, in which the top two vote-getters run against each other in the general election — even if they are from the same party. As Adam Nagourney wrote in The Times a few weeks ago, this reform is one of the reasons California’s Legislature has become less partisan and more productive. Chances are good that the same reform at the federal level would produce the same result.
 
End gerrymandering. As a tool to entrench the party in power, few maneuvers can beat gerrymandering. It’s another reason that the Tea Party Republicans can pursue an agenda that most citizens disagree with: thanks to gerrymandering, their districts could not be safer. Here, again, California offers a better model. It has a 14-person commission made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four people unaffiliated with either party. In 2011, the new commission redrew lines in a way that broadened the diversity of many districts. That is exactly what should happen everywhere.
 
Bring back the small donor. There are few things more discouraging to voters than the power of big money, which asserts itself mainly in the form of so-called superPACs. But New York City has shown how the small donor can matter again: it matches small donations 6 to 1. Thus, a contribution of $100 would add $600 to the candidate’s coffers. According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the N.Y.U. School of Law, this system creates more donor diversity, greater participation, and, not least, greater attention by the candidates to small donors

February 25, 2013

GERRYMANDERING: NATE SILVER TAKES A SECOND LOOK






NY TIMES NATE SILVER

President Obama won the Electoral College fairly decisively last year despite a margin of just 3.8 percentage points in the national popular vote. In fact, Mr. Obama would probably have won the Electoral College even if the popular vote had slightly favored Mitt Romney. The “tipping-point state” in the election — the one that provided Mr. Obama with his decisive 270th electoral vote — was Colorado, which Mr. Obama won by 5.4 percentage points. If all states had shifted toward Mr. Romney by 5.3 percentage points, Mr. Obama would still have won Colorado and therefore the Electoral College — despite losing the national popular vote by 1.5 points.
Contrast this Democratic advantage in the Electoral College with the Republican advantage in the House of Representatives. Democrats actually won slightly more votes in the House elections last year (about 59.5 million votes to the G.O.P.’s 58 million). Nevertheless, Republicans maintained a 234-201 majority in the House, losing only eight seats.

Democrats are quick to attribute the Republican advantage in the House to gerrymandering. This is certainly a part of the story. Republicans benefited from having an extremely strong election in 2010, giving them control of the redistricting process in many states. (Although Democrats were no less aggressive about creating gerrymandered districts in states like Illinois.)
However, much or most of the Republican advantage in the House results from geography rather than deliberate attempts to gerrymander districts. Liberals tend to cluster in dense urban centers, creating districts in which Democrats might earn as much as 80 or 90 percent of the vote. In contrast, even the most conservative districts in the country tend not to give more than about 70 or 75 percent of their vote to Republicans. This means that Democrats have more wasted votes in the cities than Republicans do in the countryside, depriving Democrats of votes at the margin in swing districts. Eliminating partisan gerrymandering would reduce the G.O.P.’s advantage in the House but not eliminate it.

Read more at NT TIMES NATE SILVER

December 26, 2012

How GERRYMANDERED REDISTRICTING Helped Republicans Keep an Edge in the House

[What does it all mean? That it could get worse before it gets better. Read below about Redistricting and geographical population change. First, what Esco considers the key paragraph taken from NATE SILVER 's report:]


One of the firmest conclusions of academic research into the behavior of Congress is that what motivates members first and foremost is winning elections. If individual members of Congress have little chance of losing their seats if they fail to compromise, there should be little reason to expect them to do so. Republican leaders like House Speaker John A. Boehner may conclude that there are risks to their party if they fail to reach a compromise, as during the current fiscal negotiations. But as David Frum points out, the individual members of his caucus may bear few of those costs directly.
Meanwhile, the differences between the parties have become so strong, and so sharply split across geographic lines, that voters may see their choice of where to live as partly reflecting a political decision. This type of voter self-sorting may contribute more to the increased polarization of Congressional districts than redistricting itself. Liberal voters may be attracted to major urban centers because of their liberal politics (more than because of the economic opportunities that they offer), while conservative ones may be repelled from them for the same reasons.

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NY TIMES    By and : December 14, 2012

Thanks in part to the way that Republicans drew the new Congressional and legislative districts for this year’s elections, Republicans will still outnumber Democrats in Wisconsin’s new Congressional delegation five to three — and control both houses of the Legislature.

Pennsylvanians also voted to re-elect Mr. Obama, elected Democrats to several statewide offices and cast about 83,000 more votes for Democratic Congressional candidates than for Republicans. But new maps drawn by Republicans — including for the Seventh District outside Philadelphia, a Rorschach-test inkblot of a district snaking through five counties that helped Representative Patrick Meehan win re-election by adding Republican voters — helped ensure that Republicans will have a 13-to-5 majority in the Congressional delegation that the state will send to Washington next month.
Republican-drawn lines also helped Republicans win lopsided majorities in other swing states Mr. Obama won: Democratic Congressional candidates won nearly half the votes in Virginia but only 27 percent of its seats, and 48 percent of the vote in Ohio but only a quarter of its seats.

Last month’s Congressional elections were the first to be held in new districts that were drawn across the country after the once-a-decade process of redistricting, when many state officials, charged with redrawing their district maps to account for population shifts, indulge in carefully calculated partisan cartography aimed at giving their party an edge.

Republicans had the upper hand: thanks to the gains they made in 2010 state-level elections, Republicans controlled the redistricting process in states with 40 percent of the seats in the House, Democrats controlled it in states with 10 percent of the seats, and the rest of the seats were drawn by courts, states with divided governments or commissions.

In the nation as a whole, Democratic candidates for Congress won 1.1 million more votes than Republicans, according to a tally of the popular vote kept by David Wasserman, the House editor of The Cook Political Report. But Republicans maintained their control of the House — making this one of a handful of elections in the last century where the party that won the popular vote for Congress did not win control of the House.

[Some perspective:]     Democrats also drew gerrymandered lines in states where they controlled the process, but had less of an impact over all because they had control in fewer states, said Keesha Gaskins, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has been studying the impact of redistricting. In Illinois, where Democrats drew the maps, Republican Congressional candidates won 45 percent of the popular vote but only a third of the House seats. And in Maryland, Republicans won 35 percent of the votes but just 13 percent of the seats.   

Redistricting may sound esoteric, but it can have an impact on governing at the state and federal levels. It may have played a role in Michigan’s decision to pass anti-union legislation this week, a month after Mr. Obama won the state by nine points. Michigan Republicans drew the maps in the last two cycles, and even though Republicans lost some seats last month they were able to keep their majority with 54 percent of the seats in the state’s House of Representatives, while getting just 45 percent of the popular vote. And since redistricting gives many members of Congress less competitive, more politically homogeneous districts, it is often cited as one of the factors exacerbating political polarization — a tension can be seen in the current fiscal debate.

The latest round of redistricting is not the only reason Republicans lost the popular vote but won a majority of House seats, several political scientists and analysts said. Incumbency is a powerful weapon, they noted, and Republicans went into the election with a big majority in the House. A new election process in California pitted some Democrats against one another in the general election.

And a number of political scientists pointed to what Jowei Chen, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan, and Jonathan Rodden, a professor of political science at Stanford University, call “unintentional gerrymandering” in a forthcoming paper — the natural geographic patterns that lead many Democrats to choose to live in dense, urban areas with very high concentrations of Democrats, effectively packing themselves into fewer districts.
“Now, more than ever in history, Democrats are clustered in a small number of these urban districts,” Professor Chen said in an interview.

But it is undeniable that redistricting played a role as well. The new lines helped Republicans maintain their control of the House, largely because they were able to add more Republican voters to districts where Republicans won close races in 2010.

Michael P. McDonald, an associate professor of public affairs at George Mason University who has served as a consultant on redistricting for both parties, said there was a reason both parties fight so hard for the power to draw the maps — noting that they were not going to all that trouble “just to draw neutral plans.”
 
An analysis by the Brennan Center found that the new lines that took effect this year may have changed which party won in at least 25 House districts this year, and that they helped Republicans win a net gain of six more seats than they would have won under the old maps.

NATE SILVER NY TIMES   December 27, 2012

In 1992, there were 103 members of the House of Representatives elected from what might be called swing districts: those in which the margin in the presidential race was within five percentage points of the national result. But based on an analysis of this year’s presidential returns, I estimate that there are only 35 such Congressional districts remaining, barely a third of the total 20 years ago.

Instead, the number of landslide districts — those in which the presidential vote margin deviated by at least 20 percentage points from the national result — has roughly doubled. In 1992, there were 123 such districts (65 of them strongly Democratic and 58 strongly Republican). Today, there are 242 of them (of these, 117 favor Democrats and 125 Republicans).

So why is compromise so hard in the House? Some commentators, especially liberals, attribute it to what they say is the irrationality of Republican members of Congress. But the answer could be this instead: individual members of Congress are responding fairly rationally to their incentives. Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party. Instead, primary challenges, especially for Republicans, may be the more serious risk.

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...the number of swing districts has been on a steady decline since at least 1992, and the number of landslide districts on a steady rise. The year 2008 was a partial exception: the number of landslide districts rose slightly from 2004, but so did the number of swing districts. However, the polarization of Congressional districts became sharper again in 2012.

Some of this was because of the redistricting that took place after the 2010 elections. Republicans were in charge of the redistricting process in many states, and they made efforts to shore up their incumbents, while packing Democrats into a few overwhelmingly Democratic districts. In the few large states where Democrats were in charge of the redistricting process, like Illinois, they largely adopted a parallel approach.

But redistricting alone did not account for the whole of the shift; instead, polarization has increased even after accounting for the change in boundaries.

--------------[INCREASING POLARIZATION]---------------

....polarization increased by about 8 percent from 2008 to 2012 — above and beyond any changes brought about by redistricting. For example, a district that was 25 percentage points more Democratic than the country as a whole in 2008 was about 27 percentage points more Democratic than the national average this year. Likewise, a district that had been Republican-leaning by 25 percentage points in 2008 was typically 27 points more Republican than the rest of the country this year.
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...There is also a second type of polarization, one that I remarked upon after the 2010 midterm elections. In addition to the sharp increase in the polarization of the presidential vote, there has also been a sharp decrease in ticket-splitting. Far fewer districts than before vote Democratic for president but Republican for the House, or vice versa. In 1992, there were 85 districts that I characterize as leaning toward one or another party based on its presidential vote. Of these districts, 27, or nearly one third, elected a member of the opposite party to the House, going against its presidential lean.
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...There have been other periods in American history when polarization was high — particularly, from about 1880 through 1920. But it is not clear that there have been other periods when individual members of the House had so little to deter them from highly partisan behavior....The House has arguably never been so partisan — and yet there have probably never been so few members of the House who were at risk of losing their seats.

One of the firmest conclusions of academic research into the behavior of Congress is that what motivates members first and foremost is winning elections. If individual members of Congress have little chance of losing their seats if they fail to compromise, there should be little reason to expect them to do so. Republican leaders like House Speaker John A. Boehner may conclude that there are risks to their party if they fail to reach a compromise, as during the current fiscal negotiations. But as David Frum points out, the individual members of his caucus may bear few of those costs directly.
Meanwhile, the differences between the parties have become so strong, and so sharply split across geographic lines, that voters may see their choice of where to live as partly reflecting a political decision. This type of voter self-sorting may contribute more to the increased polarization of Congressional districts than redistricting itself. Liberal voters may be attracted to major urban centers because of their liberal politics (more than because of the economic opportunities that they offer), while conservative ones may be repelled from them for the same reasons.

In this environment, members of Congress have little need to build coalitions across voters with different sets of political preferences or values. Few members of Congress today are truly liberal on social issues but conservative on fiscal issues or vice versa. Instead, partisanship has become more uniform. This also marks a break from previous eras, such as when voting on economic issues in Congress was not strongly correlated with voting on civil rights.
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Meanwhile, Republicans continue to control the majority of governorships and state legislatures after their 2010 sweep.

And they remain in control of the House of Representatives, in part because the median Congressional district is now about five points Republican-leaning relative to the country as a whole. Why this asymmetry? It’s partly because Republicans created boundaries efficiently in redistricting and partly because the most Democratic districts in the country, like those in urban portions of New York or Chicago, are even more Democratic than the reddest districts of the country are Republican, meaning there are fewer Democratic voters remaining to distribute to swing districts.

...it would require a Democratic wave year, and not a merely decent election for Democrats, as in 2012, for Republicans to lose control of the House.

These strengths and weaknesses for the Republican Party could be self-reinforcing, or at least they may have the same root cause. The district boundaries that give Republicans such strength in the House may also impede the party’s ability to compromise, reducing their ability to appeal to the broader-based coalitions of voters so as to maximize their chances of winning Senate and presidential races. If so, however, that could mean divided government more often than not in the years ahead, with Republicans usually controlling the House while Democrats usually hold the Senate, the presidency, or both. As partisanship continues to increase, a divided government may increasingly mean a dysfunctional one.