{"id":52626,"date":"2012-11-13T14:03:27","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T19:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=52626"},"modified":"2012-11-14T00:29:50","modified_gmt":"2012-11-14T05:29:50","slug":"congressional-races-and-the-manipulation-of-districts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/11\/13\/congressional-races-and-the-manipulation-of-districts\/","title":{"rendered":"Congressional Races and the Manipulation of Districts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a democracy, all votes are created equal — one person, one vote -\u2013 but apparently some votes are more equal than others.\u00a0 Obama won the electoral college vote 62% – 38%, though his margin in the popular vote was much smaller: 51% – 48%.<\/p>\n

A similar discrepancy happened in the vote for Congressional representatives.\u00a0 The Republicans control the House of Representatives, where they have 54% of the seats. But if you add up all the votes for those seats, the Democrats come out slightly ahead (by about 500,000 votes).\u00a0 More votes but fewer seats.<\/p>\n

That discrepancy arises from the distribution of Democrats and Republicans in a state\u2019s Congressional districts.\u00a0 Take a hypothetical state with four districts, each with 200 people.\u00a0 The popular vote splits evenly \u2013- 400 Democrats, 400 Republicans.\u00a0Here are the election results:<\/p>\n

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The Republicans have 50% of the popular vote but get 75% of the seats.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Less hypothetically, in North Carolina, Democratic candidates outpolled Republicans 2.22 million to 2.14 million.\u00a0 But Republicans won 10 of the 14 seats.\u00a0 The Democratic votes were crowded into four districts.\u00a0 In three of those four districts, the Democrats won big \u2013 by an average of 133,000 votes.\u00a0 (If the 7th district, where Democrats now have a slim lead, goes Republican, that average margin will be 177,000.)\u00a0 Had some of the Democrats from one of those districts been mapped into the neighboring district, they might have won both, though by smaller margins.\u00a0 The Republican districts had secure but smaller majorities.\u00a0 Republican winning margins averaged 50,000 votes, less than half the margin where Democrats won.<\/div>\n
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My first thought was that this was pure Gerrymandering.\u00a0 State legislatures get to draw the maps of their Congressional districts.\u00a0 And many more state legislatures are controlled by Republicans.\u00a0 In fact, some of the North Carolina districts have unusual shapes.\u00a0 The NC-12, the thin blue line along Interstate 85 stretching nearly to the border, was created as a \u201cmajority-minority\u201d district so that Black votes would not be diluted.\u00a0 The downside for Democrats is that it packs those votes into that narrow corridor.\u00a0 So the Democrats take that district by over 180,000 votes.\u00a0 The Republicans with the neighboring districts but by much smaller margins – 23,000, 25,000, and 53,000.\u00a0 In those four districts, the Democrats got 53% of the vote, but Republicans took three of the four seats.<\/p>\n

The Democratic district snaking down through the middle of the state is the 4th, which contains \u201cthe Triangle\u201d to the north, but now has that tail stretching down.\u00a0 Democrats carried the district\u00a0 by 170,000 votes.\u00a0 Surrounding it is the 2nd (in pink), which Republicans carried by only 45,000 votes.<\/p>\n

Similar differences crop up in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The popular vote is close, and in two of these states it goes to the Democrats.\u00a0 But Republicans get most of the seats.\u00a0 Republicans win their seats by less than half the margin of Democratic winners.\u00a0\u00a0Here is a graph of the actual returns from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. (The Ohio total does not include the vote from the two uncontested districts, one Democrat, one Republican.\u00a0\u00a0For the maps and election results, check out\u00a0Politico<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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The Republican share of Congressional seats is far out of proportion to its share of the vote.\u00a0 In Ohio and North Carolina, Democrats received more votes, but Republicans got 70-75% of the House seats.\u00a0 It certainly is possible that Republican-dominated state legislatures drew the districts so as to cram Democratic voters into electoral ghettos.<\/div>\n
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I don\u2019t know enough about the demography and geography of these states, but I do wonder why the districts are drawn this way.\u00a0 A paper by Chen and Rodd (here<\/a>) that uses 2000 election data argues that what looks like gerrymandering is in fact the result of \u201chuman geography.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s not the legislatures that pack Democrats together, it\u2019s the Democrats themselves.\u00a0 They cluster in cities.\u00a0 As for Democrats outside of cities,<\/p>\n

many rural, small-town, and suburban precincts that lean Democratic are often subsumed into moderately Republican districts. . . . There are isolated pockets of support for Democrats in African-American enclaves in the suburbs of big cities and in smaller towns with a history of railroad industrialization or universities. However, these Democratic pockets are generally surrounded by Republican majorities, thus wasting these Democratic votes. As a result, the Democrats are poorly situated to win districts outside of the urban core.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Regardless of intent, the effect is to keep Democratic votes concentrated in the 4th.\u00a0 If that blue tail of the NC-04 were subsumed into the pink NC-02, both districts might be blue.<\/p>\n

In any case, Democrats have not always been on the wrong side of the seat\/vote discrepancy.\u00a0 John Sides at\u00a0The Monkey Cage<\/a>\u00a0posted this graph showing the ratio for the last twenty-six elections.<\/p>\n

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Sides quotes Matthew Green on the general trends:<\/p>\n