If widespread disapproval holds, the GOP may have shot themselves in the foot with their successful redistricting and gerrymandering in 2011

..................................................................................................................................
Tea Party's House Seats Might Not Be All That Safe
By Karen Weise, October 14, 2013

Conventional wisdom says that the Tea Party wing of the House can do more or less whatever it wants, because representatives are gerrymandered into safe districts. As Republican popularity has tanked in recent national polls since the shutdown started, that notion looks far less certain.

Princeton Professor Sam Wang found that gerrymandered districts may actually be less safe than those that aren’t politically altered. By analyzing data from Public Policy Polling, which provides not-quite-perfect results in 36 districts, Wang found that Republicans lost twice as much support over the shutdown in their gerrymandered districts than in red districts with boundaries that weren’t politically redrawn. “Isn’t that freaky?” Wang said when I spoke with him.

Wang hypothesizes that this is because in 2011 a dominant GOP redistricting tactic wasn’t to pack districts with as many of their own supporters as possible; instead, Republicans wanted to concentrate as many of Democrats into as few districts as feasible and then spread their own loyalists across many districts to eke out wins. He says the results of 2011 redistricting are like what happened in North Carolina in the 2012 election: Republicans won nine seats by an average of 14 percentage points; Democrats won just four seats by a wide average margin of 40 percentage points.

The rest of the GOP districts are largely filled with independents, who tend to amplify the national mood. “When they swing,” Wang says, “they swing really hard against you.” Now that the mood has turned negative on the GOP, these districts have turned down even more. Taking into account that the next House elections are more than a year away, Wang extrapolates that the disproportionate reaction to the shutdown puts “dozens more seats in play” in the 2014 election. It has, he estimates, turned the likelihood of Democrats taking over the House from 13 percent to as high as 50 percent. “If either party is paying attention to this information,” he adds, “I would presume that those gerrymandered states would be prime targets to carpet bomb with ads.”

Justin Levitt, an assistant law professor at Loyola Law School who has testified in Congress about redistricting, cautions that a year is a long time in an electoral cycle: “Americans have notoriously short political memories.” If the negative national sentiment holds, he says there could be more primary challenges next year. (Bloomberg Businessweek wrote about one such race taking on a Tea Party incumbent in Michigan last week.)

The effects of redistricting can prove to be short, as political views change, candidates seek new seats, and people relocate. As Levitt says, “There is a limit of predictive power.” There is also an irony that if widespread disapproval holds, the GOP may have shot themselves in the foot with their successful redistricting in 2011. Levitt says the GOP could risk losing seats from either their more moderate or conservative wings, and fundraising could be more difficult, too. “More mainstream donors may be less willing to give,” he says. “People like to back a winner.”
..................................................................................................................................