Has Gerrymandering Made it Impossible for Democrats to Win the House?
By Sam Wang, October 31, 2014
In the upcoming House of Representatives election, nobody—not the pollsters, not the pundits—can be certain who will win the nationwide popular vote, yet Republicans appear likely to gain four to ten seats. Such a gain would bring their caucus close to the size it was after the 2010 election, when they won the popular vote by nearly seven percentage points. This discrepancy, on its face, is troubling, and it raises an obvious question: How can such an anemic popular vote yield such a bumper crop of representation?
One answer is that House Republicans have stretched their votes through state-level gerrymandering (defined here as the artful redrawing of district boundaries to help a party’s entire congressional delegation). Such redistricting is a bit like Hamburger Helper: if you come up a bit short, it helps you get the most out of what you have on hand. The generic congressional ballot (“This November, do you plan to vote for a Democratic or a Republican candidate in your Congressional district?”) shows that Republicans hold a median lead of one per cent. Historically, the final popular-vote outcome can deviate from the election-eve generic congressional ballot by a few percentage points, which means that both parties have a decent shot at winning the national House popular vote.
Gerrymandering can be spotted by comparing two ways of estimating the probable outcome of the House elections: through a close examination of district-by-district races, and by looking at the generic congressional ballot. By examining districts one by one, Kyle Kondik, of Crystal Ball, a political newsletter put out by the University of Virginia Center of Politics, currently predicts a Republican gain of nine seats. The right-leaning Web site Red Racing Horses projects an outcome between no net seat change and a G.O.P. gain of twelve seats. These projections fit with the general observation, established by political-science research, that in a midterm year the President’s opposition party gains seats. House Speaker John Boehner may end up with a caucus approaching two hundred and forty-six seats, the largest number of Republican seats held since the Second World War.
A similar mismatch between the popular vote and the number of seats gained occurred in 2012. Democrats won the House popular vote by 1.2 per cent, but still remained in the minority, with two hundred and one seats to the G.O.P.’s two hundred and thirty-four. A major cause of the mismatch arose from post-2010 gerrymandering in seven states, which gave the G.O.P. an approximately fourteen-seat advantage. Through a creative arrangement of district boundaries, large groups of voters can be put on the losing side of every election—which is what Republican-controlled redistricting was able to accomplish.
Gerrymandering protects individual representatives from the vagaries of voter opinion. In many states in 2012, gerrymandering was done at a more sophisticated level—to favor one political party at the statewide level. For example, in Pennsylvania, Democrats won 50.7 per cent of the statewide popular vote to Republicans’ 49.3 per cent. Yet thirteen Republicans won their races with an average of fifty-nine per cent of the vote, while five Democrats won their races with seventy-six per cent of the vote. A particularly creative act of gerrymandering benefited Congressman Patrick Meehan, of the seventh district, an archipelago-like assemblage of regions joined to one another by slender land bridges as narrow as a few hundred yards across.
Although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan offense, the outcome in 2012 was highly anomalous: only once since the Second World War did the party that lost the House popular vote end up with control of the chamber. I have previously calculated that, if districting across the country had followed less cynical, normal practices, the seat breakdown would have been approximately two hundred and fifteen Democrats and two hundred and twenty Republicans, a closely divided caucus. Republicans might still have a small majority because of patterns of population clustering, in which heavily Democratic constituencies tend to be clustered in densely populated areas; in any event, with the current arrangement of districts, regaining control is out of Democrats’ reach.
The House is, in many ways, a predictable game: a modest gain in the popular vote will very likely lead to even further seat gains. Roughly speaking, gaining one percentage point in a popular-vote victory should translate to approximately three more seats. A popular-vote tie would lead to a gain of four seats, and a two-percentage-point win would lead to a gain of ten seats. If the G.O.P. gains eight seats—well within the realm of possibility—they will make up all their losses of the 2012 election. This would put the House back to where it was after the election of 2010, a so-called wave year, when voter opinion swung strongly to the right. Using the tool of redistricting, they have successfully tilted the political playing field to secure a large majority for at least the next two years without the same popular appeal.
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