Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California pushes back on the gerrymandering explanation over at The Monkey Cage. Basically, he estimates what would have happened this year had the 2008 districts remained in force, and concludes:
Democrats do gain more seats under this simulation—seven more total—but fall far short of matching their predicted vote share. The point should be clear: even under the most generous assumptions, redistricting explains less than half the gap between vote share and seat share this election cycle. [emphasis his]
This may well be true; the 2010 redistricting compared to the 2000 redistricting did not, on net, explain the disparity between the Democrats’ vote share and their number of seats in the House. McGhee also points to Matt Green’s chart showing that not only is a vote-share/seat-share disparity not unusual, but that for a long time predominately favored the Dems. Part of that may be unavoidable; small differences in vote-share may correspond with larger differences in seat-share, similar to how the popular vote for president is always closer than the electoral college vote.
Perhaps my previous piece went too far in crediting the 2012 vote-share/seat-share disparity to the specific districting changes of 2010 (although I would like some alternative explanation of how Pennsylvania went from 12-7 Dem to 13-5 GOP in the span of four years). But two thoughts in defense of my larger point, namely the structural advantage Republicans have in the House:
- McGhee’s simulation only compares the 2010 redistricting with the old, 2010 districts that preceded them. The old districts are a natural point of comparison, but in doing so you can only conclude that the 2010 redistricting did not cause the vote-share/seat-share disparity if the previous redistricting was unbiased. Otherwise, you’re comparing two biased redistricting schemes. And if you look at Green’s chart linked above, you’ll see that the Democrats have underperformed their vote-share in every election save one since 1994. Whether through the result of gerrymandering or some other factors, the Democrats have been structurally handicapped for most of the last two decades.
- McGhee ponders what those other factors might be:
We have argued that incumbency is a likely culprit, but as Dan Hopkins recently pointed out, Democrats also do worse because they are more concentrated in urban areas. They “waste” votes on huge margins there, when the party could put many of those votes to better use in marginal seats.
This is a distinction that frustrates me. As I understand it, a large part of gerrymandering as currently practiced involves drawing districts that “waste” as many of the opponent party’s votes as possible. If that’s not part of McGhee’s definition, then that’s fine and we’re talking about different things. But whether Dem votes are wasted intentionally by a GOP redistricting committee or by accident through a “natural gerrymander” because they all live in cities, I think it needs to be a part of the conversation.
The more I think about it, the more I doubt that there’s any such thing as a nonpartisan redistricting scheme, at least so long as political differences are so geographically stratified even within states. The only two requirements for redistricting plans is that they 1) are contiguous and 2) contain roughly equal populations. The IL-4 laughably fails the contiguous requirement, but gets a pass because it’s an attempt to create a minority-majority district and get Illinois Hispanics some representation. But aside from such special cases, there are any number of ways to district a city like Chicago. You can do what the Illinois Dems did, and create districts going out radially from the city that mix in liberal city dwellers with more conservatives suburbanites. Or you can do what Pennsylvania Dems did, which is to put as much of Pittsburgh and Philly in as few districts as possible, and give the suburbs their own districts. I’m obviously not a redistricting specialist, but by what criteria can you claim one is more or less just than the other? Obviously as a liberal, I’m partial to minimizing vote-share/seat-share mismatches, but I can understand and appreciate the argument that the GOP’s method is more likely to create districts with shared interests, goals, and cultures. In short, should we strive for homogeneity or heterogeneity, and should we inscribe that preference into law?
Or, we could just create multi-member districts or use proportional representation and solve all sorts of problems in one fell swoop. But to use a system that systematically and consistently favors one party or group over the other seems to be incredibly unjust.