Gerrymandering: Misdiagnosis of a problem

The October 2013 government shutdown has generated a lot of talk about the seemingly hopeless political divisions within Congress. Political pundits, politicians, and citizens alike have all been seeking to understand and explain just why Washington is unable to reach any semblance of consensus on so many of the most difficult issues before us, ranging from entitlement spending to healthcare policy to immigration reform. We hear a number of explanations offered, ranging from the highly ideological nature of the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party to the intense disagreement and division surrounding the Affordable Care Act, which some argue has carried over to other policy matters. While the recent budget agreement, passed by Congress and signed by President Obama at the end of December, along with a recent vote to raise the debt ceiling without another government shutdown, provided a welcome respite from the utter dysfunction of the past several years, the specter of crippling political division still looms large over Capitol Hill. 

 One frequently cited explanation for both Republican control of the House of Representatives, as well as the discord in that body, is gerrymandering; that is, the drawing of Congressional districts to be exceptionally favorable to members of a particular party. In an early 2013 interview with The New Republic, President Obama argued that many House Republicans hailed from “sharply gerrymandered district that are very safely Republican”,  and so many House members felt little obligation to pay heed to “broad-based public opinion.” Meanwhile, prominent commentators like constitutional scholar Sanford Levinson to Slate political analyst David Weigel have argued that gerrymandering is the primary reason for the fractious nature of national politics, and a major factor in how Republicans managed to retain control of Congress in the 2012 elections, in spite of Democratic House candidates winning more total votes than Republican candidates did . At the state and local level, concerns that gerrymandering unfairly favors Republicans has driven activists in Florida and elsewhere to propose state Constitutional amendments to mandate  a nonpartisan redistricting processes.

 

While it is certainly true that gerrymandering affects the electoral makeup of the House, it’s role is significantly overstated in much of today’s political discourse. Rather, the composition of the House, and it’s political leanings, are largely a product of the existing geographic distribution of voters within the nation, as well as the electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbent members of Congress.  Additionally, the degree of ideological difference between moderate, versus liberal or conservative House members of the same party, is not as sharp as commonly thought, while differences between Democrats and Republicans as a whole, are highly pronounced. Both of these dynamics contribute to the political clashes within Congress.

In an analysis of the 2012 presidential election, statistician Nate Silver found that while President Obama defeated Governor Mitt Romney by 4 points in the popular vote, there were significantly more Congressional districts that were carried by large margins by President Obama, than by Mitt Romney. Specifically, while there were 44 Congressional districts which President Obama carried by 50 points or more (meaning that Obama carried at least staggering 75% of the vote or more in these districts) , there were just 8 such districts which were so highly skewed in favor of Governor Romney. Since the portion of votes cast for a particular presidential candidate within a district is a strong predictor of which party’s House candidate will win that seat, a high concentration of Democratic votes suggests a district where Democrats will win Congressional seats by large margins.  Chris Cilizza of the Washington Post followed up on these findings, noting that in 2012, while 51% of House Democrats won their districts with 67% or more of total votes cast, just 29% of GOP members of the House won their districts by the same margin.

Districts which vote so heavily in favor of one party are essentially “wasted votes,” from a standpoint of winning seats in Congress. After all, if a party’s presidential candidate wins elections in a given district with 75% of the vote, it is highly improbable that any member of Congress from the opposite party will be elected. Yet, a district with a significantly smaller margin of victory for a presidential candidate, perhaps say 60% of the vote, would still be a safe seat for a Congressional candidate of the same party, while dispersing votes for the party amongst a greater number of districts, and thus making other seats more competitive.

A recent study by Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Jonathan Rodden of Stanford University demonstrates exactly how Democrats are inherently disadvantaged by electoral geography. Using data from the 2000 presidential elections, and focusing on Florida as a case study, Chen and Rodden showed that Democratic voters tend to be packed into densely populated city centers, while Republican votes are more widely dispersed throughout less tightly packed suburban areas. Additionally, heavily Democratic precincts tend to be located in close proximity to other heavily Democratic precincts, much more often than Republican districts are located close to other heavily Republican districts. It is important to remember that in Florida, like many other states, Congressional districts are drawn by members of the state Legislature, who propose and vote on potential district layouts.

As a result, Chen and Rodden found, even a completely non-political process of drawing Congressional districts is likely to result in Congressional districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic, usually well beyond the threshold required for a district to safely remain in Democratic hands. Meanwhile, Republican-leaning Congressional districts generally contain enough Republicans to remain safely in the hands of GOP Congressmen, without concentrating Republican voting strength to the same overwhelming extent as for Democrats.

Using a series of computer-generated scenarios, Rodden and Chen discovered that if Democrats won 50% of the total votes for House candidates within a state (that is, 50% of all votes cast for Congressional candidates, across every district in Florida), Democrats always end up with less than 50% of the House seats. In fact, examining the redistricting proposals submitted by Democratic members of the Florida legislature (the GOP controlled the state legislature in 2002, but Democrats were allowed to propose potential Congressional districts for the record), not one of the proposals introduced by Florida Democrats would have resulted in Florida’s congressional delegation being 50% Democratic, in cases where Democrats won 50% of House votes in the state. The districts that were eventually implemented by the Republican-controlled legislature fell within the range of options envisioned in Chen and Rodden’s experiments. 

Chen and Rodden extended this type of analysis to a number of other states, and found that the concentration of Democratic votes in urban and high-density areas consistently applied in these states as well, and tended to reduce Democratic representation in the House. Comparing redistricting scenarios with actual districts (as was done in their Florida analysis), Chen and Rodden also found that in all cases, actual districts in a given state fell within the range of scenarios predicted by the electoral geography of that state. This suggests that while there may be partisan bias in the district creation process, depending on who controls the state legislature, such bias is largely dwarfed by the existing electoral geography of a state.

Incumbency, specifically, the financial and organizational advantages of being a current member of the House, as opposed to running for the first time, also plays a major role electoral advantages currently enjoyed by Republicans. John Sides of George Washington University and Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California sought to test the effects of incumbency on the 2012 House results. Incumbency typically carries significant advantages in terms of visibility, fundraising, and political experience, which led to incumbents winning reelection 90% of the time, in 2012 House and Senate races.

 In 2010, when Republicans retook control of the House by winning 63 seats formerly held by Democrats (in large part, thanks to Democrats who retired from office in 2010), numerous Republican candidates were running for office for the first time. In 2012, these candidates were running as incumbents. Statistically accounting for this incumbency advantage, Sides and McGhee found that any advantages of gerrymandering were markedly reduced; that is, as Sides and McGhee put it: “...the ability of Republicans to retain the House majority may have been due to incumbency advantage, not new and more favorable districts. “

 Sides and McGhee acknowledge that the effects of gerrymandering cannot be completely dismissed or overlooked, but since most arguments about gerrymandering don’t fully take incumbency advantages into account, they believe that gerrymandering is overstated as a factor in the party composition of Congress.

So how many seats did gerrymandering actually cost House Democrats in 2012? Estimates vary. Sam Wang of Princeton University has argued that Democrats would have won 15 more seats in the absence of gerrymandering, while Nicholas Goedert of Washington University in St. Louis found that gerrymandering cost Democrats 9 House seats, and Sides and McGhee believes it cost Democrats 7 seats. What all these estimates have in common is that in each scenario, even if gerrymandering were nonexistent, Democrats would have been unable to retake the House. Additionally, in each of these hypotheticals, the number of seats lost to gerrymandering is significantly smaller than those lost to inherent Republican advantages like electoral geography and incumbency.

As noted earlier, President Obama and other observers have contended that gerrymandering results in districts which are heavily skewed towards Republican House members. Obama, and others who share his reasoning, seem to believe that Republicans who represent these overwhelmingly Republican districts don’t fear defeat at the hands of Democrats, and so are significantly less responsive to wider public opinion, which often holds an unfavorable view of actions like the 2013 government shutdown.  Those who subscribe to this line of reasoning often believe, as President Obama stated in a press conference held during the recent debt ceiling stalemate that shuttered the federal government, that  Republicans in “gerrymandered districts” were “more worried about a Tea Party challenger than they are about a general election where they’ve got to compete with a Democrat or go after independent votes.” As a result, Republicans in such districts, it is believed, are reluctant to compromise with Democrats.

As we now know, it is untrue that most of Republican advantage in terms of winning House seats stems from gerrymandering. Still, is it accurate to say that House members from heavily Republican districts are more ideological and inflexible than those from less overwhelmingly Republican districts?

Boris Shor of the University of Chicago studied this question by comparing the liberalism or conservatism of 2012 House candidates, with the share of the 2008 vote that was received by President Obama in a particular House district. Shor found that while there was some correlation between the ideology of a particular House candidate, and the portion of the vote that Obama received in their district in 2008, this correlation was much smaller than the substantial ideological differences between members of the two major parties. That is, while there are differences between moderates and ideologues (that is, between moderate and liberal Democrats, or moderate and conservative Republicans) within a given party, these differences are significantly smaller than the wide chasm between Democrats and Republicans running in the same types of districts (that is, districts where Obama won a particular share of the 2008 presidential votes).

This reality weakens President Obama’s argument that the unwillingness of many House Republicans to compromise on issues like the debt ceiling or the Affordable Care Act, is in large measure a product of the high portion of Republican voters in some gerrymandered Congressional districts. If that were the case, we would expect to see more pronounced differences on these matters amongst Republicans, depending on the share of votes won by President Obama in their district. However, that isn’t what is actually happening. A breakdown of the ideological leanings of candidates from both parties, measured against the partisanship of the districts that they were running in, can be found here.

Shor also found that the most highly conservative Republicans, unlike moderate Republicans, and both liberal and moderate Democrats, are largely unresponsive to the electoral makeup of the districts they run in. These very conservative Republicans can be found as candidates (and sometimes win seats) in districts where President Obama won over 50% of the 2008 vote, and also in districts where he was soundly defeated with less than 25% of votes cast. Regardless of how many Obama voters live in their district, these representatives remain steadfastly to the right in their political beliefs. Thus, while gerrymandering can certainly play some secondary role in the composition of a particular House district, the primary role of gerrymandering in the fierce partisan divide in the House still remains largely unproven.

Why does it matter that gerrymandering is a far less significant issue than so many analysts, politicians, and even voters believe it to be? In medicine, the misdiagnosis of an ailment will often lead to ineffective, and perhaps even harmful, approaches to treatment, while ignoring the real causes of sickness or poor health. The same is true in politics. After all, how can a major challenge like making the House more functional and cooperative be effectively addressed, when the underlying causes of current political divisions are misunderstood? By focusing on gerrymandering as a major cause of the party makeup of, and partisanship within the House, activists, politicians, and analysts are attempting to provide an incorrect, simplistic solution to a complex challenge, and thus wasting valuable time in the process.

Those worried about partisanship in Congress might try focusing on various ways to reform campaign finance spending, where incumbents generally enjoy a substantial advantage. They could also attempt to bolster third parties. Such an approach might allow these parties to win more seats in Congress, which could break the stranglehold the two major parties hold over American politics, and possibly force members of the House to be less recalcitrant, as they would face a loss of power, if voters chose alternative leadership.Whatever the solutions to the gridlock that ails us today, gerrymandering is a small part of the problem, and we would all do well to not make it a bigger issue than warrants it’s size and scope.