Back in 1812 the governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry redrew his
state electoral boundaries to help his party win. The new boundaries were said
to be so contorted that they resembled a salamander, or a sick dragon in this
cartoon, but the idea stuck hence the word gerrymander and this is how
gerrymandering works. Take this area here. If you split it up into five fairly drawn
political seats you'll end up with two red seats and three blue seats - easy enough.
But if you get all creative with those electoral boundaries you'll end up
with a blue seat, a red seat, a red seat, a red seat and a blue seat. In other words
a red majority even though there are more blue voters. What a Dodge!
And that is gerrymandering.
Let's bring this into the real world. This is what North
Carolina's 12th district looks like, this is what New York's 10th district looks
like, and this is what Maryland's 3rd district looks like; a rollerskating
angel carrying a fox in a bag according to one Redditor. And after the Supreme
Court effectively rubber-stamped gerrymandering in 2004, gerrymandering
went into overdrive starting with the electoral redistricting after the 2010
census. According to one study partisan bias tripled compared to the post-2000
districts and in a way that gave a big advantage to the Republican Party. An
advantage like this. In 2012 the Democrats won 1.2 million
more congressional votes, yet the Republicans won 33 more seats.
So 49 percent of the vote won 54 percent of the seats.
But don't think this is just a Republican thing. This is a graph of the difference between how
many seats the Democrats actually won in 2012 compared to how many seats you
would expect them to win based on their votes in each state so
these are the seats gerrymandered away from the democrats and these are the
seats gerrymandered towards the Democrats. The colours are who was
controlling each state at the time so you can see the Republican-run states drew
Republican favouring boundaries and the Democrat-run states drew Democrat
favouring boundaries. It's just that after 2010 there were more Republican-run
states so they did a better job of it. Cut to 2016 and only 33 of the 435
House seats were considered competitive. Was there a partisan slant there? You bet!
An AP analysis found the Republicans won as many as 22 additional House seats of
what would have been expected from the average vote share across the country
and that study I mentioned before found that to win back the house the Dems
would need to win between 54 and 55 percent of the popular vote.
So we're talking a 10-point Democratic margin needed to win the House, bearing in mind
that the Republican wave in 2010 was a seven-point margin and the Democratic
anti-Bush wave in 2006 was an eight point margin. But does this have to be
the result of gerrymandering? Because there's also "sorting" going on - that's
where voters of the same kind tend to live near each other, in particular
Democrats tend to live in very safe blue states and in cities with 70% Democrat
districts which wastes a lot of Democrat votes, and the proof of this sorting is
that you can't gerrymander the Senate. State boundaries are fixed, yet the
number of competitive Senate seats has basically halved over the last 20 years
and 52 out of 100 Senate seats are in states where the 2016 presidential
margin was at least five points more Republican than the national margin.
So the Republicans do have a natural "sorting" advantage right now, but nevertheless
even bearing that in mind the Brennan Institute still found the worst
gerrymandering abuses in just a few battleground states provides Republicans
with a durable advantage of 16 to 17 seats.
So what can people do about this?
Possibly nothing because while the Supreme Court had found racial
gerrymandering to be unconstitutional, back in 2004
Justice Scalia and three other justices argued that gerrymandering for
partisan gain was a political matter in which the court had no business
intervening because there was "no practical standard for adjudicating
cases of passing gerrymandering".
Except one of the judges in the majority,
Anthony Kennedy, did say that "if workable standards do emerge to measure these
burdens courts should be prepared to order relief". Well guess what!
Anthony Kennedy is still the swinging vote on the court and now some professors think
they've found that standard and Gill versus Whitford is going to the Supreme
Court this week! So let's hope they send Maryland's third District
back to the Rorschach test it came from.