What Does Redistricting Accomplish?

Last week I stumbled across this post at FiveThirtyEight, found it thought-provoking, and wanted to share some of the observations it sparked. The background is that the folks at FiveThirtyEight drew a whole bunch of different Congressional district maps, compared them, and evaluated the results. From the post there that pointed me to the “Atlas”:

No single map can fulfill all the criteria we looked at — more competitive elections or more “normal-looking” districts, for example. Depending on the desired outcome, each of the different maps could represent the “right” way to draw congressional district boundaries. If you haven’t explored the maps in our Atlas Of Redistricting yet, we hope you’ll do that now. Below are the details of how we made and analyzed all of them.

I think there’s one basic question to ask: what do all of their maps tell us about our current Congressional districts? I think two things. The first is that the most obvious way to explain our present Congressional maps is that in states with Republican-dominated state legislatures they’re drawn to help Republicans, i.e. “Republican gerrymanders”, and in states with Democratic legislatures they’re drawn to help Democrats.

But lo! and behold, several things emerge in turn from that. The first is that the only districting methods that ends up with a number of Democratic representatives greater than or equal to the present number are the present one and the Democratic gerrymander. That result which may be counterintuitive to some is a consequence of something that is just as true at the state level as at the national level: we don’t vote at large.

And that’s not symmetric on the Republican side. Many methods of drawing districts, e.g. proportional representation, compact districts, competitive districts, etc. wind up producing more Republican representatives rather than fewer.

Which brings me to my next observation. As I have pointed out before the strategy of drawing districts is to concentrate political, racial, or ethnic minorities in a very few districts and other dilute them. Any scheme for drawing districts other than the present districts produces more black representatives than are sent to Washington at present.

So if you’re looking for racism in our politics you needn’t turn to Republican-run states. Look no farther than the large states with Democratic majorities in their legislatures. I say this as someone who lives in the state with one of the most gerrymandered districts in the nation: the Illinois 4^th Congressional district which is not only racist but, what’s worse, obsolete. But for the bizarre barbell-shaped district Illinois, drawn with the explicit intention of electing a Hispanic representative, Illinois would undoubtedly be sending more Hispanics to Washington than we do now.