Writing at The New Republic Nate Cohn challenges the common wisdom that gerrymnandering has lead to more and more conservative Republican districts than would otherwise be the case:
But the fact that gerrymandering boosted the total number of House Republicans does not mean that gerrymandering made the GOP more likely to support extreme positions or shutdown the government. In fact, partisan gerrymandering usually reduces the number of extremely red districts. Why? Because the point of partisan gerrymandering isn’t to try and maximize the number of safe districts. The goal is to maximize the number of districts that are merely safe enough by packing as many of your opponents’ voters as you can into a small number of extremely partisan districts while safely distributing the rest throughout your own districts. In this way, gerrymandering may actually increase the number of moderate Republicans.
I think that even this formulation over-simplifies what gerrymandering does somewhat. As I see it gerrymandering has two purposes. It is used to protect incumbents and to concentrate the strength of minorities in a relatively small number of districts. The minorities can be racial minorities, ethnic minorities, or political minorities.
Here in Illinois the 4th Congressional District is enormously gerrymandered. That’s Luis Guitierrez’s district and without it it’s quite unlikely he would have been elected to the House, indeed, Chicago might still be waiting for its first Hispanic Congressman since Hispanic voting strength is relatively dilute in the city.
Rep. Guitierrez has been the House’s Democratic point man on “comprehensive immigration reform”. In his absence would the parameters of the discussion been different?
I don’t believe that eliminating gerrymandering is enough to make the House more democratic. For that I believe we’d need to greatly increase the number of districts. Extremely large Congressional districts of the sort we have now have a purpose similar to gerrymandering: they preserve the power of incumbents.
The reason Prof. Taylor is advocating multi-seat districts is that gerrymandering does not significantly impact the total election results. Here is an analysis at the Monkey Cage
using very generous assumptions that it might account for 7 seats for the Republicans. Basically, if one creates compact, contiguous districts (which is the opposite of gerrymandering), the geographic sorting of the electorate comes to the fore. Democrats live near each other, Republicans are dispersed.
I had thought about challenging statements made over at OTB by two good commenters that claimed Indiana and Missouri are horribly gerrymandered. They are not. Go look at the maps and compare it to the Illinois fourth. Indiana and Missouri have the same issue. Their Democratic votes are highly concentrated in two locations (Kansas City and St. Louis; Indianapolis and Gary). St. Louis tends to vote >80% Democratic and small-town rural Missouri counties tend to vote approx 60% Republican. You would have to aggressively gerrymander districts in order to create competitive districts.
I’m against gerrymandering for other reasons. It protects incumbents and it bottlenecks minority legislators.
Well I guess I’m agreeing with you. I’ve been meaning to ask if you had any opinion on Illinois’ experience with multi-member districts. As I understand it, prior to 1980 four people appeared on the ballot for three positions decided by cumulative voting.
My concern about going small is that we can lose quality and competition with smaller districts. Also, I wonder more theoretically whether people moving towards residential communities away from where they work makes politics more responsive to issues of personal consumption and less responsive to issues like helping business investment.
My recollection is that until 1980 Illinois elected its state representatives from multi-member districts with cumulative voting. Each district had three representatives and voters could vote for one, two, or three of them, i.e. cast three votes for the same individual, two votes for one individual and one for another, or votes for three different individuals.
When it was put up for a vote I voted to retain the old system on theoretical grounds. It lost.
Shutdown’s roots lie in deeply embedded divisions in America’s politics – The Washington Post