Trendspotting: How the Congressional Map Is (and Is Not) Becoming Fairer

NewsWire: 3/28/22

• Surprisingly, this year’s congressional map is poised to be more evenly balanced in its overall gerrymander bias. This is largely due to more aggressive redistricting by Democrats, who have been catching up, in their states, to what Republicans have already done in theirs. (The Economist)
  
• NH: The midterms are coming up. And as pundits try to look ahead at what will happen to the House of Representatives, their predictions will be governed by two numbers in addition to what they're seeing in opinion surveys. The first number will be the shift in net seats going to the Democrats or the Republicans due to decennial reapportionment. The second will be net fairness bias toward Democrats or Republicans due to decennial redistricting.
• Every ten years, after the Census does its count, certain states that have lost population (as a share of the nation's total) are required to give up congressional seats to other states that have gained population. In 2020, following a recent pattern, the Northeast and Great Lakes regions tended to lose population and the Sun Belt tended to gain. So states that normally tilt Democratic and voted for Biden in 2020 were reapportionment losers: They gained two seats and lost five, for a net loss of three seats. Which means that states that normally tilt Republican enjoyed a net gain of three seats.

• So how does redistricting fit into all this?
• Well, states are required by federal courts to redraw their district lines at least every ten years. Understandably, most choose to do this immediately after the decennial reapportionment, in time for the next even-year election. So that's what has been happening again over the past year in time for the 2022 midterms. As always, when redistricting, state legislatures that are controlled by one party have a strong incentive to gerrymander their new districts so that their party will win the largest possible number of seats in their state. They do this through the now-familiar methods of cracking and packing. 
• Now let's take a look at the situation in 2020: The following map shows states where the legislatures are entirely controlled entirely by one party and where an independent commission does not do the redistricting. The map is drawn so that the total area reflects the total number of seats being redistricted.

• As we can see from this map, it looks like the Republicans hold a huge edge going into the post-2020 gerrymander war. And last fall, that's what most election forecasters were predicting--that the GOP would pick up even more seats through more clever mapmaking.
• But as the states' redistricting maps now become public, that's not how things appear to be turning out. Nearly all the analysts who run the new maps through their computers are surprised at the result: Rather than giving the GOP further advantage, the playing field seems to be tilting back toward the Democrats. It may even result in the most balanced overall playing field in several decades.
• How do experts assess the overall "fairness" of congressional districting? In presidential election years, one simple if imperfect method is to compare one party's percentage vote advantage in the median district (the one determining which party controls the House) with that party's national percentage advantage in the presidential election. Here's one calculation by the NYT:

• These bars show the number of districts won by the GOP in these years in excess of the number of districts reflecting the GOP presidential candidate's share of the national vote. Recall, for example, that the GOP retained the House in 2012 and 2016 despite losing the presidential popular vote in those years by 3.9% and 2.1%, respectively. To be sure, this method has its shortcomings: There may be "fair" reasons for this tilt, such as Republicans believing their local candidates are stronger than their national candidate. Yet it is remarkable that, using this easy-to-grasp measure of bias, the Republican advantage is expected to fall to almost zero when the 2020 election results are superimposed onto the new 2022 districts.
• The Economist introduces a new and better method of analysis pioneered by Harvard law professor Nick Stephanopoulos and others at a research group called PlanScore. It's called an "efficiency score." For each state, it counts the total number of "wasted" votes for a congressperson and divides that by the total number of votes cast. Wasted votes are all votes in a district for the losing candidate plus all votes for the winning candidate above the bare majority required to win. Clearly--when you think about it--the whole purpose of gerrymandering is to increase the number of wasted votes cast by the other party's voters.
• Stephanopoulos has not calculated his efficiency score for every state for every year going back in time. But he has calculated it for all states in 2020--and what it is likely to be in 2022. And he agrees that overall national race in 2022 will be somewhat fairer. In 2020, he says, the gap in efficiency scores between Democratic-voting states and Republican-voting states favored the Republicans by 11 points. In 2022, it will favor them by 9 points.

• This blue-zone shift isn't as big as the one reported in the NYT. But it's still in a surprising direction. Why didn't the red zone put their legislative hammerlock to better use?
• One big reason is easy to explain. In most states run by Republicans, the state parties had already maxed out on most of their gerrymander potential in their 2010 redistricting wave and occasionally in further redistricting efforts in more recent years. There wasn't all that much more they could do. And sometimes, when they tried to go further, their efforts were struck down by state and federal courts--as in 2015 (in North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia), in 2018 (in Pennsylvania), in 2019 (again in North Carolina), and again this year (in Ohio).
• What's more, some Republican states are choosing to gerrymander less aggressively in order to "ring fence" their "own" districts by feeding them more Republican voters. Aggressive gerrymandering can be risky. If you spread your majorities too thin, you may find yourself losing several seats if the overall state vote moves against you by a few points. Especially in states like Texas, which has to accommodate two new districts, the Republicans have chosen to move cautiously.
• The second big reason is that Democratic legislators, in the states they run, haven't in the past been nearly as aggressive in pushing their advantage. But in 2020 and 2021 they've been trying to copy the GOP game plan. In New York, they threw out the plan proposed by their own redistricting advisory commission and started to play hardball--netting them perhaps an extra four seats. Add in more vigorous mapping in New Mexico, Oregon, and Illinois, and the Dems may net an extra 10 seats.
• To be sure, the map is still in progress. Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Maryland, and New Hampshire have yet to finish drawing new lines or are still stuck in legal process. The analysts are assuming that these mostly Republican states will get their maps approved. 
• Most important, while this redistricting wave will probably give Democrats more seats in 2022 than they would have gotten without it, their party remains on track to lose plenty of seats--and control of the House--in November. Most opinion polls show a large rise in Republican favorability in 2022 over 2020 (see "Americans Are Shifting to the Right"), which could easily push most of the competitive seats and even some uncompetitive seats into their camp. Pundits are saying that nearly all the historical indicators point to a big GOP victory. Futures markets are overwhelmingly favorable to a Republican House majority in 2023: If you're convinced they're wrong, one dollar will get you six.
• Yet however the midterms turn out, there is one thing that all the analysts do agree on: This year, the number of competitive seats is due to keep sinking, probably down to its all-time low. Gerrymandering is as old as the American republic. But today's parties, armed with computers and big data, have access to weapons that they never had before. And given the rising level of partisan intensity, they are motivated as they seldom have been before.
• Ten years ago, after the 2010 redistricting wave, the number of districts considered competitive was 73. This year, according to the NYT, there will be fewer than 40 competitive seats. This is mainly due to more effective blue-zone gerrymandering, which will reduce the number of competitive seats in blue-zone states.
• As we can tell from the above Stephanopoulos chart, the nation may be less biased overall in 2022 toward one party, but that's just because Democratic states are becoming as biased in their direction as the Republican states are already biased in theirs. So a minority-party voter in a typical state will have even less chance of having his or her vote make a difference. Stephanopoulos puts it this way: “National partisan fairness is perfectly compatible with extreme subnational partisan unfairness.”

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