GERRYMANDERING CLAIMS OVERSTATED

Geographic realities, not schemes drive GOP victories

SOME Democratic activists argue the Republican Party’s control of Congress and state legislatures is driven primarily by excessively partisan redistricting. Evidence continues to accrue pointing to another, less nefarious cause. Put simply, Democratic voters are far more geographically concentrated.

The latter is a product of millions of individual decisions, made over the course of many years, driven by a host of factors that include everything from economic opportunity to cultural preferences. But the result is that Democrats can win the popular vote in presidential elections even as Republicans remain positioned to hang onto congressional power.

David Wasserman, the U.S. House editor for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, highlighted this reality in a recent column.

Wasserman noted the Senate “hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913.”

In 1980, Wasserman writes, the presidential vote in 18 states was at least 5 points more Republican than the national result. Today, there are 26 states in that category.

“Today, Republicans don’t even need to win any ‘swing states’ to win a Senate majority: 52 seats are in states where the 2016 presidential margin was at least 5 percentage points more Republican than the national outcome,” Wasserman writes. “By contrast, there are just 28 seats in states where the margin was at least 5 points more Democratic, and only 20 seats in swing states.”

As things stand, Wasserman predicts that if Democrats won every House and Senate race in 2018 where a 2016 presidential candidate carried the seat by fewer than 3 percentage points, Democrats “could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.”

The geographic clustering of Democratic voters in a handful of large metro areas in a handful of large-population states explains much of the GOP edge, which also is reflected in state-level data. Currently, there are 26 states where Republicans control the Legislature and the governor’s office. Democrats hold comparable power in only six states, and California alone accounts for 78 percent of the population living in those states.

A lawsuit awaiting a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court alleges Republican advantages in state legislative races and the U.S. House are driven by partisan gerrymandering. But critics have countered that the geographic clustering of Democratic voters is largely to blame. Geographically compact district lines, previously endorsed by the courts, result in a few heavily Democratic districts and many Republican leaning-districts.

While Democrats held 60 Senate seats as recently as 2010, Wasserman notes it took the “Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and a stock market crash” to generate the “huge backlash” that produced that margin. “Today, it would take even more cataclysmic events under GOP rule to propel Democrats to a supermajority over the next six years,” Wasserman writes.

We have noted that Republican inaction could lead GOP voters to stay home in 2018, which could benefit Democratic chances of victory. Obviously, Republicans can still find a way to lose.

But Wasserman’s analysis shows Republican victories have had less to do with partisan schemes than with the simple reality that where people choose to live affects voting patterns and election outcomes. Member at large