Creating a better Congress, part 1

 In my last post, I ended with the question of how to reduce the number of states that have skewed delegation.  Neither of the solutions here will fully solve the issue of skewed delegates, but they could both help reduce the skew.  And, in cases where there is still skewed data, should result in more moderate candidates than the current crop of extreme partisans we see in Congress.

One of the simplest answers is to establish non-partisan or bipartisan commissions to draw congressional districts.  Prior to 2020, 7 states had independent commissions responsible for the creation of congressional maps – Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey and Washington.  Iowa could also be included here, although their process is still subject to a straight yes/no vote by the legislature.  After the 2020 census, 5 more states are set to have maps drawn by independent commissions – Colorado, Michigan, Virginia, Ohio, and Utah. 

Obviously, California’s +11 Democrat tilt in 2018 highlights one of the issues with drawing districts regardless of who draws them – they generally only get redrawn once every 10 years barring legal challenges (see North Carolina, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and a few others).  However, the results point to better outcomes overall, even if the exact numbers don’t quite show it.  People move or the winds blow in a different direction.  Parties shift their priorities causing voters to shift their allegiences.  Events like the 2008 Obama wave or the 2010 Obama backlash could not have been anticipated when congressional districts were drawn after the 2000 census.  Could anyone have predicted President Trump in 2011?

The rest of the states behave fairly well.  Arizona is never more than +1 either direction and had 3 consecutive elections that resulted in the actual results matching the ideal.  Hawaii and Idaho only have 2 reps and Montana only has 1 so the ability to gerrymander districts is slim to none.  New Jersey did pretty good until Trump.  From 2000-2016, they had 5 ideal years and the other 4 were only +1 tilt.  After Trump, the tide shifted dramatically in favor of Democrats.  We’ll see what the 2022 results bring.  Washington doesn’t do so well, almost continuously maintaining a +1 Democratic tilt.

Over the next decade, it will be interesting to see how the newest states perform.  Even before new maps go into effect, Michigan was already coming back to matching their ideal representation.  Colorado has been good the last several cycles.  Virginia was very pro-Republican, but flipped to pro-Democrat after 2016.  Ohio has been pretty staunchly pro-Republican.  Utah only has 4 delegates, so not a lot of room for gerrymandering, but enough to occasionally give Republicans a slight boost.

The other option that opens up the possibility of better balance is ranked choice balloting.  Ranked choice balloting allows voters to select candidates in their preferred order.  If no one candidate earns 50%, then the last place candidate is eliminated and those votes go to the second choice.  FairVote is a non-partisan organization with a lot of good resources and videos explaining RCV.  I mention RCV because there are several races that might have had different outcomes if RCV was in play.  But before we get to those specific examples, let me run a theoretical scenario first. 

Assume a state with closed primaries and a general election.  The primaries feature 2 candidates in each party – one moderate and one staunch partisan.  Often these primaries result in the partisan winning which results in voters picking from the hard-line Republican or the hard-line Democrat.  Turnout in primaries is also noticeably lower than the general election.  Now, what if we just had all four candidates run in an open race decided during the general election with RCV.  There are essentially 6 ways a voter could rank the four candidates.  Voters 1 and 2 are the partisans.  They start at the extreme and rank accordingly.  Voters 3 and 4 are the moderates.  They prefer either centrist over their party extremist.  Voters 5 and 6 have a strong party affinity while recognizing the bipartisanship that the moderate candidate is likely to take to Congress.  Here’s the table:

 

	Voter 1	Voter 2	Voter 3	Voter 4	Voter 5	Voter 6
Far Right	1	4	3	4	2	4
Center Right	2	3	1	2	1	3
Center Left	3	2	2	1	3	1
Far Left	4	1	4	3	4	2

Take a look and where the 1’s and 4’s land.  The partisan candidate is only 1^st in one of the six scenarios, but they are last in half of them.  Meanwhile, the moderates are the top choice in 2 different scenarios and never finish last.  Combine RCV with non-partisan redistricting commissions and it’s easy to see how more districts would turn into competitive races that would send fewer partisans and more moderates to Washington D.C.  I think that is a result we could all get behind.

Now for some concrete examples.  Louisiana has used a variation on the theme for several years where everyone runs in the general election.  If no candidate gains 50%, the top two move to a runoff.  The problem with this process is voter turnout.  Take the 2020 race in Louisiana’s 5^th district for example.  In the general election, turnout was 309,566.  The runoff only had 79,307 voters.  RCV would have more fully captured the will of all 309,566 voters and could have easily resulted in a different winner.  The 2006 race in Louisiana’s 2^nd district had a similar issue with the runoff turnout dropping by roughly 30,000 voters.  In 2020, the race in New York’s 22^nd district saw the top two separated by a mere 109 votes.  The 6700+ voters who selected the Libertarian candidate could have easily changed the outcome if their second choice had been factored in.  Other races that could have changed if RCV was used include the 2000 races in Michican’s 8^th and Minnesota’s 2^nd, the 2002 race in Colorado’s 7^th, Illinois’s 8^th in 2006, and Virginia’s 11^th in 2010.  All of these races featured winners who captured less than 50% of the vote with a combination of several small 3^rd party candidates or a single strong 3^rd party candidate.

How about the 2000 Presidential race?  Anyone want to venture a guess as to how things would have turned out if RCV had been in play?  It was less than 600 votes that separated Bush and Gore in Florida.  I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the 97,488 votes cast for Ralph Nader might have swung the state the other way if RCV had been used. 

Any other proposed solution to the skewed states requires more nuance than the data allows.  Both Joe Manchin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are listed as Democrats.  Yet, most of us can agree that they don’t exactly share the same underlying philosophy.  AOC leans much further left than Manchin.  There are ways to address this, but those changes require more courage and political will than we currently have.  

Not So Representative Congress

For a long time, I’ve been working on a project analyzing the make up of the U.S House of Representatives.  I started with a basic assumption that most states use gerrymandering to skew the delegation that goes to D.C.  For example, the 2016 election in Indiana saw Republicans earn 54.28% of the votes and Democrats had 39.61% with various 3^rd party candidates making up the remaining 6.11%.  However, the delegation that went to D.C. was 7 Republicans (77.78%) and 2 Democrats (22.22%).  Clearly Indiana drew districts to maximize Republican voters while limiting Democratic voters.

If Indiana is skewed, what other states are and how badly?  What’s the net impact on the entire Congress?  Would it change the majority party?  How many states are skewed?  Is it just a handful or do the majority of states draw lines to favor one particular party?

If you want to jumps straight to the visualizations, visit my Tableau Public viz.

Before I get into the results, a few notes on methodology and other concerns.  The general rule was to find the correct mix of delegates that most closely matched the election results.  The basic formula: (Majority actual – Majority Ideal) + (Minority Ideal – Majority Actual) = Net gap.  In some cases the 3^rd party gap was also included.  The goal was to make the Net gap as small as possible.  I did make an exception for states with only 2 delegates since 25% seemed too low a threshold to meet.  For those states the bar was set at 37.50% (In years where a 2 rep state managed to split the vote, roughly 40% voted for the minority party)  

There were also some issues obtaining accurate voting results.  Most of the data is taken from officials results as reported by the FEC.  However, four states (Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma) do not require totals to be reported when a candidate is running unopposed.  Where possible I dug into precinct level results to determine precincts that made up the congressional district and then used the total votes of either the Presidential or Gubernatorial race as the figure for that race.  In some cases, precinct results were unavailable or required more time/money than I had available.

The final issue is my treatment of 3^rd party candidates.  Since the focus was on the two major parties, I made the decision to lump all the other candidates into one pool.  Obviously, that misses the nuances of various third parties being generally conservative or liberal.  It also introduces the idea that enough 3^rd party candidates could get votes to impact the ideal mix without accounting for ideological differences.

On to the results.  One of the biggest things that came out of the data was the impact of Barack Obama.  In 2008, Democrats held 14 more seats than ideal, while Republicans were 10 seats short of ideal (3^rd party candidates made up the other 4 ideal seats).  Two year later, 3^rd party candidates should have held 8 seats, Republicans were +12, and Democrats were -4.  To be fair, the President’s party typically loses seats at the mid-term, but the flip is significant.  That was also the same year as the decennial census.  Republicans took major advantage of the census and reapportionment to lock in their gains. 

Prior to 2010, the number of states with delegations matching their ideal mix waffled between 22-24 states depending on the year.  In fact, only 10 states had a Republican tilt in 2008.  Two years later that number more than doubled to 21 states with a Republican tilt and it’s never dropped below 20 since then.  States that are neutral dropped to 14-16 each year.  The jump in states that are skewed Republican was so great that it effectively offset the single greatest skew from the data (California 2018 +11 Democrats).

Here in Indiana, the evidence is similarly clear.  In 2008, we sent 5 Dem and 4 Rep to Congress, matching the ideal mix.  In 2010 Republicans were +1 and then +2 in every election since.  The 2020 election saw the race in Indiana’s 5^th district become a little tighter for Republicans than they really liked.  So what did the legislature do after the census?  They redrew the districts, shoving Democratic leaning precincts into the same district as the urban core of Indianapolis and adding a few more Republican rural precincts to the 5^th district.  That way, Republicans didn’t have to worry about losing a seat in 2022 and beyond.

A few other interesting results from the data.  In both 2014 and 2016, more people voted for Democratic candidates in Michigan but the actual Congressional delegation had 9 Republicans and 5 Democrats.  California had the largest single skew as Democrats were +11 in 2018.  Texas had the largest Republican skew at +5 in 2018.  Republicans in 2016 own the largest gain from gerrymandering as they were +23 during the first two years of the Trump Administration.  Republicans also own the 2^nd largest gain of +20 in 2012.  Democrats had their biggest gain in 2008 at +14.

I also have to respect the home of gerrymandering, Massachusetts, for failing to elect a single Republican to Congress in more than 2 decades, despite roughly 15% of the state voting Republican each year.  I’m no fan of gerrymandering and would like to see it removed from practice, but Massachusetts has been at this game for a very long time.

I hope to have another post up soon looking at changing the balance in Congress.  The data on hand suggests that we do not have a good representative democracy.  So, how do we get better balance?  How can we get more states to move back to the neutral column and reduce the number of states that are skewed towards a particular party.

Take a look at the visualizations at the link above and let me know what you think.  Have a question you want answered or a visualization you want to see, let me know in the comments.