Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images
A similar discrepancy happened in the vote for Congressional representatives. The Republicans control the House of Representatives, where they have 54% of the seats. But if you add up all the votes for those seats, the Democrats come out slightly ahead (by about 500,000 votes). More votes but fewer seats.
That discrepancy arises from the distribution of Democrats and Republicans in a state’s Congressional districts. Take a hypothetical state with four districts, each with 200 people. The popular vote splits evenly – 400 Democrats, 400 Republicans. Here are the election results:
The Democratic district snaking down through the middle of the state is the 4th, which contains “the Triangle” to the north, but now has that tail stretching down. Democrats carried the district by 170,000 votes. Surrounding it is the 2nd (in pink), which Republicans carried by only 45,000 votes.
Similar differences crop up in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The popular vote is close, and in two of these states it goes to the Democrats. But Republicans get most of the seats. Republicans win their seats by less than half the margin of Democratic winners. Here is a graph of the actual returns from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. (The Ohio total does not include the vote from the two uncontested districts, one Democrat, one Republican. For the maps and election results, check out Politico.)
I don’t know enough about the demography and geography of these states, but I do wonder why the districts are drawn this way. A paper by Chen and Rodd (here) that uses 2000 election data argues that what looks like gerrymandering is in fact the result of “human geography.” It’s not the legislatures that pack Democrats together, it’s the Democrats themselves. They cluster in cities. As for Democrats outside of cities,
many rural, small-town, and suburban precincts that lean Democratic are often subsumed into moderately Republican districts. . . . There are isolated pockets of support for Democrats in African-American enclaves in the suburbs of big cities and in smaller towns with a history of railroad industrialization or universities. However, these Democratic pockets are generally surrounded by Republican majorities, thus wasting these Democratic votes. As a result, the Democrats are poorly situated to win districts outside of the urban core.Regardless of intent, the effect is to keep Democratic votes concentrated in the 4th. If that blue tail of the NC-04 were subsumed into the pink NC-02, both districts might be blue.
In any case, Democrats have not always been on the wrong side of the seat/vote discrepancy. John Sides at The Monkey Cage posted this graph showing the ratio for the last twenty-six elections.
Sides quotes Matthew Green on the general trends:
- the winning party usually gets a “boost” in the number of seats
- that boost used to be much larger
UPDATE (Nov. 15): John Sides at The Monkey Cage has more data on the vote/seat discrepancy. He calculates seats expected given the popular vote and compares that to the actual outcome. Even in states where districts were drawn by a bi-partisan agency or the courts, the Democrats fell 7% below the expected number of seats. In states where legislatures did the redistricting the differences were starker.
Republicans gained benefits across the board from controlling the redistricting process. By contrast, Democrats exceeded their expected seat share only slightly in the three states where they controlled the process