Let’s not be too eager to abolish gerrymandering

[Lance_Turbo]

Here’s a post of mine from a thread about the Wisconsin Assembly 2018 elections.

@Lance_Turbo

More on this.

This gerrymander is extremely resistant to the will of the people. Similar to the plot in the link posted by RTFirefly a few posts ago I looked at the district by district results found here.

We can calculate the net difference in two party vote share for each district or even all the districts together with the formula (D - R)/(D + R).

For example, statewide there were 1,308,454 D votes and 1,103,521 R votes in assembly races so the net difference on two party vote share is (1308454 - 1103521)/(1308454 + 1103521) = 0.08496… = D + 8.5.

When I did this calculation for all districts the thing that struck me was the sparseness of districts that fell in the even to D + 20 range. There are two.

What does that mean? In an election that went D + 8.5 assembly seats went 36 D to 63 R. Had the electorate flipped and this election went R + 8.5 assembly seats would have gone 34 D to 65 R. It is pretty unlikely that we’re going to see an election outside ± 8.5 point range anytime soon so the range of achievable assembly outcomes for the foreseeable future is something like 34 - 36 D versus 63 - 65 R.

The make up of the assembly barely responds at all to massive swings in the electorate that realistically achievable. Also by my analysis, which is far from perfect and limited to exactly one election, Wisconsin voters would have to go about D +21 in assembly voting to put the median seat in play. A two party vote split of 60 - 40 would probably fall just for of Democratic Party control of the assembly.

On the other hand, Democrats did once make people wait two weeks to fuck over teachers eight years ago.

The mean district was D+8.5. The median district was R+12.5. Sickening.