It was a political trick to give the small states more than their fair share in the vote. Which is fine, but they don’t deserve it and don’t really need it any more. And we might not need them to get rid of it, though that’s possible.
Its takes a 2/3 vote in both houses of congress and ratification by 3/4 of the states to pass an amendment (I don’t think we’ve ever had a constitutional convention after the first one). So if about half of the states benefit from this over-representation, how are you going to get 2/3 of the senate and 3/4 of the states to go along?
Say hello to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It’s nearly halfway there. Once it goes into effect getting a constitutional amendment shouldn’t such a big deal. Once faced with fait accompli it’s not a huge jump to regularizing the process like the 26th Amendment after Oregon v Mitchell.
If it’s popular enough, some of the states that benefit will willingly go along. Vermont, DC, and Hawaii are overrepresented in the electoral college, but all three have enacted the National Popular Vote compact.
The seventeenth amendment took rights away from every state legislature, but it was still ratified by 37 of them.
Yeah I heard about that. I guess it might work unless a Republican wins the popular vote (I don’t see any deep red states on that list).
Even after it goes into effect it won’t be easy to get a constitutional amendment, it would be more than a formality.
Yeah, those are pretty liberal places, I’m not sure that places like Wyoming will be so eager give up its over-representation in the electoral college.
I have no problem with Republicans winning the popular vote. Fair is fair; if they can get more people to vote for them, they deserve to win.
Why not? What good is it doing them? When was the last time a Presidential candidate concentrated on Wyoming?
The way things have worked out, all the power is with a few swing states, like Florida and Ohio — not the states that have more electoral votes than their populations warrant.
An entirely sensible and reasonable point of view. You’ve not been to Wyoming, I take it?
Heh, point taken.
I don’t see how that article is an update of anything. It doesn’t discuss allotting electoral votes by congressional district at all. Nor does it seem to provide any vital new information or perspective. It’s just a rehashing of what has become part of the common wisdom: after their big win in 2010 the GOP gerrymandered a lot of states in their favor and that’s a big factor in their House Majority. Am I missing something in finding the article yawn-worthy?
I agree, it’s old news. Lesson for the future- pull out all the stops to win state legislature elections in years ending in zero. Then when the census data comes out, you get to gerrymander in your favor.
Gerrymandering giving the GOP control of the House is almost entirely a myth, and the basis for it is weak. Even the article I just linked to misses the mark in a key area (which I’ll touch on this later.)
But to start with, the assumption all the liberal pundits have made is that if the Democrats won a majority of the “aggregate popular vote” in House elections, then the default assumption is they should have won a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives. Additionally, the assumption is that if they didn’t, the reason must be the 2010 gerrymander.
The many liberal articles that address this claim simply show lots and lots of statistics about the “perverse result” but few actually dig into the details of the actual districts and how they are drawn. This means that all they’re really showing is that there is a deviation from the expected result, and then saying “it must be gerrymandering” without ever bothering to actually demonstrate whether gerrymandering is happening or not. As I said, the article I linked to has a problem–and that is it. It correctly shows that if you factor in issues like incumbency, if you run the results with previous district maps, if you look back to the 1990s–the statistical “proof” that the 2010 redistricting is why the Republicans control the House vanishes. That in fact if you followed norms of geographical compactness, it will always hurt the Democrats.
This is an old thread, but earlier in it I mentioned that because Democrats are a more “naturally” compact electorate it means that districts that follow geographic compactness norms will harm the Democrats and help Republicans. That means the only “fair” districting (rather, districting that would produce the result Democrats demand) would basically be districts designed specifically to benefit the Democratic party. That’s gerrymandering at its essence. In a single member district, first past the post electoral system your party is simply disadvantaged by being disproportionately and homogeneously geographically concentrated.
You can propose alternative election schemes (and that was done earlier in this thread), but that doesn’t mean you can just blame it all on gerrymandering.
As the Washington Post article I linked to shows, even if you accept the gerrymandering argument on its face, it accounted for a 7 seat swing in the Republican favor in 2012–far short of the total margin of control of the House.
I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve seen titled “most gerrymandered States” and then it just lists the % of the popular vote won by Democrats and Republicans and the number of seats won. Where the Republicans win more seats than their vote share would suggest, the articles just conclude those districts have been gerrymandered.
In truth, if you filter out the mandatory gerrymandering, that is, gerrymandering required primarily in the South to create “majority-minority districts” gerrymandering isn’t nearly as common as you would suspect.
Actually do the exercise, do you know how many statehouses the GOP actually controlled in 2010? The answer is 25, that is 25 where they controlled both houses of the legislature in a given state.
Now, some of these I’m going to toss right away because you can’t gerrymander these states at all:
Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming.
Why? Because those states all have 2 or fewer districts, period. Idaho and New Hampshire have two each and the rest have only one–and you can’t conceive of gerrymandering a single district State. You can make an argument about 2 district states but would still have to concede you’re very limited in how you can gerrymander those. So that leaves 18 States the GOP controlled where gerrymandering could happen. Of those the ones I’d say have some level of gerrymandering problems:
Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.
Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina have been fairly open in that their Republican leadership has tried to draw districts to benefit the party. In Texas they’ve succeeded in several districts. Same for Ohio and Pennsylvania, although much of both of those States actually fairly closely follows geographic compactness norms. North Carolina has some bad intent, but it also has some districts drawn to appease the “majority-minority” concept, which is something liberals are also majorly in favor of and in essence force gerrymandering.
Florida actually passed an anti-gerrymandering law in 2010. It has some districts that make sense and some don’t. But the most nonsensical district in Florida is District 5 (covering an area similar to that which District 3 used to cover.) This district was drawn to get a black congress person elected, and by and large that’s what has happened there.
So in the grand scheme of things you’re talking about a few districts in five states where crass political motives have drawn the districts. And in some cases the districts in those states would not be that different anyway.
The article’s analysis is a bit lacking. What they showed was that the change from 2000 districts to 2010 districts cost the Democrats something like 10 seats, but that doesn’t mean that the 2000 districts weren’t Republican-biased to start with. I think it’s quite likely that we’ve gone from a heavy Republican bias in the 2000 lines to an overwhelming Republican bias in the 2010 lines. I’m not sure that the data exists to show what the results would have been like going back in time to 1990 lines, 1980 lines, etc. That would be quite interesting but I don’t know how possible it is.
That’s the situation here in Penna. After 2000 the GOP gerrymandered the state (erasing the Dem gerrymander) and after 2010 they tightened their grip. So looking only at the extra advantage the GOP carved out since 2010 doesn’t measure their actual advantage in the state. There are other factors though as Martin Hyde points out. The GOP have a natural advantage in redistricting because Democratic voters do tend to cluster in certain municipalities. Also the low population states tend to be slightly overrepresented even in the House and to vote Republican.