Look, I see what you’re saying. But let’s use an analogy – let’s say we’re looking at black vs. white candidates. Surely we can agree that people don’t always vote for a candidate based on their race, right?
But if black candidates always won their districts by an overwhelming percentage, whereas white candidate squeaked by every time they won, then things would start to look suspicious. Indeed, I might start to wonder if the folks who drew the districts did everything they could to lump white people into concentrated areas, increasing their voting power disproportionately.
Look at it this way: imagine we’ve got 10,000 people in an area, 7,000 of whom are black and 3,000 of whom are white. We’ve got ten districts of 1,000 people each.
A normal division might mean that we’d expect to see about 7 black candidates and 3 white candidates (assuming everything’s equal). But we might create districts with the following number of white people in them:
District 1: 0 white people
District 2: 0 white people
District 3: 0 white people
District 4: 600 white people
District 5: 600 white people
District 6: 600 white people
District 7: 600 white people
District 8: 600 white people
District 9: 0 white people
District 10: 0 white peopel
In this case, we might find that districts 4-8 have proportionately more white people than black people, and therefore will have proportionately more qualified white candidates than qualified black candidates, and therefore will be likelier to send a white candidate to office.
Instead of seeing 7 black candidates and 3 white candidates, we’ve gerrymandered the districts to produce 5 black candidates and 5 white candidates.
And that’s a problem, right?
Why wouldn’t it be a problem if we substituted “Republican” for “black” and “Democratic” for “white”?
Daniel
