Gerrymandering, everyone is talking about it, but how bad is it really? Repubs always defend it, by saying that states like California and New York are equally gerrymandered, so it all evens out. Is that true? No. For one thing, those states have Democratic Governors and legislations, so they are NOT as gerrymandered as let's say, Pennsylvania.
The number most progressives know about gerrymandering is that with a million less votes, Repubs still hold the House with 234-201. That's true, but it doesn't tell the story by a long shot. I thought, is there a way to measure the LEVEL of cheating that is going on with gerrymandering? Yes, there is. I thought what if Congressional seats were distributed according to proportional representation? That is, let's take the Presidential vote in and apply it to the number of House seats. Then we could compare to the actual number of seats that either party has won.
For example, let's say that in a Red state with 5 Congressional districts, still 40 percent voted for Obama, but that the actual number of House seats were 4 Repub and 1 Democrat. Then, we could say that the distribution should have been 3 R and 2 D, but instead it's now 4 R and 1 D. This means we got cheated out of 1 seat.
Now, there's two types of distortion going on
The first one is where a Blue state sends more people to Congress than they should according to the proportional representation of the Presidential vote.
The second one is where a Blue state is actually deep red in it's representatives.
And no, there are no cases where red states send a majority of Democrats to congress. I guess we're too honest for that.
So, how many seats did we get cheated out of?
20. Yep. Two-Zero. TWENTY. Yes, if there had been no redistricting, we would have won the House with 221-214, but now we lost it 201-235
It would be actually fairer to exclude the one-seaters, states that only send ONE representative to Congress, because they can't be redistricted. Even if we do that, we would've won the remaining House seat 219-210.
Even without the two-seater states, we'd have won the House 215-207 of the remaining House seats.
Check out the table of gerrymandered states I have made.
For example Pennsylvania: In the blue column "D seats by Pres" is the number of seats we'd have won if there was no gerrymandering, 9. The actual number is 5, in the blue column "D seats". Same goes for the red columns "R seats by Pres" and "R seats".
The columns "gerrymandered percentage" and "gerrymandered seats" speak for themselves. If it's red, they got to many, if it's blue, we did.
Note also that while the number of states skewed in their advantage is 26, the effect in seats is far, far, more skewed.
These following states actually have no gerrymandered effects:
Nevada
Iowa
West Virginia
Utah
Washington
New Mexico
So, yes, it's bad. It's really bad. This all means that we should work hard to win those elections for Governor and for the legislation. Let's not be complacent.
