By now you might have heard that Democrats won the popular vote for the United States House of Representatives yet we're still stuck with Boehner and the shutdown caucus. There is very good reason to believe that this is entirely due to anti-democratic gerrymandering. Sadly, the US House wasn't the only legislative body in our so called democracy where this was the case. Now not all of these chambers can be solely attributed to gerrymandering given that Democratic votes are unfortunately more geographically concentrated which is inherently negative when our system is built off of geographic bias. Yet there are still very clear cases where gerrymandering is the only thing that kept the GOP in control.
So in which states did Democrats essentially win the popular vote, yet see the Republicans maintain their hold on power whether through outright rigging (gerrymandering) or system bias? Let's see.
I have to reiterate the US HOUSE! where Dems won the popular vote by about 2% accounting for uncontested districts, but got 201/435 seats, is at the top of the list.
1. Michigan House of Reps - Pretty much a slam dunk, Democrats won the popular vote by nearly 8%, Republicans barely held their gerrymandered majority.
2. New York Senate - Ironclad case here, for gerrymandering by Republicans was the only thing that got them remotely close to being able to peel off renegade Democrats for their coalition.
3-4. Pennsylvania House and Senate - Republican drawn maps from 2002(!) allowed them to win narrow majorities, despite Dem popular vote wins.
5. New Hampshire Senate - Democrats outright won the popular vote but Republicans drew the map, whether gerrymandering is the cause or not is harder to determine.
6-7. North Carolina House and Senate - Gerrymandering probably not determinant, but rather unfair geographic bias.
8-9. Wisconsin Assembly and Senate - Republicans gerrymandered to protect themselves but whether that made all the difference is uncertain, but probably did in the Senate.
10. Iowa House - Commission drawn map so not gerrymandering, but still unfair geography.
11. Washington Senate - Another commission map, but if we lose the special election tomorrow the Republicans will pad the margin for their coalition with renegade Dems.
12-13. Ohio House and possibly Senate - Republican gerrymandering yet again, Dems definitely won the House popular vote but too many seats went uncontested in the senate.
All in all we have the US House, and 13 state legislative chambers where Dems probably won the popular vote yet Republicans are still in power. So I ask you, where is the outrage? Why do we keep pretending we're a fair and free democracy? Tell me how this is different than Obama winning the popular vote yet Mitt Romney the electoral college? I see the anger and activism induced by blatant voter suppression attempts like cutting early voting, imposing voter ID, but it doesn't get any worse than this when each Republican vote elects twice as many representatives as Democratic ones do.
Gerrymandering is killing our democracy.
Let's do something about it and organize independent redistricting initiatives in states where we can like Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, or contribute to Democratic candidates for governor in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylania who can block future attempts at gerrymandering. (Below the fold I'll go into detail about determining or estimating the popular vote, feel free to ignore)
So when you see that Democrats won the House popular vote with a 1.2% plurality, what that doesn't take into account is districts where only one major party candidate was on the ballot or some districts where no challengers appeared at all. This skews the popular vote total because opposition party voters in that district didn't even have the chance to vote. Looking at similar districts where one major party's incumbent or nominee faced only token opposition from the other major party, we can see that they don't come anywhere close to winning 100% of the vote or in many cases all that much more than the presidential ticket in their district. So it doesn't make sense to just leave these handful of districts unaccounted for. The method I've used is to take the districts which had both major party nominees and then compare the two party US House or state legislative body vote share for the Democrat with either Obama's vote share or an average of all statewide races' Democrats in states where this was a better predictor. Running a statistical regression shows in many of these states that the correlation between presidential or statewide and downballot performance is quite high. We can then produce an estimate for how an uncontested district might have otherwise played out by taking all contested districts and dividing the Dem share by Obama's share and the GOP's share by Romney's share, taking the average, and multiplying it by the uncontested districts' presidential numbers. While there are other variations on this method you can do, they matter very little at the margins and only in rare cases do you have districts that would have outright flipped parties, such as California's 31st congressional district.
If you want to look at any of my data and see if you can contradict my conclusions, you're welcome to try, but it seems logical to me to account for uncontested districts. For example though, if you only took into account the contested districts, Obama wins the popular vote by 3.6 rather than 3.9 and that doesn't make any sense.
So, using that method, the Dems' US House popular vote lead expands from a 1.2% plurality, to a 2.4% majority (given that the vast majority of votes for Libertarian/Constitution/Independent/Green candidates were protest votes, we're essentially replacing/ignoring a lot of them).
Michigan - Fortunately Dems contested all but 2 seats and the GOP every single one, giving us a clear picture that Dems won the state House popular vote by about 8%. The state senate was up in 2010 and 2014 and the GOP actually won the popular vote handily in 2010 when every seat was contested by both parties.
New York - Dems won the popular vote nominally, and taking into account uncontested districts puts their vote share in the mid 50s. Democratic candidates won the chamber outright, but one was an explicit turncoat who sided with Republicans giving them control and then on top of that 4 Dems formed their "Independent Democrat" caucus to give the GOP a sizable majority. The only reason this regime was remotely possible is because the New York GOP gerrymandered the crap out of that chamber using every trick in the book.
Pennsylvania - In the House, Republicans narrowly won the nominal popular vote but that's with far more Republicans facing no opponent than Democrats. Taking into account these districts, we get a popular vote Dem win of about 2%, which was very similar to the US House popular vote in the state which saw all 18 districts contested. The state senate is a little more complicated since half the even-numbered seats weren't up, but by looking at the relationship between contested seats and presidential performance in both 2010 and 2012 (for a large enough sample) and applying that to the uncontested ones, we get the GOP winning the popular vote for the senate in 2010 and losing it in 2012. Again this is a Republican gerrymander and given the closeness of their margin in both chambers, it's quite possible that Democrats would have the majority under a neutrally drawn map.
New Hampshire - The state senate is an airtight case since Republicans contested every seat and Dems all but one, yet Dems still won the popular vote by about 4%. Whether or not gerrymandering made a difference is harder to tell since it requires us to look at an alternative map, but given how many districts Republicans barely won I'd say it probably put them over the edge since they have a 13-11 majority.
North Carolina - Dems would have won the popular vote for both chambers by about 1% if you take into account uncontested districts which is very similar to both the US House results where all 13 districts were contested, and the average statewide performance for the Democratic ticket despite Obama's loss. However the state is a pretty good candidate for being one that, while gerrymandering had a huge impact, it didn't put Republicans over the top despite a popular vote loss, rather geographic concentration does. Regardless, this is still no more fair.
Wisconsin - In both chambers Democrats won the nominal popular vote yet there were considerably more uncontested Dems in the Assembly than Republicans. Still, when you take these into account, the 6.4% win narrows to about .5% but that's still more than Republicans yet they won 60 seats to Democrats' 39. In the state senate Dems were in a little stronger of a position and would have won the popular vote by around 3-4% and gerrymandering very likely kept Republicans in control.
Iowa - The Iowa House was of course commission drawn and isn't per se gerrymandered, but the commission's requirement of smallest possible deviation with minimal split jurisdictions overrides communities of interest in some cases. Either way, the map is still inherently biased due to the fact that it's a winner take all map. Republicans hold a narrow majority of seats and won a nominal popular vote majority, but that becomes about a 1-1.5% Democratic majority when we take into account the uncontested districts.
Washington - The State Senate gave Republicans a nominal majority among the half of seats up for election in 2012, but that's with these districts giving Obama about 3% lower vote share than his statewide total as well as many of them, due to Washington's top two system, featuring a D vs D or R vs R general election. Looking at the contested seats and how they relate to the presidential vote among those in the senate as well as the House, we can conclude that the Democrats would have won the popular vote in both chambers rather comfortably. Geographic and pro-incumbent bias in the legislative map enable Republicans to get close enough to where they got two renegade Dems to crossover, and after tomorrow's special election will likely be just one seat short of outright control. Regardless, voter intent was clearly a preference for a Democratic majority.
Ohio - The House is fairly clear cut; only 12 seats were uncontested and among the 87 which had candidates from both major parties, Dems ran less than a point behind Obama. While they won the nominal popular vote, taking into account uncontested seats gives us a Dem pop vote margin of about 1-2%. The senate cannot be calculated to any reasonable degree of certainty since the vast majority of districts went uncontested or were not up in 2012. It's possible that, given the option between voting for the actual winner and a token challenger from the other party, incumbency would have put Republicans over the top, or it's possible that ticket splitting would have been low enough that Dems would have won the popular vote in that chamber as well. For what it's worth though, among the 12 contested districts, Dems ran 1.4% behind Obama who won 51.5% statewide and ran 2.4% behind Sherrod Brown who won 53% statewide. That puts us pretty clearly into the margin of error territory, but the sample size does that anyway.
When looking at whether there were any legislative chambers where Republicans won the popular vote but Democrats won control, only one candidate was remotely possible: The Kentucky House. This was a chamber Dems drew the lines to, but Kentucky is also a state where the local Democratic brand is very strong for a conservative state. Looking at the performance among actual contested seats and the 2011 statewide race average (Obama's performance is worthless), we get a small Dem popular vote lead within what I'll call the margin of error. It's possible, but Kentucky has some of the lowest polarization in the country so it's hard to say for certain whether or not Dems would have won the popular vote if every seat had been contested since incumbency is worth a lot here.
So if you're with me this far, there are two main takeaways from this rant/diary I hope you all get.
1) Gerrymandering plays a huge role in screwing over democracy in this country. Even in chambers where it wasn't likely the sole cause as in North Carolina, it effectively suspends elections when the result is predetermined.
2) This system is inherently unfair since it is geographically winner take all. This causes the the whole thing to institutionally favor the Republican party in the United States, even if everyone who wants to vote gets to vote.
We cannot fight the war on voting if we do not fix gerrymandering and how we elect our representatives.
