In my last post, about how Democrats being in the minority in the Congress should not be attributed to any "choice" made by voters, I didn't give Republicans enough credit for their supersized influence in national affairs. Yes, it's true that Democrats, by flocking together in urban centers, make it easy for Republicans to pack them all into a relatively few congressional districts in order to give themselves an advantage in the rest. But Republicans have made the very most of this friendly fact. The case of Pennsylvania is representative.
In the 2010 election, Republicans gained control of the Pennsylvania state legislature, which gave them the power to redraw the state's congressional boundaries after the 2010 census. Two years later, in the first federal election with the new districts, President Obama carried Pennsylvania by around 300,000 votes, and Democratic candidates for the U.S. House received, in the aggregate, about 100,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. Nevertheless, Republicans won 13 of the state's 18 House seats. In other words, Republican candidates, though receiving 100,000 fewer votes statewide, won 13 of the 18 elections for U.S. House.
The secret to their success lies in "packing" and "cracking" Democratic voters in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It works something like this. There are about 700,000 people to a congressional district. Let's say that, in a certain metro area, there are 2.8 million people--four districts--and that two-thirds of them at least lean Democratic in their voting habits. That sounds like a recipe for sending four Democratic representatives to the U.S. House. But if you can draw the lines in such a way that two of the districts are around 85% Democratic, you might then be able to divide up the remaining Democrats in such a way as to create at least one safely Republican district out of an overwhelmingly Democratic metropolis. And that's how, with fewer votes, you can win more congressional seats and thus wield more power.
The system is rigged, though not in the way that the Republican's presumptive nominee ever describes. How else can you describe a system in which one party, having received 40-some percent of the votes statewide, wins more than 70 percent of the state's seats in the U.S. House of Representatives? It sounds almost magical, but you can sense the hard work involved just by looking at the unnatural polygons of some of the district maps (shape on the left, placement in the state to the right):
It's not easy sending that many Republicans to Washington on the strength of so few votes! The districts have to be drawn very carefully. The journalist David Daley has written a book about the Republican art of mapmaking. The title is Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. Elizabeth Kolbert has a review, here.
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