Tag: redistricting

Video: Assessing California’s Redistricting Commission

The creation of the Citizen Redistricting Commission (CRC) in 2008 marked a radical departure for California. This shift of responsibility for drawing state assembly, state senate, and US congressional districts from the state legislature to an independent commission also put California ahead of the national curve. Very few states have adopted a similar model, though many may be considering it—particularly in light of two US Supreme Court cases that could establish a legal standard for partisan gerrymandering. For California and for other states, partisan fairness and competitiveness should be important aims of redistricting reform.

A new PPIC report examines whether the commission’s first plan achieved these aims by analyzing recent election outcomes and putting them in national context. Researcher Eric McGhee described his analysis in Sacramento last week and outlined some key findings.

  • The CRC largely satisfied expectations that it would draw state legislative and congressional districts that are fair to the major parties and increase electoral competitiveness.
  • While Democrats have a greater advantage under the CRC plan than they did under the 2001 plan drawn by the legislature, this advantage is very small.
  • The CRC districts are somewhat more competitive than the districts drawn by the legislature. Competitiveness in state legislative districts remains low compared to other states, but the CRC congressional plan is among the most competitive in the country.

The report also notes that the CRC has moved California in the opposite direction from the rest of the country: other state plans are on average more favorable to Republicans and less competitive than plans from the last round of redistricting.

McGhee recommends that future commissions use more data to help them produce competitive and fair maps. He also recommends using sophisticated methods for automatically drawing redistricting plans.

Partisan Gerrymandering and the Role of Social Science in the Courts

The US Supreme Court is considering a high-profile case that could change the way legislative maps are drawn and reshape elections. The court has invited social science to play an unusually significant role in its decision.

On October 3, the court heard oral arguments in Gill v Whitford, a Wisconsin case that could result in the first constitutional constraints on partisan gerrymandering. The case represents the culmination of decades of litigation on the subject. As someone who responded to the court’s call and provided a metric used in the case, I have an unusual perspective on the court’s relationship to social science and what it may say about the role of social science and the law more generally.

Partisan gerrymandering, broadly defined, is the practice of drawing the boundaries of representational districts to maximize the number of seats for one party. In 1986, the court declared this practice appropriate for judicial consideration. But the justices did not know how to define a partisan gerrymander so they could consistently identify one in a way that removed personal bias as much as possible. In the ensuing 30 years of litigation, the court has hardly strayed from this initial view—that the problem is real but difficult to define.

Partisan gerrymandering is a challenge to measure and describe because it represents the collision of two fundamental elements in American politics: geographic representation and party allegiance. Our district-based approach to elections presumes that geography trumps all other concerns. Each district is supposed to elect the best person to represent the needs of the people in that community, and each district’s needs are imagined to be distinct from the needs of other districts.

In reality, parties, not geography, drive our politics. Parties bring factions of voters in each district together into a broad, durable coalition that often has no relationship to geography at all. Voters will agree much more often with fellow partisans in other districts than they will with opposing partisans in their own district.

Parties therefore bind voters in different districts to each other. Voters who choose parties care about more than just the mechanical fact that someone has been elected to represent their district. They want their party to win, and they also want representatives from their party to be elected elsewhere.

But in our district-based system, a party that wins more votes does not necessarily win more seats. It has to win more votes in the right places: in districts where more votes will push the party over the threshold to victory.

Partisan gerrymandering exploits this fact by making sure that one party spends its votes in futile efforts: districts where it comes close to winning but will never quite get there, and districts that it will win by margins so large that victory is never in doubt. These outcomes “waste” votes because so much of the party’s support (the votes cast for losers and those cast in excess of the number required to win) do not contribute directly to victory. By playing with the number of votes each party wastes, a partisan gerrymander can manipulate the number of seats each party wins, even when the number of votes the parties receive does not change.

This leads to a real tension. One the one hand, our district-based political system suggests that parties are unnecessary and certainly not owed any particular level of representation.  On the other hand, if voters largely express their policy desires through parties, suppressing a party’s representation—as partisan gerrymandering does—seems like a serious violation of democratic norms. The court’s struggles in this area reflect this collision of ideas. The court believes the issue is real and potentially very serious, but it has trouble defining the harm within a system that does not take parties into account.

Rather than resolve this contradiction, the justices extended an open invitation to social scientists to solve it for them (or at least get them closer to a solution). This was a sensible step for the court to take. Social scientists add the most value when a clear, objective measurement is needed but the specifics of it are going to be nuanced and complex.

Moreover, social scientists have stepped up to the court’s challenge. In addition to the measure I have offered—the “efficiency gap”—social scientists have also presented several other approaches to the court. Each one measures a slightly different aspect of the concept of a partisan gerrymander, and each has its plusses and minuses. In the Whitford litigation, these quantitative options led to an unusually large amount of analysis. Graphs, tables, computer code, equations, and data all became important parts of the Whitford evidentiary record.

This is clearly a success for social science. But it also creates a problem for the court. Precisely because it takes social science to understand partisan gerrymandering, the solutions offered will be complex. The court balked at this complexity in the oral arguments, calling the social science “full of questions,” “gobbledygook,” and a “bunch of baloney.” Concerns were raised that reliance on social science would undermine the legitimacy of the court, since it might be difficult to explain the court’s decision in terms the average person could understand.

These concerns should be taken seriously, but they should not prevent the courts from addressing complex problems. As more data and computing power become available, social science will increasingly provide nuanced analyses that will be challenging to understand. These may not always be requested by the courts. In fact, it may be social science that invites the courts to get involved in issues that had once been considered untouchable—or that the courts were not even aware were problems.

The courts cannot just ignore this new evidence. Nor can they be expected to step in to defend something that they do not understand. Instead, we must find more effective ways to help the courts deal with the evidence that they see. There are a variety of options here, from staffing courts with social science experts to adding more social science analysis to law school curricula.  Perhaps we might even require judges, like doctors, to take short courses on the latest methods in order to be “re-certified” on a periodic basis.

Regardless of the solution, the struggles evident in the Whitford gerrymandering case are unlikely to get better without some change. Social science and the law are made for each other, but the marriage might need a little counseling to work itself out.

Three Lessons About California’s Election Reforms

California got its second taste of two important reforms yesterday: legislative and congressional districts drawn by an independent redistricting commission, and a “top-two” primary system that allowed voters to choose any candidate in the primary, regardless of party, and advanced the top two vote-getters, also regardless of party, to the fall election. Both went into effect in 2012.

How did the reforms do this time around? This is really a question about the legislative and congressional races, since the statewide races weren’t affected by the redistricting and there were no same-party races at that level. The new districts were used for the first time only in the state senate races.

A first pass at the results (as they stand at the time of this writing) suggests three important conclusions:

  1. Competition was higher. Races were more competitive this year than before the reforms, though they were a little less competitive than in 2012. Among races between candidates of opposing parties, 15% had a margin of victory of less than 10 points, compared to 18% in 2012 and just 7% in the decade before. There were 25 same-party races (compared with 28 in 2012), almost exclusively in districts that would have been uncompetitive under the old primary system. (The only possible exception was Congressional District 25 just north of Los Angeles, where two Republicans faced off against each other in a district that might have been competitive for a Democrat under the right circumstances). Roughly one-quarter of those same-party races were decided by less than 10 points, down slightly from 2012.

  2. The establishment did pretty well. Despite the extra competition, most races turned out as they might have before the reforms. In other words, incumbents and candidates endorsed by their party fared well. All but seven of the 114 incumbents across state assembly, state senate, and U.S. House races won reelection, although fewer incumbents ran in the senate’s new districts (50%) compared to the assembly (70%) or Congress (89%). One incumbent in a same-party race is losing this cycle (Raul Bocanegra in Assembly District 39), compared to six who lost in 2012 (two of whom were running against another incumbent). The average margin of victory for incumbents (33%) was about the same as in 2012 (33%) and in the decade before (31%). In the same-party races where only one candidate was endorsed by the party, that candidate won 15 out of 18 times, compared to 12 of 16 in 2012.

  3. Minor parties continued to struggle. One criticism of the top-two system is that minor-party and no-party-preference candidates find it more difficult to survive the first-round election to reach the fall runoff. This year, only seven such candidates managed it, four of them by running write-in campaigns in races where there was otherwise no formal major-party opposition. None of these candidates was elected on Tuesday (though such candidates rarely won before the reforms, either).

It will likely take more time for the impact of redistricting and election reforms to be clear, but for the time being, the results are falling into some predictable patterns. As voters, candidates, and campaign consultants wrap their heads around the idea of the top two, we may see further evolution of this system. But for now, the reforms have transformed certain aspects of California elections—such as increasing the number of competitive races and allowing same party runoffs in the fall—while leaving the broader landscape unchanged.

Electoral Reforms Face New Test

California’s political reforms—redistricting and the top-two primary—were meant to shake up the status quo through radically redrawn voting districts and a primary system that let voters choose any candidate of any party, and advanced the top two candidates (also regardless of party) to the fall election.

The first time out the gate, in 2012, the reforms didn’t disappoint: numerous incumbents retired, many seats were open, and a lot more candidates threw their hats in the ring. It was the shot across the establishment’s bow that supporters had been looking for.

Things are calmer in this year’s legislative and congressional races. The most obvious sign: an unusually large number of candidates facing no formal opposition. There were eight such races in 2012 and an average of 7 under the previous primary system. Today there are 20.

These candidates may not remain completely uncontested, since there are reasons to think we may see more write-in candidates this time around. The deadline for filing as a write-in—at least one whose votes are actually counted—comes after the normal candidate filing deadline. Under the top two, potential write-ins can wait to see whether a heavyweight ends up uncontested and then jump into the race for less money and effort. As the only other candidate, these write-ins will be guaranteed a spot in the fall campaign. This was not a popular approach in 2012, but candidates are still learning the system, so we may be seeing this strategy coming into its own. We will know more once the official write-in list is announced later this month.

In 2012, there were also a number of incumbents who faced challengers from within their own party. This was a sign, in part, of the better odds facing those challengers under the top two system: so long as they finished at least in second place, they would get another chance to topple the incumbent in the fall campaign. Nonetheless, only a handful of these challenged incumbents lost. Perhaps as a result, fewer incumbents overall face an intra-party challenge this time: 28% this year compared to 42% in 2012. And with only a couple exceptions, even those incumbents facing an intra-party contest are in a dominant financial position.

Finally, there are fewer open seats this year. In 2012, an extraordinarily large number of incumbents chose to retire or run for another office, leaving nine seats open for the U.S. House and 35 open for the state assembly (open seats for the state senate were more in line with past experience). This year, there are six open seats for the U.S. House—still high by historical standards, but less so. And the 23 open seats for the assembly aren’t all that many, at least in the era of term limits.

However, the seats that have come open are hotly contested, as open seats usually are. The great majority of these races feature at least three candidates, and a few have far more than that—with the prize going to Congressional District 33, where no fewer than 18 candidates are vying to replace retiring incumbent Henry Waxman. Moreover, fundraising in these races is much more evenly distributed across a range of candidates.

We are still early in the election cycle, and between the primary and the general there are still plenty of opportunities for surprises. But so far, it looks like the revolution, such as it was, is coming to a close, and a new status quo may be settling into place.

Rebooting California’s Congressional Delegation

We’ve just passed through retirement season in California politics: the weeks leading up to the candidate filing deadline when incumbents who have decided to step down often make their announcements. Six of California’s 53-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives have decided not to run; the latest is Democrat Gloria Negrete McLeod, who is leaving after only one term to run for the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors. Also retiring are John Campbell, Buck McKeon, Gary Miller, George Miller, and Henry Waxman.

Six retirements might seem like a lot, but California’s rate of open seats this year (11%) is only slightly above the national rate (9%) and in line with the national rate in other recent non-redistricting years. (The disruption caused by redrawn district lines usually increases the number of retirements.)

California had gotten used to low turnover in part because the districts drawn by the legislature in 2001 preserved the status quo. But the new independent redistricting commission and top-two primary have opened the floodgates. Fourteen incumbents either retired or were defeated for reelection in 2012. With this year’s retirements (not all of which can be traced to the reforms), more than a third of the delegation will have turned over by the time the dust settles this fall.

This turnover is having a dramatic impact. At the start of the 112th Congress in 2011, California’s delegation had served an average of 15.1 years, far higher than the national average of 9.8 years (this number comes from the Congressional Research Service). But by the start of the 113th Congress in 2013, California’s average had plummeted to 10.2 years, and with this year’s retirements it will fall to 9.7 (or lower if some incumbents are not reelected). In the context of congressional history, that’s like pressing the reset button.

This rapid change raises questions about what we need from our representatives. On the one hand, we want turnover in Congress. New members can bring new ideas and fresh perspectives. At the very least, we want to feel like we can kick members out of office if we get fed up with them.

On the other hand, experienced representation can be more effective for both the state and the nation as a whole, and even mediocre representatives gain influence over time. Incumbent retirements or losses since 2010 have included the top majority or minority member on eight committees and 10 subcommittees, some of them among the most influential in Congress. The state should expect a diminished profile on Capitol Hill as a result.

Which is better: experience or responsiveness? There’s no simple answer. Without passing judgment on the specific members who have retired, one might argue that the pre-reform delegation had gotten out of whack, with too many members serving too long. But if things shift too far the other direction we could lose all the benefits of experience.

The recent turnover puts California at the national average for the first time in decades. We’ll see what impact that has on both behavior and legislation.