HOW REPRESENTATIVE IS THE HOUSE?
Imagine that each party’s number of seats in the House of Representatives matched the share of votes its candidates received. Republicans running in Illinois received 39 percent of the votes in the state’s eighteen House races. A close matching would give them seven of the eighteen seats, which is just about 39 percent.
Had this formula been used for the House that is currently sitting, Democrats would have 259 members, or twenty-four more than the 235 they now have.
The main reason was cynical gerrymandering by GOP state legislatures. Among their shortfalls were five seats in Texas, three in North Carolina and Ohio, and two in Indiana.1 Due to shameless mapmaking, Wisconsin Republicans were able to turn 46 percent of the votes into 62 percent of the state’s delegation. The only Democratic counterpart was Maryland, which yielded them two extra seats.
But there’s more. Despite their losses from contorted districts, Democrats won 53 percent of all House votes nationally and ended up with 54 percent of the membership. That seems a pretty equitable result.
Or take another measure. A basic stratagem in drawing district lines for partisan advantage is to force the other party to “waste” its votes. That’s what happened in notoriously gerrymandered North Carolina, where Democrats expended 544,235 votes on each seat they won and Republicans got theirs with 189,644 apiece.
Yet nationally, Democrats averaged 255,197 votes per seat, almost identical to the Republicans’ 253,994. I can’t think of another year when the two sides were as close by that yardstick.
So it would seem that in the current House, neither party is losing. Here’s the reason: Republicans fared almost as badly in heavily Democratic states as Democrats did in Republican-dominated ones when it comes to comparing seat allocation to statewide vote totals. In bright-blue states, the GOP got twenty-one fewer places than their votes warranted. Notably, they were two down in New York and Illinois, three down in New Jersey, and a dazzling ten down in California.2
How this occurred differed from the manipulations faced by Democrats. California’s congressional districts are crafted by an independent panel. In New Jersey, New York, and Illinois, the districts that Democrats won in 2018 had previously gone to Republicans. If that could happen, it should be a sign of nonpartisan mapping.
So what brought about the GOP’s underrepresentation? As was pointed out earlier, Republicans chose to sit out thirty-nine races in 2018, whereas Democrats skipped only three. I estimate that these blanks caused a dip of 2,473,998 votes cast for Republican House candidates.
Another reason is more recondite. In 2018, Democrats increased their victory margin in some fairly competitive states, notably by doing well in reddish suburbs. In the dozen states where Democrats had their best tallies, they carried an arresting 125 of the 148 districts. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, they took every one. Yet these states also had sizable pools of Republicans—in fact, 11,801,177 in the states together—who came away with only twenty-three House successes.
GOP supporters in these states sank 629,842 of their votes into each of their seats, while Democrats got theirs for 175,936. Few gerrymander templates attain that ratio. In California alone, Republicans ended up with only seven of the fifty-three places in their state’s delegation. Geared to votes, they would have had ten more.
Much is said about how Democrats coalesce in urban areas, where their votes are clustered in overlarge majorities. It appears that Republicans are also assembling with fellow thinkers, even if the milieus can’t be as readily identified as a Phoenix or a Philadelphia. As a result, Democrats have felt less need to manipulate maps. (As I’ve noted, only Maryland is truly culpable on this score.)
As matters now stand, there’s no partisan consistency to the relationship between votes and seats. It comes close to pure equality in Republican Florida and Democratic Colorado. It’s most divergent in Democratic New Jersey and Republican Kentucky.
Of course, nonpartisan maps are possible. Pennsylvania’s, which was imposed in 2018 by its highest court, is an excellent model. But it’s unclear how even a fair-minded map would aid California’s Republicans, apart from adopting multimember districts and preferential ballots. The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has now decreed that it is not the province of federal judges to umpire cartographic quarrels. (At least that’s how they put it. Their party’s stockpile of extra seats was under attack.)3
So does the current composition of the House mirror the electorate’s will? In an odd way, it does. Each party’s deficits in states are redressed elsewhere. It’s almost as if Arkansas’s bypassed Democrats gain a voice via Rhode Island. Still, state by state, representation is woefully out of kilter. In thirty-one states, district maps help one party, albeit not always by conscious design. That the parties’ averages turn out to be similar should not deter moves for nonpartisan commissions and a commitment to fairness.