Gerrymander Rejoinder

Many news outlets (NY Times, Wall Street Journal) are talking about gerrymandering, but they all basically say the same thing:

• Gerrymandering's been going on forever
• Republicans are the primary culprits and Democrats the victims
• Democrats are using it effectively this year to negate the Republicans' historic advantage

They're also all leaving out many important points:

• Democrats had a huge advantage from gerrymandering for 50 years.
• Gerrymandering's effect in 2018 and 2020 was almost nil.
• Democrats gerrymandered in 2010-2020 as well, and the most gerrymandered state is California.
• Democrats passed numerous commissions in the 2010s to reduce gerrymandering, but those are basically ignored.

Why Is This Important?

I imagine for most readers who aren't following this every day, their eyes glaze over as soon as they start reading the word gerrymander. It's one of those words that is easy to forget its exact meaning because it's rarely used, its meaning can't be intuited from the term itself, and is only used in the context of boring political stories. While you can easily look up the definition somewhere and get an explainer, simply put, it signifies the process for determining who gets to vote for each of the 435 congressional seats, which matters to which political party controls Congress. Politicians in each state get to figure out who will vote for each of their state's representatives to Congress. This process is known as redistricting because they draw the lines for the districts, and who falls into what district. Politicians can draw these lines in a way so certain voters fall within certain districts and thereby determine whether the district has more Democrats or Republicans. If they do it well, they can distort the number of seats that each party will win in their state.

Republican Gerrymandering Isolated to 3 Election Cycles Out of Last 25

Taking a historical perspective, you can see that Democrats held the advantage in seats continuously from 1946 to 1994. With some years having an advantage of more than 40 seats. The average from 1958 to 1992 was 28. Then in the 1990s, after the Republican revolution, Republicans began punching above their weight, winning more seats than votes from 1996-2006, with a switch during the Democratic wave of 2008. Then, because Republicans were so successful at all levels in 2010, they finally had the chance to gerrymander districts for themselves, on a scale they were never able to before. You can see the effect of that in 2012-2016, where they averaged a 19 seat advantage for three cycles. Then in 2018, when Democrats retook Congress, that advantage shrank to just 1, then 2 in 2020.

The point of all this is that the effect of gerrymandered districts has historically advantaged Democrats, and at a magnitude much higher than Republicans' edge in the 2010s, yet it's only now that we hear about the scourge of gerrymandering, and always without the historical context. That context is important to understand when judging the scale of the problem and its import.

Gerrymandering Effect in 2018 Very Small

Using the election result data available from the FEC, I ran an analysis of the votes casts versus the seats won. If seats were distributed proportionally to votes, there would have been 2 additional seats awarded to Democrats, so nationally, there is a small effect. There are 8 states where Democrats have the advantage and 17 states where Republicans have the advantage, so there are about twice as many Republican states. This shouldn't be a surprise as Republicans tend to have a broader geographic appeal, holding majorities in more states than Democrats which is counterbalanced by the fact that Democratic states tend to have more people.

Looking state by state, California, has the largest discrepancy in votes vs. seats, and Democrats have a 10 seat gerrymandering advantage. They should won 36 seats, given the vote totals, but they won 46. The next highest was Texas, which gave Republicans an extra 4 seats beyond what their vote totals would merit. Adding up all the states individually, Republican gerrymandered states net them an additional 25 seats, and Democratic states net Democrats 20 seats. This doesn't match the +2 national Republican advantage because combining the votes across all states, including the 26 that show no advantage, produces a different outcome. What readers should take away from this is that Democrats still gerrymandered a great deal, but just not as much as Republicans.

States with gerrymandering commissions

Lastly, the other context that these articles consistently omit, is that in the 2010s, as Democrats realized they were newly on the losing side of the gerrymandering effect, they led a movement to eliminate gerrymandering altogether. Several states passed redistricting commissions to ensure district lines were drawn fairly and objectively, without favoring either party. According to ballotpedia, eight states have a commission to manage the redistricting process (California, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Michigan, Hawaii, and New Jersey). The National Conference of State Legislatures says the total is ten, Virginia having added one in 2020, and it also includes Montana. These are independent commissions which draw up Congressional district maps. 

In 4 states (Maine, New Mexico, New York, and Utah), there is an Advisory Commission, which draw up maps that are submitted to the legislature for approval in a conventional vote. Notably, this is less helpful, as the legislatures can easily, and on a partisan basis, reject the independent map, and adopt its own.

Lastly, in 3 states (Connecticut, Indiana, and Ohio), there is a back-up commission if the legislature can't agree.

Of these states, which purportedly want to reduce gerrymandering, New York's final map gets an F score from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. In 2018, New York's map provided Democrats a +2 seat advantage, and the new map will give Democrats three more seats. California, as mentioned previously, already has a pretty strong Democratic advantage already, and it's expected to either maintain the current composition, or give Democrats an extra seat.

The importance of including this information is so that readers and citizens understand that Democrats aren't as committed to fairly drawn districts as they say and also, the existence of a commission doesn't guarantee fairly drawn districts (which should make everyone wonder whether a federally mandated solution to this will only reward the more craven).

Background Links

Cook Political Report - Redistricting

Princeton Gerrymandering Project - They conduct pretty good quantitative analysis on the maps and effects.

All About Redistricting

National Conference of State Legislatures - Redistricting - more detail about the commissions

Ballotpedia

FEC Election Results

Notes on Methods and Sources

• I did analysis using different sources and at different times, so numbers don't always match up. Primarily, the state analysis and national analysis were done using different sources.
• National analysis used data provided through Wikipedia (their sources are always listed).
• The basic methodology was not strictly a gerrymandering analysis but was a comparison of the composition of votes by party to the composition of seats. In a randomly distributed state, with fairly drawn maps, this should not lead to a difference in seats of more than 1. 

It should also be noted that there are many complications to conducting this analysis. 

• Four races had only one candidate so the votes weren't tallied or entered.
• Taking the national composition and comparing to seats ignores that there are several states with only one seat so can't be gerrymandered.
• Because the voters are not distributed uniformly by party throughout the country, there can be discrepancies between the vote composition and seat composition due entirely to geographical distribution.
• Results can change from election to election based on turnout. When one party turns out in higher numbers, it gives the illusion of a temporary gerrymander.

Double Standards Wrecking America

Once again, Democrats have done what they used to hyperventilate about Republicans potentially doing.

Yesterday, the NY Post published the accusation (from a whistleblower) that Governor Cuomo and his team hid data for political purposes. Ask yourself, how serious is this. 

Now compare this to the announcement over the summer that the HHS would take over data reporting from the CDC. If you don't remember, there was a ten-alarm outrage fire from the media about politicizing data collection and hiding data. All of which was worried speculation based on the belief that Trump is the most evil and cynical human being that has ever lived.

Anyone who was outraged by the possibility that Trump would hide data should be even more outraged by Cuomo actually doing it! But they're not. Are there calls from Democrats or the media for an investigation or just Republicans? Do you know any Democrats? Is their reaction proportional to the events?

Also, consider the reaction to and follow-up investigations of Chris Christie when someone on his staff closed a bridge.

This is just a single example from the past fortnight. Over and over again, we were warned that Trump doesn't believe experts and puts politics ahead of science. Yet, Biden does the exact same thing, dismisses the well-documented position of the director of the CDC as just a personal opinion and minimizing it because he didn't want to run afoul of the teachers' unions. That is absolutely his right, but the media should call him out on it. It should apply at least 50% of the scrutiny it applied to Trump.

Gina Carano was fired because "her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable." This was the post she shared:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views”

Do you think this statement is "abhorrent" or that it denigrates anyone, let alone denigrates them based on their cultural and religious identities? Some make the argument that any comparison of today to what happened to the Jews is itself abhorrent. Firstly, to be totally clear, this post does not say that what is happening today is the same as the violence against the Jews, the concentration camps, or the genocide itself. Read literally, it is comparing only the existence of neighbor on neighbor hate. But secondly, if any comparison is off-limits, then Pedro Pascal should also be fired.

There is a great chasm in the reactions from the media and left-leaning people. They may agree with everything in this post, but because of their political affiliations, their level of outrage is highly correlated with not the events themselves but the affiliations of the people involved. Their blood boils when it's the other side and when it's on their side, they nod and move on.

This leads to a huge disparity in consequences. Republicans get fired and ridiculed, and oftentimes Democrats skate on without punishment. For this country to continue to work, the consequences have to depend on the offense and not the offender. There cannot be different punishments depending on the political affiliation of the criminal. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is rampant, both in the media and in the public, and the only step towards solving it I can imagine is to continue to push people to look at themselves, consider whether they are part of this problem, and try to overcome it.

Update:

Yet another example: White House Press Secretary TJ Ducklo threatened a reporter writing a story about him. His threats included "I will destroy you" and that he would "ruin her reputation." Pre-Biden, any threats made by a White House official against a reporter would have been met with a day of stories and opinions about the end of democracy. In this case, there's no coverage on the main page of Google News; I had to search for Psaki to find the details. This gap in the level of caring by Democrats and the media will lead to disaster in the long-run.

Censorship for Thee but not for Me

These are the opinions of the left, as I've surmised them. Not all of the left believes all of them, but I have heard or deduced each of these arguments from them.

1. The social media moderators try to reduce racist, hateful, and misinformation on their platforms.
2. The social media moderators, while mostly left-leaning, apply their standards blindly and without regard to politics.
3a. The right is more likely to generate content that fits into #1, and so gets suppressed more.
3b. There is no disparity between moderation of the left and right.
4. There is no moderation of the right. (Because right-leaning users have high engagement)
5. The word "suppress" is too polemical.

#3 is split into two, because both can't be true, but I've heard both arguments. #4 is a remarkably terrible argument. There are many reasons why the right can have high engagement despite an effort to reduce it. Making this argument is like saying masks have no effect on Covid spread because countries with mask mandates are seeing Covid spread. There is no way to infer the effect of a deterrent by observing the final amount of anactivity. The only thing that high engagement tells you is that any moderation isn't 100%, which no one is arguing.

This is what the right believes, as I understand it:

1. The social media moderators try to suppress racist, hateful, and misinformation, and that's ok.
2. The social media moderators, mostly left-leaning, apply their standards inconsistently and overzealously because of their own views.

Recent events are substantial evidence that #2 is true. 

The NY Post story. First, Twitter banned the links altogether because the story was based on hacked e-mails or it contained private information, so they said. First, there was no evidence that the e-mails were hacked. Recovered under dubious circumstances, to be sure, but no indication they were obtained illegally. On the other hand, the NYTimes story about Trump's taxes was very likely based on tax returns obtained illegally. There's clearly a double-standard. Twitter has also never acted to suppress a political story that contained private information. Again the NYT story about Trump's taxes would seem to fit into this definition. 

On the overzealous application of their "standards," the recent post from U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan is illustrative. Twitter suspended him for a post about the border wall. The text of the post: "[Customs Border Protection and US Army Corp of Engineers Headquarters] continue to build new wall every day. Every mile helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country. It's a fact, walls work."

The explanation from Twitter: "You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease."

If we first remove everything that Twitter can't possibly be referring to: "You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin....". Since there's no threat here, there's no promotion of violence, so it must be that Twitter believes this harasses other people. But still this doesn't seem to relate in anyway to the offending post.

In truth, Twitter blocked this because a moderator, representative of the left, inferred that Morgan is saying 100% of the people (who are overwhelmingly Latino) are "gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drug [transporters]." Firstly, this is not what Morgan said, this is what Twitter inferred. Second, even if he had said exactly this, it still wouldn't fit the reason they cited, since it's not harassment. It would be an extremely egregious and racist form of stereotyping, but Twitter should have a policy for that explicitly.

The problem for the right with this episode, is Twitter is acting, call it suppressing or moderating or censoring, based on how they are interpreting a statement, not based on the literal words being used and that there's no clear policy. Taken as it is, I don't think it's disputable that there are some gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs that cross the border, and if a wall is effective it'll stop them.

The left has a real problem separating text as written from their own inferences. Because their inferences are highly correlated with their political biases, it leads them to over-moderate the right. Morgan should not have been suspended for making a factual statement that didn't obviously violate Twitter's policy. Instead, Twitter should have, at most, slapped on a "Potentially racist implication" tag, and allowed Morgan to modify his language if he wanted it removed.

Democrats Admit Actions Politically-Motivated

The news isn't that their actions are politically motivated. The news is that they admitted it.

Democrats continuously claim that their actions are noble--they're doing the best for the American people.  Those evil Republicans, however, always have nefarious political motivations. If you follow the news closely, you would have noticed how frequently they brought up Mitch McConnell saying his main goal was to defeat President Obama.

Well, here's Democrat James Clyburn admitting that they designed the ACA to help them win elections. Now Republicans have the opportunity to take the moral high ground. Why wasn't the sole goal of this legislation to insure the uninsured and bring costs down--to help people?  How many people have to go uninsured so that the Democrats can win in 2014? How many people are going to die for their blatant politicking?

I expect to hear next to nothing about this development from Republicans, from the media, and from the Democrats who endlessly criticized McConnell.

Double Standards: Obama's Oral Skills

If President Obama didn't look at the text of his speech as often as he does in this clip, he would speak as poorly (or worse) than President Bush.

White House State Dinner - March 14, 2012

I'm surprised he can't go more than 3 or 4 words without consulting the notes.