This election year we can expect to hear a lot
about Congressional district gerrymandering, which is when political parties
redraw district boundaries to give themselves an electoral advantage.
Gerrymandering is at
least partly to blame for the lopsided Republican representation in the House.
According to an analysis I did last
year, the Democrats are under-represented by about 18 seats in the
House, relative to their vote share in the 2012 election. The way Republicans
pulled that off was to draw some really, really funky-looking Congressional
districts.
Contrary
to one
popular misconception about
the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a
collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a
small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats
that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win
comfortably. Considering this dynamic, John Sides of The Washington Post's
Monkey Cage blog has argued
convincingly that
gerrymandering is not what's behind the rising polarization in Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment