Gerrymander?

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Mike Johnson blames gerrymandering for the Republicans' failure to win more seats in 2024.  In fact, their seat share matches their vote share.

 Ben Cohen at Factcheck.org:

Jonathan Cervas, assistant teaching professor in political science at Carnegie Mellon who was a nonpartisan consultant on redistricting in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York, told us in an email that he agreed with Niven and the Brennan Center’s findings. While “the net effect of gerrymandering is difficult to gauge,” partisan redistricting “created a substantial advantage for Republicans nationwide,” making it “pretty clear that the Republicans have the advantage in terms of how the districts lines were drawn to favor a party,” he said.

Cervas, Nevin, and the Brennan Center’s report all pointed to North Carolina as an example of partisan gerrymandering affecting the 2024 election. In 2023, the state Supreme Court reversed an earlier ruling that had prevented the implementation of a Republican-drawn map in the 2022 election, with the court now concluding that they could not rule on cases concerning partisan redistricting. As a result, the Republican-controlled state legislature redistricted the state to favor their party. In what Cervas termed “textbook gerrymandering,” the Democrats lost three congressional seats in North Carolina between 2022 and 2024 under the newly drawn map, despite what he says were similar statewide Democratic vote shares in both elections.

However, Cervas also argued that the Republican advantage through gerrymandering has decreased in recent election cycles. The “Great Gerrymander of 2012,” as experts called it, created significant partisan advantages for Republicans in the aftermath of the 2010 census. But Cervas told us that shifting political control and interventions to courts and independent commissions have lessened the Republican Party’s advantage in recent election cycles. For example, Niven and Cervas both said that recent court rulings enforcing redistricting changes in Alabama and Louisiana favored Democrats over Republicans.

Alternatively, other experts used differing methodologies to quantify the effects of gerrymandering and found a smaller net effect from partisan redistricting.

In a 2023 study, Kosuke Imai, professor of government and statistics at Harvard University and the leader of the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology Project, found — along with his team — that Republicans possess a net advantage of only two congressional seats from partisan gerrymandering.

Similar to Cervas, Imai told us in an email that partisan redistricting efforts largely favored Republicans over Democrats after the 2010 census. However, he said that “in the 2020 redistricting cycle, some states had a partisan bias toward Democrats. As a result, even though there was widespread gerrymandering in 2020, the partisan biases were mostly canceled out at the national level.”

Informal Checks and Balances: Stocks and Media

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book looks at the return of Donald Trump.

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

When Donald J. Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with news cameras rolling, the moment perfectly captured two of the president-elect’s biggest obsessions: the stock market and television.

Mr. Trump’s fear of falling markets and bad imagery on TV may serve as more formidable checks on some of his more aggressive policies, like mass deportations and sweeping tariffs on trade with China, than any institutional restraints he may face in Washington.

Those guardrails are not foolproof, of course: Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shatter longstanding political and legal norms in Washington while enduring the crush of condemnation from his adversaries at home and abroad.

But more than a dozen people close to Mr. Trump say he sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices. And they say he is so obsessed with how he comes across on television that a barrage of negative coverage can make him hesitate, or even reverse course.

...

The old guardrails from his first term have rusted away. The kind of people who saw themselves as the “adults in the room” who needed to protect the country from Mr. Trump — like John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — will not be hired again.

 The old guardrails from his first term have rusted away. The kind of people who saw themselves as the “adults in the room” who needed to protect the country from Mr. Trump — like John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — will not be hired again.

Turnout in 2024

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book -- titled TBD -- looks at the 2024 election.

G. Elliott Morris, Amina Brown and Katie Marriner at FiveThirtyEight:

Exacerbating Democrats’ vote share losses among key groups was a decline in turnout among those formerly their most fervent supporters. Cities saw a large decline in turnout in 2024. By our calculations, turnout in the most urban counties in the U.S. fell from 53 percent of the voting-age population in 2020 to just 45 percent in 2024. On the other hand, turnout was steady at 71-72 percent of the voting-age population in the most rural areas.


Turnout also seemed to drop in other counties that voted strongly for Biden in 2020, regardless of how urban they were. In Jefferson County, Mississippi, where Biden won 85 percent of the vote, turnout fell from 71 percent in 2020 to 58 percent in 2024, despite remaining high in counties that voted strongly for Trump in the last presidential election. Turnout fell by 6 points in Taos County, New Mexico — popular with both avid skiers and liberals (Biden won 76 percent of the vote there in 2020) — while rising by 7 points in Haralson County, Georgia — a rural county on the border with Alabama where Biden garnered just 13 percent in 2020. This story is repeated over and over again nationwide; turnout went up in the whitest, most rural and most Trump-friendly areas of the country, and it dropped in cities, Democratic strongholds and counties with high percentages of minorities — especially in the Southern Black Belt.

Nate Cohn, however, says that turnout was not the main reason she lost.

For one, the story doesn’t apply to the battlegrounds, where turnout was much higher. In all seven battleground states, Trump won more votes than Biden did in 2020.

More important, it is wrong to assume that the voters who stayed home would have backed Harris. Even if they had been dragged to the polls, it might not have meaningfully helped her...[In] a presidential election, turnout and persuasion often go hand in hand. The voters who may or may not show up are different from the rest of the electorate. They’re less ideological. They’re less likely to be partisans, even if they’re registered with a party. They’re less likely to have deep views on the issues. They don’t get their news from traditional media.

Throughout the race, polls found that Trump’s strength was concentrated among these voters. Many were registered Democrats or Biden voters four years ago. But they weren’t acting like Democrats in 2024. They were more concerned by pocketbook issues than democracy or abortion rights. If they decided to vote, many said they would back Trump.

 

Republicans and the Aggregated Vote for the House

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

In 2024, as in 2022, Republicans won the aggregated national vote for the House.  Their vote share (50.6%)  matches their seat share.  It was not always thus.  Until a few years ago, their seat share was larger than their vote share because the Democratic vote was concentrated in urban areas where Democrats won by huge margins that resulted in wasted votes.  But now more Republicans are winning by rubble-bouncing margins, mainly in rural areas.

Philip Bump at WP:

[C]ontrol of the House came down to only about 7,300 votes. If you were shaking that many hands starting at midnight, you’d be done by about 2 a.m.

This interesting little bit of trivia comes from a social media post by the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman. Republicans will enter the 119th Congress with a 220-215 seat majority. That means that, with a three-seat flip in November, Democrats would have the majority. (220 minus three is 217; 215 plus three is 218. QED.) But thanks to three districts (in Colorado, Iowa and Pennsylvania), Republicans will have control of the chamber.

I was, probably predictably, curious how this could be visualized. So I visualized it, showing the margins in House contests arranged from biggest vote-margin victory for a Democrat to the biggest for a Republican. ... There’s an interesting pattern, as you’ve likely noticed: Republican victory margins jump upward a lot more quickly than do Democratic ones. 

Slotkin v. Identity Politics

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. 

Marc Rod at Jewish Insider:

Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Wednesday that the Democratic Party needs to abandon “identity politics” to succeed in the future, and discussed her strategy to appeal to both Jewish and Muslim voters in Michigan on a webinar with the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

“I feel very strongly that identity politics — we need to have it go the way of the dodo,” Slotkin said on the webinar. “The idea that you can say ‘this group, because of their race or religion or ethnicity, is going to do this predictable voting behavior’ is not right. Coalitions are changing. Voters are changing.”

Slotkin said that she experienced this personally on her campaign, giving an example of an event with a group of Pakistani-American doctors she assumed would be reliable voters for Vice President Kamala Harris, but were actually all voting for Trump. She said the Democratic Party has also made mistaken assumptions about Latino and African American voters.

“You’ve got to appeal to people’s core issues regardless of their historical voting patterns, and you can’t get lazy,” Slotkin said. “And I think Donald Trump was not lazy.”

She described pocketbook issues as the key question in the race, and said her campaign had tackled the issue head-on. Voters, she said, were “confused” about what Democrats’ priorities were, especially at the presidential level, following President Joe Biden’s departure from the race.

Immigration, Politics, and Wages

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of immigration, as will our book on the 2024 election.

David Leonhardt at NYT:

The scale of recent immigration helps explain why the issue has played a central role in American politics over the past few years.

Mayors and governors, both Democratic and Republican, have complained about the strain on local government. In Chicago and elsewhere, residents have filled public meetings to make similar criticisms. In Denver, where tens of thousands of migrants have arrived, homeless people say that shelter spots are harder to find. In Queens, residents say that an influx of street vendors has created chaos in some neighborhoods.

Some of the biggest effects have occurred in South Texas, and Mr. Trump made big electoral gains there. Eight years ago, he won less than 30 percent of the vote in a strip of six counties along the Rio Grande. This year, he won all six counties.

Elsewhere, Democrats who managed to outpace Vice President Kamala Harris and win tough congressional races — including in Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New York and Wisconsin — frequently criticized Mr. Biden’s border policies. Polls suggest that the immigration surge was Ms. Harris’s second biggest vulnerability, after only the economy.

Voters expressed particular frustration with the high recent levels of illegal immigration. Of the roughly eight million net new migrants who entered the U.S. during the Biden presidency, about five million did so without legal authorization, according to Goldman Sachs.

Some Republican politicians, including Mr. Trump, have spread falsehoods about recent immigrants, claiming that they have caused a crime wave. In truth, immigrants have historically committed crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, and crime fell nationwide over the past few years as immigration levels spiked.

Similarly, academic research suggests that the immigrants of recent decades, who have come primarily from Asia and Latin America, are climbing the economic ladder and assimilating into American society. Their children and grandchildren have made progress at a pace similar to that of the predominantly European immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But high levels of immigration do have downsides, including the pressure on social services and increased competition for jobs. The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that wage growth for Americans who did not attend college will be lower than it otherwise would have been for the next few years because of the recent surge. On the flip side, higher immigration can reduce the cost of services and help Americans, many with higher incomes, who do not compete for jobs with immigrants

Bernard Yaros Jr., a lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, a research firm, described the recent increases as “something that we really haven’t seen in recent memory.” Mr. Yaros said that they had “helped cool wage growth.”

More on State Legislative Results

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Paul Demko and Liz Crampton at Politico:

Republicans controlled 55 percent of the 7,000-plus state legislative seats going into Election Day, and they’re poised to hold almost exactly that — 55.25 percent — when legislatures gavel in next year. That’s a shift of only about 50 seats – far below the average of 195 over the past two decades, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

...


Michigan Republicans flipped four state House seats, giving them a six-seat advantage. That will empower them to hit the brakes on the policy goals of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer – widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender -- and the Democratic-controlled state Senate.

Exact control of the Minnesota House remains up in the air — the results led to an even split, with each party controlling 67 seats. But Republicans are contesting the outcomes in two races, and seemingly have plausible arguments for why the results might be challenged. Whatever happens, the disappointing results for Democrats were a further blow to Gov. Tim Walz, who enjoyed a stratospheric rise over the summer to become the (doomed) vice presidential nominee.

Republicans also made big gains in some Northeastern states. In New Hampshire, for example, they expanded majorities in both chambers, picking up two seats in the 24-member Senate and 25 seats in the chaotic 400-member House (although there were 11 vacancies heading into Election Day).

Perhaps the most surprising gains for Republicans came in deep-blue Vermont, which accounted for close to half of all GOP state legislative gains across the nation. Republicans gained 28 seats across both chambers, significantly eroding Democratic majorities and strengthening the hand of popular GOP Gov. Phil Scott, who was elected to a fifth term by a landslide margin and campaigned heavily on behalf of Republicans in the state legislature.

For Democrats, the party’s biggest victory was arguably not winning a chamber but rather holding the Pennsylvania state House — an accomplishment that speaks to the bruising night Democrats in state legislatures faced throughout the country. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro will continue to do business with a divided legislature: Democrats control the House and Republicans manage the Senate.

Democrats are also celebrating picking up 14 seats in Wisconsin, thanks to new maps that give them hope they’ll be able to flip the legislature in the near future. New maps in Montana also helped Democrats gain nine seats in the state House and two seats in the state Senate, taking away Republicans’ supermajority.

And Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the North Carolina state Assembly, taking away Republican power to override the governor’s vetoes. That will spare Democratic Governor-elect Josh Stein from the treatment received by his predecessor, Roy Cooper: Republicans overturned all 11 of Cooper’s vetoes in his final year in office.

Yet those modest successes were tempered by disappointments elsewhere. Before the election, Democrats were optimistic about their chances in purple states like Arizona, where Democrats believed this cycle was their best shot at flipping the Legislature in years. But Democrats ended up losing seats in both chambers in the state.

Another disappointment for Democrats was Idaho, where the party bragged about recruiting a candidate to run in every district for the first time in at least 30 years, believing they had an opportunity to bring over voters alienated by the rightward turn of the GOP. Instead, they lost seats in both chambers, and now will control just 15 out of 105 legislative seats