http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/lets-talk-about-redistricting/
While the entire article is good for anyone who finds redistricting even the slightest bit interesting or does not really understand the process, I will post a few of my favorite parts here:
MC: Can you just talk generally, for someone who is not following redistricting at all, about what we should expect?
While the entire article is good for anyone who finds redistricting even the slightest bit interesting or does not really understand the process, I will post a few of my favorite parts here:
MC: Can you just talk generally, for someone who is not following redistricting at all, about what we should expect?
DW: Democrats are poised to gain a handful of seats. The inimitable Stu Rothenberg put out a great column outlining why the pendulum has swung in a minor way toward Democrats, and why they’re poised to pick up a handful. And I agree with his assessment.
If you take what Democrats need to get to the majority, they need 24 more seats after picking up New York 26. Their best case scenario is a gain of 4 to 5 seats total from redistricting – assuming things go their way in court in Florida and some of the other big states where there’s a lot on the line. Then they need 20 more seats after that to get to a majority.
But the effect of redistricting is to make those 20 seats a little more difficult for Democrats to gain, because Republicans will be able to shore a lot of them up. There are 61 Republicans – including many, many freshman – who are sitting in districts carried by President Obama in 2008. A third or 40 percent of those Republicans stand to benefit from redistricting and will get better seats. Whether it’s enough for some of them to stave off Democratic challenges is a question we’ll have to answer next year. But those next 20 seats get harder for Democrats as a result of redistricting.
Republicans have unprecedented control over the state legislatures that will draw the lines. They control the process in states with 202 house districts compared to just 47 for democrats. But the irony is that Republicans made so many gains in 2010 that they don’t have a lot left to gain. They simply have a lot left to shore up."
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NS: How different would the results be if Democrats controlled the majority of state legislatures instead of Republicans? Maybe there are some structural factors that are making this, I guess, better for Democrats than conventional wisdom might hold. But could they have made really big gains if they’d won a few more states?
DW: Oh, absolutely. Because Republicans have so much to lose in this process. If Democrats were in control in all of these big states then we’d have lots of Illinois scenarios, where you have a lot of Republican freshman on the line, and Democrats can basically take a weed-whacker to their districts, and cut them however they want to. And in Illinois alone, Democrats are poised to pick up 4 or 5 seats. If Democrats were in control in Ohio as well, they could pick 4 or 5 seats in Ohio, same with Pennsylvania. That would be the House majority right there.
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MC: In terms of gerrymandering, is there a shame factor that constrains how far a party is willing to go? Or are they going to push it as far as they want?
DW: There is a certain threshold at which voters react badly to excessive gerrymandering. We saw that in Georgia in the earlier part of the last decade where Georgia Democrats engineered a gerrymander that looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. Democrats failed to achieve the kind of gains that they were hoping for in that map in part because voters rejected the way in which the lines were drawn and saw it as a Democratic power grab.
You’ll notice that in Illinois this time around, Democrats could have drawn lines that were even more mangled than the ones in effect right now. But they chose not to, and actually part of the brilliance of it was that the districts they produced, at least downstate, were relatively compact by gerrymandering standards.
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MC: How much impact does the White House have on this?
DW: The party in the White House makes a difference only because the Justice Department has the authority to issue pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And this is a new frontier for redistricting because every redistricting round since the passage of the Voting Right Act has taken place under a Republican administration: Nixon in ‘72, Reagan ‘82 and the Bush justice departments of ‘92 and 2002.
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NS: When parties are thinking about redistricting, are they thinking about the whole 10-year period or are they just thinking to the next election?
DW: Parties have traditionally been pretty short-sighted in redistricting, and there’s some evidence of that again this year. But I’d say more than in past years the consultants and strategists are thinking about the long term. Because there have been three consecutive wave elections, there is really a sense among them that they need to think long term about safeguarding the districts that they draw. So we’re seeing Republicans place an emphasis on simply shoring up their gains and not trying to cut their advantage too thin. I hear some consultants talking about software that assesses not only the political performance in districts, but the overall trend line over the past ten years to gauge which direction districts are moving. That’s a new wrinkle in this process that wasn’t really present ten years ago.
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NS: What mistakes can parties make? Can they get bad advice? Are there consultants out there who don’t know what they’re doing?
DW: Balancing competing interests of incumbents with partisan considerations, overall strategy and Census data is really, really difficult.
One possible mistake early on in this process is Texas Republicans’ decision to put forward a map that lacks a second new Hispanic-majority district. It’s possible that they could have drawn a map that created the same number of Hispanic majority seats that MALDEF, the Hispanic advocacy group, wanted, and still preserved their grip on the seats that they have. But because they have shortchanged the number of Hispanic districts, it’s possible that their entire map might get thrown out in court, and that’s a risk that Republicans might not want to run.
So it’s possible that some parties will go too far in the process. But for the most part, there are so many consultants and so much data in the room, that parties really are going through every scenario and feverishly coming up with a plan that maximizes their opportunities.
