Feb 4, 2018 6 min read

”I know Dad, but why isn’t it ever unfair in my favor?”

- Bill Watterson, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

The Democrats, the League of Women Voters and other left-aligned groups have been complaining about congressional districts ever since recent losses of Democratic congressional seats in Pennsylvania.

In 2004, Republicans held 12 of the 19 congressional seats. In 2006, Democrats picked up a net four seats for an 11-8 advantage, and increased that to 12-7 in 2008. Apparently, the districts were OK at that time. However, in 2010, Republicans picked up a net five seats for a 12-7 advantage. All of a sudden, the same districts became questionable. In 2011, Pennsylvania lost a congressional seat, and the state’s congressional map was redrawn to accommodate 18 districts, and Republicans have held a 13-5 advantage ever since.

To hear Democrats and the League of Women Voters tell the story, it is all because of gerrymandered districts. They have their knickers in a twist and demand redistricting to achieve “fair” congressional districts.

There are some problems with this narrative. First, seven of the 13 Republicans were elected before the 2011 redistricting was signed into law, so are not beneficiaries of any alleged gerrymandering. Second, two of the Republican congressional districts have a majority of Democratic voters. The districts in Western Pennsylvania in which Republicans hold registration advantages have seen Republicans perform better than the registration margins, indicating they drew significant numbers of Democratic voters. One of the worst cases of gerrymandering in Western Pennsylvania is Congressman Mike Doyle’s 14th district, which is 3.6-to-1 Democratic. I’m sure those who advocate fairness would insist on fixing that.

The point clearly is that there is no causality, at least in Western Pennsylvania’s congressional districts, between redistricting and congressional representation. People vote for better candidates and better policy.

People become emotional about gerrymandering because they believe that redrawn districts are somehow unfair to them. They believe that the districts keep one party in power because elections have become “uncompetitive” (that is, their candidate or party does not win).

Indeed, nationally the number of “competitive” elections measured by the Cook Partisan Voter Index has declined, but gerrymandering is not the whole story. Current research suggests that the areas from which districts are drawn are becoming much less competitive because people are self-sorting into like-minded groups where political opinions are more likely to be the same, thus “pre-gerrymandering” large parts of the landscape. That makes drawing competitive districts out of homogeneous communities very difficult. One has but to look at the map of the 2016 presidential election to see that the Democratic vote was strongly “pre-gerrymandered” to urban and coastal America with the Republican vote everywhere else.

We know from many studies, such as the 2016 Pew Study, that America has become significantly more polarized in the past decade. This leads to social self-selection and increased extremism in all political areas. This is not caused by redistricting or gerrymandering, but it certainly results in an increased number of non-competitive political races. The bottom line is that getting rid of gerrymandering, if that is even possible, isn’t going to eliminate extremism in Congress.

The U.S. Constitution places very few guidelines on congressional districts. It first requires that state legislatures draw the districts. Article 1, Section 2 provides that the seats shall be apportioned equally based on population, and a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling mandated that the populations of House districts must be as nearly equal as possible. This is a hard-and-fast rule. State-based requirements for legislative district redistricting often include:

• Contiguity, with all areas within a district being adjacent to one another.
• Compactness, a principle that all residents of the district live as near to one another as practicable.
• Community of interest, which could be described as a group of people who have common political, social or economic interests.
• A requirement that district boundary lines take into account the boundary lines of counties and municipalities.

The Pennsylvania Constitution requires that state legislative districts be contiguous and compact, and should respect county and municipal boundaries, but does not require the same for congressional districts.

Modern software can do a lot of interesting things, including sorting voters into districts and drawing district lines to various criteria very quickly. Districts can be selected to maximize the number of typically Democratic districts, the number of usually Republican districts, promote highly competitive elections, maximize the number of majority-minority districts, or make districts as compact as possible. The result? What you do with one district impacts other districts. Voters placed in one district must come from somewhere else. Making one district more competitive may make another area less compact, or fracture community boundaries.

Seldom are voters monolithic. Democratic voters from Pittsburgh are not the same as those from the Mon Valley, and Republicans from Greene County are not the same as those from Upper St. Clair. Just shuffling voters around is not moving interchangeable parts.

The courts have never said what “fair” is. They have not given any guidelines or tests as to what is too partisan or unconstitutional. Just because a district looks ungainly does not mean it is not constitutional or “fair.”

It is hard to imagine what the outcome of a court-ordered redistricting will be other than “unfair in my favor.” Hardly a worthy objective. The threat of the court drawing the districts is not only absurd but completely unconstitutional.

Which brings us back to Calvin’s initial question. Voting districts are inherently partisan and “unfair.” So Calvin asked, “Why isn’t it unfair in my favor?” Isn’t that really what the ruckus is all about? Democrats can’t seem to win even in districts where they have a numerical advantage, so they want some super advantage? They want it to be unfair in their favor.