In the tail end of comments to this post I linked to a New York Magazine excerpt/adaptation from a forthcoming book with the intriguing title Ratf***ed: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, by David Daley. The book is about the triumph of gerrymandering that is the Repubican headlock on the House for the foreseeable future – even in the event of a total Trump implosion. (But be aware that Republican advantages in this regard may be somewhat overdetermined.)
All very interesting and terrible. But I’m thinking about this bit from the tail end of the article:
But there have been unintended consequences: Last fall, when John Boehner resigned as House Speaker, it was in no small part due to a political environment enshrined by the new electoral maps, which Boehner’s own political team helped create. His job was made impossible by a new breed of post-2010 congressional Republicans — pure in their conservatism, united in their distaste of deal-making with Democrats and President Obama, and certain that they represented districts where their only electoral challenge was by someone even further to their right. Boehner’s top deputy, Eric Cantor, once a conservative young Turk himself, also lost his seat, in a summer 2014 primary challenge to an even more hardline Republican backed by the influential talk-radio power Laura Ingraham.
By all but eliminating competitive general elections, redistricting had made the Republican Party too conservative even for what had been the most conservative, revolutionary edge and given rise to the ultra-conservative agenda playing out in the 2016 Republican primary. By creating safer and safer seats, held by more and more conservative members, Republican strategists generated deeper and deeper frustration among the conservative base when congressional majorities did not lead to exactly the policies they hoped to see. Hence, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz surged while establishment candidates including Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and even Ohio governor John Kasich failed to gain traction amongst a GOP base that had moved even further to the right of them. “Big Data has ruined American politics. Big Data could be used for good and is instead used for evil. Big Data has given you the tools to not have to coalition-build,” Todd tells me. “There is no persuasion. We don’t do political persuasion anymore. If you have competitive districts, you force political persuasion. The data is what has destroyed our political campaigns.”
Here’s an example of this sort of dynamic in pundit microcosm: Ross Douthat writes a squishy Ross Douthat column in which he articulates, give or take, the Norman Ornstein It’s Even Worse Than It Looks point that the Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier due to true conservatives’ unwillingness to compromise. And here is Andrew McCarthy penning a rebuttal to Douthat – pull quote: “no sensible conservative is against compromise” – which is, itself, a data point in Douthat’s favor. McCarthy doesn’t even contemplate compromise in the Ornstein-Douthat sense. He writes only about the challenge of compromise within the Republican Party – between Boehner/McConnell and Senators/House members far to their right. With such a yawning gap between the Douthats and the McCarthys, it seems to make back-of-the-envelope sense that Trump waltzed through the gap.
But does it make sense to chalk up the failure of The Party Decides, on the Republican side, in 2016, to the contribution of gerrymandering to The Big Sort?
This narrative that the Republicans might have shot themselves in the foot, party governance-wise, by over-gerrymandering has an attractive, Hegelian irony (whose discovery I leave as an exercise to the reader, if it isn’t obvious.) But my empirically naive sense is that this backfire model doesn’t quite add up. When you gerrymander, you aren’t trying to generate cocoons in which your voters are so concentrated the other side has no shot in hell: 80-20 districts, let’s call them. That’s wasteful of your own votes. You want 55-45 districts. That’s safe. To maximize such safe results, overall, you want to concentrate the other side’s votes in a few 80-20 districts, where possible. So if, in a given state, Republicans are 40%, Dems 60%, you want to massage that out into a whole bunch of 55% Republican districts, socking away the irreducibly huge Democratic remainder in overwhelming Dem stronghold districts where the vote basically goes to electoral waste. This seems like a recipe not just for effective disenfranchisement of the opposition (that is the intention) but also for driving the opposition to internal division. In 80-20 Democratic districts you would expect very left-wing Democrats to do especially well. In 55-45 Republican districts, Dems trying to prevail against the odds would need to be very different kinds of creatures. So you would, in effect, be driving a wedge, making it hard for the Dems from different types of districts to present a unified front, since visible mutual association could be a liability for each. By contrast, safe – but not too safe! – districts should be ideal, for purposes of ensuring overwhelming victory while keeping everyone on the same page, and keeping fit for electoral combat. Ideally you want your candidate to have some Democrat who is just strong enough that you have to campaign against her, not strong enough that she’s a serious threat unless you screw up. This should keep the party from nominating screw-ups or ideological extremists.
Ergo, gerrymandering efforts might actually work to mitigate The Big Sort, at least on the Republican side.
Ergo, Republican gerrymandering efforts did not backfire, causing Trump.
But what do I know?
{ 30 comments }
bob mcmanus 05.07.16 at 1:45 am
In 80-20 Democratic districts you would expect very left-wing Democrats to do especially well.
And this will be, in Red States, the kind of Democrats that moderates, independents, and moderate Republicans will be most familiar with, the most left-wing, partisan, and polarized of Democrats. I contend that minority-majority districts have contributed to the Repubs moving right in softer non-demographic ways.
Big Data has given you the tools to not have to coalition-build
This is actually very interesting outside of this context. Current reading: Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party. She is at least one step ahead of us, and seems to be getting better.
m0nty 05.07.16 at 2:09 am
My understanding is that, yes, gerrymandering produces a majority of those 55-45 districts, but the crucial thing is that the Republicans plan to continue to have power over future redistricting, so those seats will always and forever be 55-45 no matter how extreme the candidate, because the gerrymander will accommodate their electoral needs. Those 55-45 districts are as safe as the 80-20 ones on the Democratic side, because the gerrymander is persistent, elastic and structural. That’s why electorates don’t matter so much any more.
LFC 05.07.16 at 2:38 am
from the Daley excerpt as quoted in the OP:
This passage assumes that Trump’s success has been fueled by the “conservative base” — but are ‘conservative base’ voters the ones who have been providing Trump’s victory margins? I don’t know, but anecdotal evidence and, e.g., that NYT ‘The Geography of Trumpism’ piece linked by someone in the other thread, might suggest otherwise, depending of course on how one defines ‘conservative base’ voters.
For that reason and others, I wd tend to share Holbo’s skepticism of the gerrymandering-backfired-and-caused-Trump argument. My impression is that most House seats have been safe seats for one party or the other for quite a long time.
Moreover, the ‘frustration’ Trump is exploiting seems more rooted in (some) objective conditions that affect people directly, rather than in ‘ideological’ frustration about policy outcomes in Congress (which is the implication of the phrase “did not lead to exactly the policies they hoped to see”). My sense is that Trump’s success stems from his simultaneous appeal to several different groups not all of which have precisely aligned interests or views (i.e. skilled use of ‘multi-vocal signaling’, to borrow someone else’s phrase).
However, as someone who has been charged by a regular CT commenter (in a recent thread) with “anthropomorphizing [my] abstractions” — I think the commenter in question perhaps meant to say “reifying” not “anthropomorphizing”, but never mind (I’m not a huge fan of either verb, although Marx used both to advantage in his discussion of commodity fetishism) — I suppose it might be the better part of discretion for me to acknowledge unworthiness and/or ignorance and, to put it bluntly, shut it. (That doesn’t necessarily mean I will, of course.)
eddie 05.07.16 at 2:58 am
I suspect Cruz and Ryan are already working on a plan to shut down the government if Drumpf gets the whitehouse.
BBA 05.07.16 at 3:56 am
Of course this is possible because the state legislatures are responsible for redistricting both Congress and themselves. It’s a self-perpetuating gerrymander and because a substantial portion of Democratic voters believe the Presidency is an elected dictatorship and downballot and midterm elections don’t exist, it can go on forever.
Since everything’s predetermined, one wonders why we bother going through the motions. Isaac Asimov’s “Franchise” anyone?
nick s 05.07.16 at 4:34 am
I’d agree with monty that we’re talking about 55-45 districts that are solidly so — with 80-20 districts reserved for the other side though ‘packing’ — and also a specific landscape to the gerrymander. It’s remarkable what you can do with voter ID, felon disenfranchisement and strategic location of state prisons, whose population counts towards districting but will never be able to vote.
If you look, for instance, at the NC state legislature that rattled through HB2 in under twelve hours, the GOP (super)majority manages to exclude most of the state’s large population and economic centres, and since Charlotte or Raleigh can’t pack up and leave en masse, they have to deal with the burghers of Bumfuck.
kidneystones 05.07.16 at 5:09 am
@4 Excellent. The problem for the elites is clearly on display, however. I’m watching diehard anti-Trump Governor Pete Rickett endorsing Trump in Nevada, who if he did anything but would have been strung-up by the crowd.
Trump patted him on the head and went to work. Trump even after winning is transforming himself into the Republican nominee on his own terms.
He’s proven to be a handful to, say the least.
kidneystones 05.07.16 at 5:12 am
Nebraska, Nevada, two computers. He’s on message, again, whipping up the same levels of enthusiasm talking trade, jobs, and elites who don’t care, are incompetent, corrupt, or some combination of the three.
John Quiggin 05.07.16 at 7:10 am
The difficulty with 55-45 or 60-40 districts is that a big enough swing (5 or 10 per cent respectively) can wipe them all out. That’s inevitable with a gerrymander subject to a constraint of equal district size.
To the extent that the gerrymander is applied consistently, the result is a quite narrow margin between continued Repub control and a Dem supermajority. With Trump at the top of the ticket, big swings are much more likely than they would be otherwise.
BBA 05.07.16 at 4:18 pm
Why assume Trump will lose, and not only that but lose by a large enough margin to break through the GOP gerrymander? From all I’ve seen so far, there is absolutely nothing Trump can do that will alienate his supporters, and absolutely nothing anyone else can do to get them to leave Trump. He is impervious to the normal forces of politics and common sense. Which means the Democrats can only win by mobilizing their base to counter the angry white men Trump has brought out of the woodwork, and I have doubts that Clinton is capable of it, even with Obama’s help.
I also expect, based solely on pessimism and cynicism, that a future nominally Democratic majority in Congress will have a splinter faction make a corrupt bargain with the GOP to maintain conservative control. See, e.g., the New York State Senate since Cuomo took office.
Layman 05.07.16 at 4:55 pm
“From all I’ve seen so far, there is absolutely nothing Trump can do that will alienate his supporters, and absolutely nothing anyone else can do to get them to leave Trump.”
If what happens is ‘no one alienates Trump from his supporters’, he still loses. In recent primaries Trump wins barely a majority of Republican primary voters, which by extrapolation means his base must be something on the order of 15-20% of the electorate. Of course he’ll do better than that – many Republican loyalists will vote for him – but unless he attracts very large numbers of Democrats or Dem leaners, he loses. Anything is possible, and events can change this, but all signs point to a substantial Clinton victory this fall.
Marc 05.07.16 at 5:17 pm
It makes more sense if you think of the primary electorate as a small sliver of the Republican voter base. Gerrymandering makes the general election uncompetitive and drives down marginal voter participation.
So you end up with a cycle where fewer and fewer primary voters, more and more extreme, select candidates. Cruz won a very low turnout primary in TX against a less extreme opponent.
Marc 05.07.16 at 5:23 pm
@2: in most states you get control of the process with statewide elected officials. There are 5 members in ohio, for instance, and 3 are elected statewide. The governor also has to sign the redistricting bill. So it’s actually key to win governors races in 2018, when most are up. It was losing the govs in 2010, not the legislatures, that really hurt the DS.
BBA 05.07.16 at 6:19 pm
@Layman: I see Trump as dominant among low-information angry white men who barely know what a primary is – the kind of people who think his recent admonishment to “save your vote for the general election” makes sense. They probably haven’t voted since at least 2004, if at all, but they have photo IDs.
This plus the Republican rank-and-file who don’t like Trump but think Clinton is Satan incarnate may be enough to put him over the top.
I could be wrong. I hope and pray that I’m wrong.
Layman 05.07.16 at 6:23 pm
“I see Trump as dominant among low-information angry white men who barely know what a primary is – the kind of people who think his recent admonishment to “save your vote for the general election†makes sense.”
Me, too, but that’s an electoral minority. Winning those people is a trade-off where you lose everyone else.
“This plus the Republican rank-and-file who don’t like Trump but think Clinton is Satan incarnate may be enough to put him over the top.”
Then you’re double-counting. Many of those are the same people!
Bruce B. 05.07.16 at 11:19 pm
John, I have a question. You write, “In 80-20 Democratic districts you would expect very left-wing Democrats to do especially well.” I may just be distracted today by allergy headache, but I could also be more profoundly ignorant. Would you expect very left-wing Democrats to do especially well in districts stuffed with, presumably, much of the spectrum of Democratic voters? If so, why? I’d think that you might well see more of them in 45-55 Democratic/Republican districts, where Democratic success is essentially always out of reach and voters get pissed off about that, while 80-20 ones would have more pressure to be candidates that represent as much of the district as possible.
But I know for sure I haven’t studied the matter and that my intuition is at best clouded today. What should I know that I don’t right now?
kid 05.08.16 at 12:05 am
@12 The outcome of the presidential election is a question of distribution as much as numbers. From the WAPO 2015 ” And indeed, it’s not just turnout; a modest drop-off in share of the vote among African Americans could hurt Democrats’ vote tallies as much as a turnout drop. A basic simulation using an estimate of 2012 eligible voters finds that a drop from 93 to 85 percent support (blacks’ historical average support for Democrats) would cost Democrats a net of 2.8 million votes.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/11/how-black-voters-could-determine-the-2016-election/
From Van Jones: “70 percent of African Americans have a horrible view of Donald Trump,†Jones continued. “In order for the Democrats to win the White House they don’t have to get 50 percent of the black vote or 60, or 70, or 80, or 90, Democrats in order to win historically need 90 to 92 percent of the black vote. If only 70 percent don’t like Donald Trump, that means 30 percent are open to his argument. If he gets half of those, he’s president.â€
Jones argues that Trump’s populist anti-immigration arguments need appeal to just 3/20 African-American voters in northern rust-belt states to give Trump the electoral college votes needed for the WH. In Jones’ scenario TRUMP gets wiped out in Colorado and California, but still wins because the ‘let them eat confetti’ argument is unlikely to work this cycle for any number of reasons. The principle being economic.
Let the smearing begin. On a related topic, Trump clearly wants to get the sexist argument out into the open now. He launched a full bore attack on HRC branding ‘Crooked Hillary’ as Bill’s principal enabler blah, blah, blah. He also described the 90 million Trump is a sexist vulgarian campaign to come. Danielle Allen, btw, had an interesting piece on the weakness of the woman card this cycle. What is clear is that Trump clearly wants to do is get all the locker-room Howard Stern remarks aired now on his own terms and according to his own timetable.
File under “Don’t fire until…” My own view is that by the time HRC dispatches Sanders Americans will have already been forced to endure hundreds of hours of discussions and video/audio clips well before debates between the two candidates begin. What HRC and her team want won’t matter.
Trump demonstrates, again, his mastery of the media and of negotiating ‘the deal’ with the American public. He’ll get another billion dollars in free air time from ratings-seeking media outlets eager to have Trump ‘explain/defend’ the clips that Dems hope will be enough to make it impossible for women to support Trump. Yesterday, in Eugene Oregon Trump took a howitzer to that strategy. Allen argues that the ‘woman card’ argument is exactly the argument Trump wants HRC to make. By the time the debates begin this fall that card will have been played so often even die-Dem women will be sick of it, especially if every single time they here it they’re reminded that they’re being asked to ignore the role HRC played in destroying the lives of Bill’s much less-powerful young female victims.
My guess is Trump’s locker-room vulgarianism won’t matter much to voters who want jobs back from China, strong borders, local control of schools, and a brighter future for their kids.
MilitantlyAardvark 05.08.16 at 12:07 am
@Bruce B
I agree with you in questioning the proposition that an 80-20 district in Oklahoma will be more likely to produce a left-wing firebrand than say a 60-40 district in California. Where are all these inevitable red fire-breathing Communists from 80-20 districts?
kidneystones 05.08.16 at 12:22 am
I’ve a comment in moderation that can be deleted, please. Simple typo error in the upper fields. Thx!
Pittsburgh Mike 05.08.16 at 12:32 am
Good point about gerrymandering — something I haven’t read about, but is clearly true: gerrymandering makes your opponents’ districts super-safe, not yours.
Gerrymandered districts are actually a little more fragile than normal, and given a disaster like Trump, it is possible for a lot of those districts to flip.
derrida derider 05.08.16 at 12:34 am
John’s right that gerrymandering subject to the constraint of equal district sizes ensures the gerrymanderer’s majority in reasonably close (in popular vote) elections, but at the cost of maximising the size of their loss if they lose the popular vote badly.
But how effective is that equal districting constraint (a genuine question – as a non-USAnian I don’t know)? From nick@6’s comment I gather that there are effective ways around it. If the Republican House majority is mostly due to differing effective district sizes then it’s technically malapportionment, not gerrymandering, and doesn’t carry the same risk for them. And all the more outrageous for that.
bruce wilder 05.08.16 at 5:35 pm
Within a state, districts are constrained quite tightly to equal census population and the lines may be drawn to as fine a grain as voter precincts allow, which is very fine indeed. So, it is not as it is in Britain, where some discretion is allowed, or even mandated in a few cases, to permit districts to conform to the bounds of historic communities and geographic features (e.g. islands).
So, there can be a lot of variations in district size between states, because of variation between State populations and the integer problem that a State cannot be assigned fractional Representatives.
The more politically consequential problem is that there is often very poor correspondence between a Representative and self-conscious communities. It is very common for Americans not to even know the name of their Representative in Congress. This is not just a function of poor political media. There is no way to conveniently name the community the Rep represents, because she represents not a community but an arbitrarily bounded, numbered district. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs is commonly expressed as a demand that Districts be “geographically compact”, but that prescription, though written into law by well-meaning fools, is no answer at all. If “compact” districts do anything at all, they concentrate urban voters into districts with particularly confusing boundaries.
I do not know if there is currently any obstacle in law to multi-member districts.
Suzanne 05.08.16 at 7:22 pm
@18: And I thought Trump was just shooting his mouth off, as usual.
“My guess is Trump’s locker-room vulgarianism won’t matter much to voters who want jobs back from China, strong borders, local control of schools, and a brighter future for their kids.â€
None of which will be delivered by Trump, the candidate who opined last fall that their wages were too high and is now fudging on the minimum wage. Trump will give them reactionary judges, big tax cuts for rich people, and a default on the national debt.
BBA 05.08.16 at 7:53 pm
@Suzanne: sure, he can’t and won’t deliver on his absurd promises, but nobody will listen to us when we say that, because we’re losers. Sad!
John Quiggin 05.09.16 at 1:48 am
@23 The objection that constituents know nothing about their representative is a hangover from the days of bipartisanship. As far as the general election is concerned, the only thing voters need is to be able to distinguish the letters D and R.
Howard Frant 05.09.16 at 4:38 am
@23: Surely the very word “gerrymander” (from salamander) suggests that people were not fools to think map-makers should face some constraints about geographic compactness. The problem, I think, is that now that there’s so much more homogeneity in residential communities, that’s not sufficient. Instead of having district lines follow community, as I think you’re suggesting, we should be making heterogeneity/diversity a positive good in redistricting.
derrida derider 05.09.16 at 8:17 am
@18, y’know Hillary can walk & chew gum at the same time. Yeah, she’ll try and lock in the female vote and the black vote. But more critically she can easily Swift Boat Trump – attack him where he superficially appears strong among older white males.
Suzanne @24 had it right – Hillary can nail him on his anti everyday guy views, not just (or even mainly) his sexism and racism. You can’t do that too much to people like Cruz because of the “What’s the matter With Kansas” effect, but you sure as hell can with people who can’t respond credibly with “Look over there – abortion and atheism!”.
I predict HRC in a landslide come November.
Brian 05.09.16 at 5:26 pm
I think the model of the electorate in the OP gets a number of things wrong.
First, it’s all about the primaries, which will pretty much determine the result of the general election for both the 45-55 and the 80-20 districts. They tend to be low turnout, so the so the successful candidate needs to appeal to the primary voters, and then just have the D or R by their name, per John Quiggin @26.
R primaries tend to be dominated by the more extreme right faction of the party, thus the worry about challenges from the right among current R House members. So there’s really no moderating effect, the point of the 55-45 is that it’s just skewed enough to be not really competitive, barring extreme circumstances.
D primaries will be dominated by D partisans, but per Bruce B. @17, that doesn’t seem to result in a lot of left-wing firebrands elected to the House. That, IMHO, should be taken as strong evidence that the stereotypical pinko commie liberal is much more a figment of the right’s imagination than anything else. I live in a blue state, but my experience is that Demcratic challengers in red states tend to be gun-toting, ‘business-friendly’ moderates. Others from red states might have more experience and be able to correct me on that point.
This leaves us with about what we see, a structurally Republican House with ever more extreme members over the last few election cycles. So I would say the gerrymandering backfired theory is still plausible.
politicalfootball 05.09.16 at 8:59 pm
Trump is, indeed, the logical consequence of trends that the GOP has been stoking for decades. Same with Cruz.
While the GOP is directly responsible for Cruz and Trump, I think it’s fair to say that the party’s plan backfired when it ended up promoting them.
The GOP oligarchs gave us Bush II, then McCain, Romney and Bush III. They liked Perry for a short while. They would have settled for Rubio or Walker or Kasich. The thing that all of them share is a willingness to pander to the basest, most racist instincts of white men, and a proud refusal to acknowledge factuality as a driver of public policy.
What the Establishment didn’t understand is that once you throw empiricism and human decency out the window, you open the door for Trump and Cruz. Once you’ve established that global warming is a myth and that black people and liberals are the real racists, isn’t it wrong to express your racism sotto voce? Isn’t that just political correctness?
politicalfootball 05.09.16 at 9:25 pm
My #30 is really kind of off-topic. Sorry about that.
But I think Brian@29 gets it right:
R primaries tend to be dominated by the more extreme right faction of the party
So yeah, although JH makes a solid case that the gerrymandered districts are intrinsically less extreme, the voting results in those districts are more extreme.
Separately, I think the possession of a House majority (again, partly a result of gerrymandering) has made the Party Establishment appear to be more culpable for the perceived failure to deliver results.
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