The Sky Isn't Actually Falling

With respect to the Chicken Littles of Michigan Democratic politics, I’m not ready to throw my hat in with the “complete Republican control over the redistricting process will mean the end of the Michigan Democratic Party, and possibly the Apocalypse” crowd quite yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a good thing: it’s much worse than the alternatives of split or Democratic control. Nonetheless, even if optimism isn’t quite called for, we should put off seppuku for at least another election cycle.

The reasons I’m staying sanguine about Democratic chances for the next decade fall into roughly two categories: 1. Republicans controlled the redistricting process in 2001, so the current districts are already Republican-gerrymandered: The only difference between the new districts they’ll draw and the current ones will be that the gerrymander will be more up-to-date. 2. There are simply too many Democrats in this state (assuming they actually get to the polls) for any drawing of the lines to solidify Republican majorities for long.

The argument I’m making – that the Republican screw-job we’re about to experience come redistricting time won’t be that much worse than the status quo – carries with it a very depressing corollary: that the Republican screw-job we’ve been dealing with for the past ten years has been remarkably effective.

At the risk of turning this into a PS101 lecture, the gerrymandering party’s goal is to win a number of seats considerably higher than their proportion of total votes cast. This means forcing the opposing party to use their votes as ineffectively as possible, whether by casting them in losing races or by running up the score in winning races. If a gerrymander is more or less effective based on the opposing party’s vote inefficiency, we can judge the current Republican gerrymander by looking at recent election data relevant to those areas. I compared data from the 2006, 2008, and 2010 elections (US House, State House, and where applicable, State Senate races) in terms of the number of seats each party won overall, seats won with a 2-to-1 or greater margin (henceforth “blowout wins”), percentage of the total vote, and the raw number of votes cast by each party for losing candidates (henceforth “wasted votes”).

2006

2006 USH	Total	R	D
Total Votes	3648502	1624865	1923485
Percentage	0.97254983	0.44535127	0.52719856
Seats	15	9	6
2-1 Seats	x	2	6
Waste	x	223776	931363

2006 SS	Total	R	D
Total Votes	3659104	1647113	1968116
Percentage	0.98800936	0.450141073	0.537868287
Seats	38	21	17
2-1 Seats	x	1	14
Waste	x	400457	916062

2006 SH	Total	R	D
Total Votes	3620841	1648236	1957999
Percentage	0.995966131	0.455208058	0.540758073
Seats	110	53	57
2-1 Seats	x	7	38
Waste	x	489841	765081

2006 is a prime example of a gerrymander being well designed to withstand an opposition wave year. Democrats outdid Republicans by around 300,000 votes across the ballot, yet were only able to squeak out a majority in the State House. In the U.S. House and State Senate races, the Republicans made their districts safe enough to withstand increased Democratic turnout with closer victories; safe Democratic seats in those races simply ended up being bigger blowouts. If there’s an explanation for the Democrats’ success in the State House races, it’s that those districts are too small to gerrymander effectively. The typical vote total in these races is around 30,000, making it easier for a surge in turnout one way or the other to flip the election.

2008

2008 USH	Total	R	D
Total Votes	4810690	2114293	2516640
Percentage	0.962633843	0.439498908	0.523134935
Seats	15	7	8
2-1 Seats	x	1	5
Waste	x	691638	888859

2008 SH	Total	R	D
Total Votes	4718297	1962242	2682664
Percentage	0.984445447	0.415879289	0.568566159
Seats	110	43	67
2-1 Seats	x	4	37
Waste	x	759079	795314

2008 is what happens when the water gets too high for the dam. Being a presidential election year, turnout was higher on both sides, but record-setting on the Democratic side. The Republicans built a cushion for their candidates that would keep the seats safely Republican in high Democratic turnout years, but the Obama campaign’s unprecedented GOTV efforts were enough to flip a lot of these seats. Even with those gains, much of that record turnout went to losing candidates, and much of the rest went toward making Democratic blowouts even more embarrassing.

2010

2010 USH	Total	R	D
Total Votes	3194901	1671707	1415212
Percentage	0.96620177	0.523242191	0.442959578
Seats	15	9	6
2-1 Seats	x	2	2
Waste	x	417229	874999

2010 SS	Total	R	D
Total Votes	3145959	1688851	1404868
Percentage	0.979791432	0.536831853	0.442959578
Seats	38	26	12
2-1 Seats	x	5	5
Waste	x	253752	848055

2010 SH	Total	R	D
Total Votes	3300625	1645213	1413355
Percentage	0.92666328	0.49845499	0.42820829
Seats	110	63	47
2-1 Seats	x	25	23
Waste	x	359918	674876

If 2008 illustrated how well the Democrats could do if they added a half million votes to their baseline, 2010 illustrated how poorly they could do if they lost a half million. Fortunately for the Democrats’ U.S. House delegation, the lines were drawn to make five seats so solidly Democratic that even the worst turnout numbers couldn’t lose those races. They picked up another close race to bring the numbers back to 2006 levels. As the numbers pretty clearly show, the State Senate was the low-water mark for Democrats this cycle – with 44.3% of the vote translating into 31.6% of the seats in the Senate. While the numbers in the State House races seem to match up – 42.8% of the vote winning 42.7% of the seats – the reality there is simply that statewide turnout was so bad as to bring vote percentage and seats percentage into line with each other.

Probably the most important thing to keep in mind here is that all a gerrymander means is that a party outperforms its statewide vote percentage numbers. Michigan is generally considered a 55-45 blue state, so even a 51-49 Democratic majority evidences a Republican gerrymander. The last few cycles have proven that Democrats can win statewide, and they can win majorities in our Congressional delegation and the State House of Representatives. Just because the deck is stacked against you doesn’t mean you can’t win a few hands if you play your cards right. For Democrats in Michigan, that means growing and maintaining the bench, putting viable candidates on the ballot (particularly in close races), and emphasizing get-out-the-vote efforts.

I'll go into more detail about the mechanics of how the Republicans are likely to try to screw us this decade in the next post, but for now let's take heart that we survived - and even succeeded - in the face of the last gerrymander. There's no reason to imagine we can't continue to do so in the face of the one upcoming.