The Biggest Problem in American Politics
Forget gerrymandering. Here’s what we need to fix to ensure truly fair elections.
As a conservative living in New York City, my vote for Congress is essentially a socially approved form of venting. A short while ago, I moved from an extremely liberal neighborhood in Manhattan to an extremely liberal neighborhood in Brooklyn. In my old apartment, I was represented by Jerrold Nadler, an extremely liberal Democrat. In 2012, he defeated his Republican opponent, the redoubtable Michael Chan, by a margin of 69.8 percent to 16.6 percent. In my new home, I am represented by Nydia Velázquez, also an extremely liberal Democrat. She trounced her Conservative Partyopponent, James Murray, by 79 percent to 4.4 percent in 2012. More depressing still, Murray was crushed by blank ballots, which accounted for more than 16 percent of the total. Something tells me that Velázquez is not losing sleep over her re-election bid.
To be sure, had I moved to Staten Island or Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, I would have found myself in the congressional district of Michael Grimm, a colorful Republican who likes to mix it up with the press. But Grimm is considered one of the mostendangered incumbents in the House, thanks in no small part to, um, a 20-count federal indictment relating to, among other things, his alleged mismanagement of his old health food store, Healthalicious. (You know, the usual.) There is an excellent chance that in a few months’ time, New York City’s congressional delegation will consist entirely of Democrats.
None of this should come as a shock. New York City is a liberal town, and I’ve long since resigned myself to being part of a small political minority. What I find galling is that, as observed in May by Rob Richie, the executive director of the electoral reform group FairVote, there are actually quite a few conservatives in New York City—believe it or not, Mitt Romney won 435,000 votes here. If Grimm goes down in November, Republicans in New York City will have no representation at the national level, an outcome that Richie rightly sees as a reflection of a much larger problem.
I don’t expect you to weep for the Big Apple’s hearty band of unreconstructed Reaganites, as we are, after all, free to pick up stakes and move to Wyoming. Yet the problem we face—that our political influence doesn’t match our numbers—is one faced by many groups, including liberals in conservative parts of the country, and members of racial, ethnic, and other minorities who want and consistently fail to get their fair share of political power. The root of the problem, as Richie and the good people at FairVote have long maintained, lies in our reliance on single-member districts to elect legislators.
What’s wrong with single-member districts? Let’s start with gerrymandering, the practice in which the officials charged with drawing the boundaries of our various legislative districts do so with an eye toward boosting the members of a particular political party or group. There are many people who believe that gerrymandering is the root of all evil in American political life, and that we need to draw districts in an entirely apolitical manner. That is a fantasy. As long as we have single-member districts, it is inevitable that some group of people will be disadvantaged by the lines we draw, whether or not the line-drawers have sinister motives.
Take the problem of Democratic underrepresentation in the House. If we assume that the parties should win congressional seats roughly in proportion to their share of the vote, Democrats in 2012 were underrepresented by a whopping 18 seats, according to an analysis by Christopher Ingraham. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic candidates won just more than 50 percent of the vote in the 2012 congressional elections while winning just five of the state’s 18 congressional districts.
Nate Cohn of the New York Times’ Upshot has written that while partisan gerrymandering has indeed given Republicans an edge in holding the House of Representatives, the deeper problem is that Democrats are highly concentrated in densely populated urban and suburban districts, like those in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. By contrast, Republicans are, as a general rule, more evenly distributed across the map, which allows them to win more rural Pennsylvania districts with smaller margins. Slate’s David Weigel hasreplied, reasonably enough, that there is an easy workaround to the fact that Democrats like to live cheek-by-jowl: simply carve up the cities in which they live and parcel them out across different congressional districts that also include less densely populated Republican territory. But this approach seems like just another way to institutionalize unfairness. If we wind up with pizza-slice districts that distribute Democrats into a larger number of heterogeneous districts, Republicans will complain that their voices have been squelched.
If our goal is to create legislative districts that truly reflect their electorates, our best bet would be to give up on single-member districts altogether and replace them with multi-member ones. Take the case of my tribe, the forlorn conservatives of New York City. Even if the New York state Legislature decided that it wanted to carve out a new district to represent conservatives scattered across the five boroughs, and not just those in Michael Grimm’s swing district, they’d have an almost impossible time doing so. For one thing, we don’t all live in a heavily Republican enclave called “Giulianiville.” A similar problem arises for minority groups that aren’t isolated in particular neighborhoods. The only reason it is possible to draw majority-minority districts for blacks in the Deep South and some Northern and Western cities is that black segregation is still with us. Drawing majority-minority districts for less-segregated minorities, like Asians, is a different story. (The only Asian-majority congressional district in the United States is in Hawaii, though there is one district in California’s Silicon Valley that comes close.)
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