Thanks. So, what about the response that well,
these maps, they could sort of happened by chance?
Well, that's a common argument that you get or I should say used to get.
I think you're seeing it used less frequently now but oftentimes,
people will say won't just because Democrats live in places like Detroit,
or like New York City,
and the reality is that if you look at the states that have the worst bias,
sort of the most durable bias,
it states again that are very much 50-50 states Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina,
these are states that if you looked at a precinct level map or a census block level map,
you would see a lot of light pink and a lot of light blue across the map.
These are not states in other words that are like Nebraska
where it other than a few pockets of blue,
it's dark red, right?
If all of these states were sort of dark red across,
you wouldn't really have to during that because he would just,
any district no matter what shape, or what configuration,
or whether you drew to the East or West,
would be exactly the same because they're so dark red.
But, that's not the case in states like Michigan or North Carolina,
where you see a lot of ink in blues sprinkled in
among each other which indicates that they're even outside of the big cities,
there's a lot of people,
there's a lot of mixed partisanship,
people Democrats living close to Republicans and in those instances,
how you slice and dice and recombine voters actually makes
a huge degree of difference in the way that the maps perform.
Again, just the fact that these are 50-50 states at every level,
they're competitive for judicial races.
They're competitive for governor's races.
They're competitive for president,
and yet they produce these outlaw sized advantages over one party or the other,
that suggests that it's not something that is accidental.
That's not to say that geography in what people call sorting doesn't have an impact.
Clearly, you wouldn't expect in any of these states,
the maps will be 50-50 despite the fact these are 50-50 states.
Democrats do tend to cluster in the big urban centers.
So, you wouldn't necessarily expect North Carolina, for example,
to be seven-six, but you don't also expect it to be 10-three.
Right. So, what is happening to produce these maps?
Well, so, gerrymandering is something that we've
long had a problem with in our country but the term dates to the
early 1800's and a map of that governor Elbridge Gerry of
Massachusetts signed into law and that's where we get
the term gerrymander because the argument is that,
well at the time,
people thought that one of the districts look like a salamander,
so they called it a gerrymander,
and hence we have the term gerrymandering.
Now, of course he pronounces his last name Gerry,
so I'm not sure why it's not gerrymandering,
but that's an issue for another day.
But, it's something that's long existed in our country.
So, even goes back before Elbridge Gerry to Patrick Henry.
Patrick Henry is famous for "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death",
but at the same time, he was a politician.
He was a member of the Virginia legislature
at the time that they had to draw their first congressional map.
He hated a man named James Madison and he tried to
draw the map in a way that James Madison couldn't win election to Congress.
Now, he was unsuccessful but even the framers engaged in political manipulation of maps.
What has changed in recent years and why it's getting worse is frankly two things.
One is sort of data and technology and the fact that
we have become a more polarized society.
It used to be people who long tried to do these sort of
extreme gerrymandering or they get an extra large share of seats,
they lock it in, but they weren't very successful at it.
This was really common in the 19th century
but the maps would last for maybe an election or two.
Then, people would move around or their allegiances would shift
or they would have drawn the districts in a way that really didn't enable them to stick.
Now we have data about voters that we didn't have in the past and so,
we know things at the block level about how likely it is that
every individual voter in the precinct or block is going to vote.
It used to be in the old days that you would know that
a precinct voted 50 percent Republican or 50 percent Democrat.
But, you wouldn't know where the Democrats and Republicans were unless you
had on the ground knowledge about where they were.
But, now because of things based on your Google searches,
based on what kind of car you drive,
based on your credit score,
based on what you buy on Amazon,
we have a lot more data about people and
in the same way that political campaigns and marketers
use that data to create profiles of people and have a good sense of who you are,
gerrymanderers also are able to use that.
So, they are able to know how likely it is that you are a Democrat or a Republican,
how strong a Democrat or Republican you are.
Likewise, how likely it is you are to vote in presidential years and
midterm years and how likely you are to switch and what your issues are,
whether you're a voter who cares a lot about abortion rights or
a voter who cares a lot about the owning as many guns as you can.
There's lots of information that we have now and that makes it possible for people to
slice and dice at sort of a micro level and
create districts that not only created advantage for party,
but also stick in the sense of
no district sort of change on the map and so that's really completely anathema to
what the framers would have wanted because they thought
that the House should be and legislature should be
places where the mood of the people
changed the composition of the legislature would change and that we would always
have a House where it was
an exact miniature portrait of the people as
a whole to use a phrase that John Adams used,
and that's not the case now.
In fact, the House is in a lot of ways more
predictable in your average year than the Senate is.
So, there's more competition on the Senate than there is in the House because
the House is so designed to lock in exactly what you have.
Right. So, the political check is gone, right?
That's right.
Yeah. I'm really interested in this idea of these biases being very durable.
Can you talk a little bit more about what you found, for example,
going into the midterm elections of 2018 how gerrymandered maps might prevent
any changes from happening despite
so-called blue wave or very different results in voting.
Yeah. So, we did another a follow-up report to
our extreme maps report called extreme gerrymandering, the 2018 midterm,
in which we tried to gauge how much of a structural barrier Democrats have to being able
to win majority in the US House in
2018 and we found that it was really crazy significant.
Democrats would have to win the national popular vote by something North of
10 percent to be favored in a normal year to win the House.
Now, 2018 of course,
in many ways is not a normal year.
It's a year where there seems to be extraordinary enthusiasm on
the Democratic side and likewise Democratic candidates are doing well in fundraising.
Democrats are getting all the people they want to run and there's a lot of volunteering.
As you've seen in the special elections,
really high turnout among Democrats.
So, 2018 may be be sort of an exceptional year and Democrats could win
potentially a majority with less than a 10 plus point win;
but that's only one year, right?
So, if 2020 proves to be a more normal year,
even a pretty good democratic year,
but a more normal good democratic year,
then those gerrymanders could snap back with
a vengeance and Democrats could end up losing a lot of seats that they
might win in 2018 because it's
an extraordinary year and so that really is the lesson of it.
More than anything else is that, these gerrymanders,
they may not hold for an election but they will
hold for the majority of the decade and that is truly undermining our democracy.
Yeah. I saw a spot that you posted on your website featuring Alexis Farmer,
one of your research and program associates.
Who is from Michigan.
That's right, and can you,
where she was talking about how this plays out in,
I think it was two states: North Carolina and Maryland for example,
and so we've been talking a lot about Republican gerrymanders,
but can you just walk us through the example of Maryland and how
the gerrymandered maps there will kind of lock and buy us for elections to come.
Sure. There's no question and this is important to get out.
I've talked a lot about how Republicans have
an advantage and that's really because in 2010,
there was a wave election.
Republicans won a huge number of seats,
63 in total, and took control of the House and they won a bunch of seats.
They weren't normally expected to win and that really was sort of surprise wins,
but what happened is that redistricting a place the next year, 2011,
and so Republicans were able to walk in
an advantage because they controlled redistricting in more states than Democrats.
Which is not to say the Democrats given the opportunity wouldn't do the same thing.
Democrats historically have been equally aggressive gerrymanders and in this decade,
in a state like Maryland,
they also were very aggressive.
Maryland is a fairly democratic state.
It has eight congressional districts.
Historically, six of those were Democratic and two were
Republican in part because they didn't control many states.
Democrats decided, "We're going to maximize our potential and take seven
out of the eight congressional seats and only leave one for Republicans."
In fact, they actually toyed around with trying to take all eight of them,
but they thought that would stretch them a little too thin.
A fair map in Maryland probably is something closer to 5-3.
It's a very democratic state but it's not sort of a 7-1 state.
Five-three is probably more natural.
Five-three also would probably allow election of more people of color
and more people who represent their nor the choice of communities of color,
but what Democrats did is they took a district
in the western part of Maryland and swapped out about half the voters.
Took half the voters out and put them in other districts and moved in
another equivalent to half the population of the district from elsewhere.
So, what they did is they took out
more rural areas that were Republican voting and they put in suburbs of
Washington DC which are very affluent and created a safe Democratic district.
It's sort of really a strange district in a lot of ways because the areas that they
added in the Washington DC area are among the most affluent in the country.
The median income is well north of 190,000 or 200,000.
It's just very high,
and the areas they left in are places where the median income is more like 50,000, right?
It's sort of these are fairly divergent places that have very little in common
and it was done solely to maximize
Democratic advantage and to give Democrats an extra seat.
Recognizing as national Democrats did in 2011, that they,
in places like Texas and Michigan and Pennsylvania,
they weren't going to have a lot of ability
to maximize seats because they didn't control the process.
Thanks Michael. In our next segment,
we're going to talk about things that
are being done to challenge these kinds of practices.
But just to wrap up this segment,
seeing what you've seen and having
really analyze the maps that exists right now from the 2010 cycle,
what kind of changeover or turnover are you expecting from the 2018 elections?
Well, that's a really interesting question because it tells you a lot about how
these gerrymanders get done because when
you gerrymander to try to grab a large share of seats,
you have sort of an extra large seat bonus,
what you don't do is you don't draw districts that your party wins by 80 percent,
because if you do that you're using your voters very inefficiently.
Instead, rather than drawing 80 percent districts,
what you want to do is you want to spread your voters out as much as possible so
that your party wins as many seats as possible.
So, you're drawing a bunch of 53,47 districts,
even 52, 48 districts if you can get away with it.