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How Republicans stole the House. Legally.
Democrats won 50.7 percent of the votes for Congressional seats in Pennsylvania, but won just 27.7 percent of House seats. Gerrymandering is disenfranchisement.
How Republicans stole the House. Legally.
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Speaker John Boehner is boasting that, Republicans having maintained their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, there is "no mandate for raising tax rates." But it might not be true that a majority of Americans voted for a Republican House: the right may have stole the House, quite legally, through gerrymandering.
In 2010, Republicans took control of a record number of state governments just in time for the every-10-years redrawing of congressional district maps. And they drew them to make it extraordinarily difficult for Democrats to win, partaking in the shameless but ancient practice of gerrymandering.
Pennsylvania's (still somewhat incomplete) congressional election results are a case in point: 2,702,901 Pennsylvanians voted to send Democrats to the House, and just 2,627,031 voted for Republican candidates; yet an astonishing 13 of 18 Pennsylvania House seats were won by Republicans. In other words, Democrats won 50.7 percent of the House vote in Pennsylvania, but just 27.7 percent of House seats.
Democracy in America indeed. The way an increasingly Democratic state that has stopped swinging right in presidential elections continues to send an overwhelmingly Republican congressional delegation back to Washington is through gerrymandering. And gerrymandering is a form of disenfranchisement. Plain and simple.
This should be a scandal on par with the winner of the presidential popular vote losing thanks to the electoral college. But election reform issues, unfortunately, are boring. If political leaders don't take the lead (hello, Democrats?), a citizen movement is unlikely to take shape. This anti-democratic Republican advantage is now locked into maps for 10 years.
Take a look at some of these cartographic monstrosities. Republican Rep. Patrick Meehan's surreally contorted seventh district narrows to just 800 feet at one point, and is one of the most gerrymandered districts in the country, according to data mavens at Azavea.
Out west, Pennsylvania Republicans eliminated one Democratic seat entirely, thanks to the reapportionment of House seats following the 2010 census (the state lost one seat because of population loss). So after Democratic Rep. Marc Critz defeated Democratic Rep. Jason Altmire in a spring primary, Critz went on to lose to Republican Keith Rothfus on Tuesday. Pittsburgh Rep. Mike Doyle is now the only Democratic House member from west of Harrisburg.
Votes are still being counted around the country, including in parts of Pennsylvania (see Philly's election-day mess), so it's not yet possible to replicate this analysis on a nationwide level. But it's possible that Democrats would have won control of the House on Tuesday had it not been for gerrymandering. Someone please crunch those numbers later this month. The Washington Post posted an article just a few minutes after this went live: nationwide "Democrats have won roughly 48.8 percent of the House vote, compared to 48.47 percent for Republicans."
Unlike requiring voter ID or restricting early voting, this is a stratagem that is far from peculiar to Republican evil. Democrats would have done the same had they ran state governments at the time. Decennial redistricting is when politicians choose their voters, and either party would eagerly seize that opportunity.
Republicans who retained control of state government also gerrymandered state legislative districts. This not only locks in Republican control of state government, but also installs a sort of meta-gerrymandering: Gerrymandered state legislative districts make it more likely that Republicans will control the state legislature again in 2020, when they would have another opportunity to gerrymander U.S. House districts.
Legislative districts are much smaller than congressional ones, and many districts are so solidly Democratic or Republican that the incumbent party candidate faced no general election opponent. Pennsylvania political analysts credit the Republican state House and Senate majorities at least in part to gerrymandered districts favoring the GOP.
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