Why are there 538 Electoral Votes? The answer is that that is the number you get if you add the 100 seats in the Senate and the 435 seats in the House, and then add three more votes for the District of Columbia. President Obama won 332 Electoral Votes when he won reelection last November. Mitt Romney received 206. Because all but two states are winner-take-all, this doesn’t give us a true picture of public opinion. Obama only won 51% of the vote, but he won 61% of the Electoral College. This helps explain why the some Republicans have begun agitating to get rid of winner-take-all state-level elections. Yet, if the Democrats enjoy a structural advantage in the Electoral College, they suffer from a major disadvantage in the Senate.
If we subtract the 100 Electoral College votes that represent the Senate, we have 438 votes left. How many of those votes came from states that Obama won versus states that Romney won? The answer is that the states won by Obama (including the District of Columbia) had 278 votes and states won my Romney had 160. In other words, Obama controlled 58% of them. Yet, he only has 53 Democrats in the Senate, plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats. That’s not a terrible skew, but it shows that the Democrats suffer because the Republicans are overrepresented. The Republicans do better overall in sparsely populated states, which results in them banking three extra seats in the Senate than if the seats were distributed by population.
The situation in the House is even worse. Romney actually carried 274 congressional districts despite losing by four points and despite Democratic candidates getting more than a million more votes than Republicans nationwide. The reason is gerrymandered districts. Look how this shook out in Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvanians also voted to re-elect Mr. Obama, elected Democrats to several statewide offices and cast about 83,000 more votes for Democratic Congressional candidates than for Republicans. But new maps drawn by Republicans — including for the Seventh District outside Philadelphia, a Rorschach-test inkblot of a district snaking through five counties that helped Representative Patrick Meehan win re-election by adding Republican voters — helped ensure that Republicans will have a 13-to-5 majority in the Congressional delegation that the state will send to Washington next month.
Think about it. Romney won 274 congressional districts to Obama’s 161, yet Obama won states containing 278 districts (including DC) compared to Romney’s 160. That’s completely inverted. It perfectly expresses the effect of the gerrymander.
So, contrary to Ron Brownstein the Democrats’ advantages in presidential elections and the Republicans’ advantages in midterms are not sufficiently explained by reference to differential turnout. Winner-take-all state elections make it much more difficult for Republicans to conquer the Electoral College. But the overrepresentation of small states and the gerrymander both contribute to disadvantaging the Democrats in Congress.
It’s true that midterm electorates are older and whiter than presidential electorates, but that only compounds a pre-existing structural problem. Moreover, the congressional Democrats suffer from the skew in presidential and midterm elections alike, while the Republicans only suffer from high voter participation in the presidential elections.
The bottom line is that our elections don’t do that great of a job of reflecting the will of the people. And that’s why the people elected Barack Obama for a second term and wound up with John Boehner calling the shots in the House.
Result: dysfunction.
And this also makes a mockery of K-Drum(and I think Young Ezra) among other “pundits” who say gerrymandering had nothing to do with things.
John Sides, too?
The problem is, that since 1960, in the years ending with a “0,” after which we do redistricting, Republicans have won too many national, Presidential, and state, elections.
Kennedy was the last Democratic President to win with a year ending in “0.”
And in ’70, ’80, ’90, ’00, and ’10, Republicans have either won the Presidency, or controlled enough of our national Congress, or state legislatures and governorships, so that they have been able to gerrymander to their little hearts content.
In 2010, I made this point in e-mails and calls to Democratic politicians and pundits, hoping to light a fire under their asses, because Republicans were using Obamacare to organize around.
No one, seemed overly worried.
And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Even if they weren’t, what harm could it have done to do everything to they could to motivate the Democratic base?
I’m hoping that OFA will take the steps needed to get traditional Democratic voters out to the polls in 2014.
But, knowing the complacency on our side, I’m not exactly heartened.
And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.
At some point the evidence mountain gets so big that you have to accept it. The reason Democratic leaders behave this way is that either this is the result they want or they don’t give a fuck. Either way, that means they are the wrong leaders.
But, you won’t get far trying to replace them. We occasionally get someone who is really willing to stir things up, but the powers behind the curtains find a way to deal with him or her very quickly. Remember the fake Howard Dean “Scream”?
Why is it that we have Democratic leaders who act so scared of right wing lobbies – even though the position in question is something that is hugely popular in their own districts and that the people who are complaining would never vote for them under any circumstance anyway. Yet the Democrats cave time and again.
Don’t want to get too conspiratorial – but regardless of intent, the effect of the Democratic Party is to be a placebo party for they left. They attract all the political energy from the left with little actual payback but in the process prevent any real left party from emerging. Ditto Blair and Labour in the UK.
It has gotten more and more popular to take the lazy explanation that the Repukeliscum have out-gerrymandered the Dems, and are doing well in blue states.
This is bullshit, honestly.
The real issue is that there is NO Democratic issue that plays well outside of cities anymore. Every state is mostly rural, and the mostly rural parts are wholly Repukeliscum.
That’s the real issue. The Democrats cannot win outside of cities. And that is going to screw us big-time in the long run.
We have no issue which is attractive to the white working class. We used to give a crap about the working conditions of Americans. Not any more. Now, Democrats care only about the immigrants, and have thrown students, working class whites, IT workers, and blacks under the bus. It’s an idiotic strategy. We are in bed with Grover fucking Norquist in increasing the job visas. We are on the same side as Bob “Swift Boat” Perry in that Democratic policies favor immigrant labor over US citizen labor.
What policies do we have that pull in rural voters? None that I can see, and this is the real problem.
Gerrymandering is ONLY a problem because Democrats and the Democratic brand is absolutely toxic in the rural areas.
Leaving aside your rant, the weakness of Democrats in rural areas has very little to do with the composition of Congress. Each congressional district has the same number of constituents (more or less). New York City has more congressional seats than half the states.
However, the density of Democrats in urban and suburban areas makes it easy to draw maps that are 90% Democratic. What they do is Pennsylvania is pack almost all of Philly into two seats and then carefully draw the heavily Democratic suburbs in such a way that they are all relatively safe Republican seats. The rural districts are geographically enormous, but they would be Republican anyway. You can tell they didn’t have to monkey with them because they are basically rectangular. But the suburban districts are serpentine and barely contiguous in places. This is repeated around Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Milwaukee, Charlotte, and anyplace that the Republicans controlled redistricting.
The gerrymander is a real problem, it’s just not the only problem.
Republicans don’t have to Gerrymander cities. Cities are self-gerrymandering. They are about 90% Democratic. That makes (D) votes only half as effective as they would if it was only 51%. Suburbs are closer to 50-50, except for extremely wealthy suburbs that tend to be 90+% (R). Middle-class suburbs tend to be (R) because of refugees from the cities that are reacting to (D) corruption in the cities. In addition, here in Cook County anyway, the County government sees suburbs as milch cows to fund city projects. That makes the suburban residents reject the city-county government and vote (R) in reaction. Your mileage may vary in the East and West.
With Democrats in control during the last reapportionment, they engaged in a little gerrymandering by drawing districts with urban hearts and pseudopods reaching into the suburbs to negate Republican votes. Republicans do the opposite when they draw the maps. No one draws draws a demographicly clean map to reflect the will of the people (as if they knew what they wanted).
Please excuse the capitalization faults. I’m very tired right now.
P.S.
The Illinois Republican Party is throwing away their natural suburban base by embracing the Bible-thumpers.
right, gerrymandering doesn’t work in urban or rural areas.
Jerry Nadler’s district on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is so heavily Democratic that it can’t be turned red.
Steve King’s district in Western Iowa is so Republican that it can’t be turned blue.
These districts aren’t gerrymandered.
But we can take a slice of Nadler’s district and wed it with Staten Island, and turn a naturally red district into a blue one. They can pull King’s district into a college town and take the Democratic votes out of a purple district with no risk to King.
Gerrymandering is easier for the Republicans because it’s easier to pack the Democrats in geographically. Either way, all the action is in the suburbs, not the cities or the rural areas. The cities and rural areas simply serve as ways to tip suburban districts one way or the other.
That’s why dataguy is wrong. It’s not our inability to appeal to rural voters that matters. It’s our inability to dominate with suburban voters that makes it possible to use a dollop of rural voters (or exurban voters) and turn a competitive seat into a red seat.
No districts in IA are gerrymandered, as you know. IA uses a neutral citizen committee to draw districts, and the west of IA is drawn into a natural district. It is red because it is rural, and King will be there as long as he wants to be there. Because no Democrat will ever be found to take him out, not in today’s democratic party with the issues and perspective that we are promoting.
Years ago, there was a rural populist tradition, that led to the DFL in MN and other rural populist parties. We had Frank Church, a LIBERAL from ID, McGovern, and many other moderate and liberals from the rural west. But we have abandoned the entire idea of attracting the rural voter.
I was using King as an example because he’s in a very red district and somewhat well known. But, you’re right, we couldn’t gerrymander it even if we wanted to. However, in most states we can do that.
Let me ask you this. Why did Heidi Heitkamp and Jon Tester just win? I am not pretending to know better than you, but I am interested in your answer.
One thing I will venture, however, is that the Farm-Labor alliance was weakened because of the decline of labor, but even more so from the decline of the family farm. We’re not living in John Steinbeck’s America anymore. In FDR’s time, there were a ton of farmers getting screwed by people back East who didn’t want to have a thing to do with the party of Wall Street. Now, South Dakota is credit card state. I think your answer may lie there.
I will merely speculate on Heidekamp and Tester:
It’s not impossible for a Dem to win, and I have never confused my candidacy with a real challenge. As you know, I was not a strong candidate. But the climate has gone very far from the Dem party in the rural areas. Is that the fault of the Dems or the credit of the Repukes?
Yes
Your comment is puzzling. Do you not understand WHY gerrymandering is a problem?
If democratic policies had any ability to attract anyone outside of a city, there would be no gerrymandering. Thus, by failing to find any way to appeal to rural voters, gerrymandering can be effective.
If Democrats are going to escape this trap, they had better figure out how to attract non-urban core voters. Because with the current status of PA, MI, WI, OH, and soon IL, we are in deep doo-doo.
I love the term “rant”, BTW. It usually is used to describe a strong argument that you cannot refute and with which you disagree.
Well, living in a rural area that is highly conservative I have to disagree.
The problem isn’t that the Democratic policies don’t appeal, the problem is that the people’s understanding of the policies is so massively distorted. Nowhere is the right wing noise machine more powerful that in rural areas where all media is controlled, ultimately, by a few major corporations. In many places you simply cannot find a radio station that isn’t overtly conservative – either religious or politically bent, or both, but that’s the reality.
Rural America is where you have people earning $10/hour at Walmart and not able to take their kids to dentists who are LIVID that other people aren’t paying income taxes – not realizing that while they pay medicare and SS taxes on their 1040A or 1040EZ forms they don’t come close to paying federal income taxes. And who get supplemental “food stamp” cards but are FURIOUS at all the handouts they hear Obama’s black brothas in the hood are getting. And who are lucky that their 20-year old daughter has health insurance for her unplanned pregnancy because their ex-spouse can now include the daughter on his/her employer insurance, but are scared to death of Obamacare.
And they are soooo worried now. They voted for Romney and Ryan because they knew they’d protect their medicare and social security from that evil Kenyan.
No, the problem isn’t Democratic policies. It’s that the Democratic party is probably the most incompetent marketing organization this side of the old soviet union on the face of the earth, especially when you factor in the money and resources they have. When 75% of the 2010 voters think Obama raised their taxes when he in fact lowered them – and the Democrats didn’t do anything to fix that huge marketing flaw – well that confirmed just how bad our team is.
And Obama played right into that with Chained-CPI and Medicare cuts.
You know, his tendency to offer pre-negotiation concessions has been the strongest weapon in the GOP arsenal. In fact, you have to grudgingly admire their strategy. The know that if the press accurately reported what is in the Paul Ryan budget they’d get creamed in the next election, but they also know the lapdog press won’t – because the lapdog press basically wants those cuts on the programs for the great unwashed masses. However, what this does mean is that the GOP can’t actually propose any of those in a public negotiation with Obama – it’s one thing to have the details buried in a massive budget document, another to have it as a leading bullet point in the nightly news.
So the GOP has come up with the strategy of demanding that Obama offers something before they offer anything – something that they want. Then when Obama does they immediately cry foul and air hundreds of ads blaming him for doing so.
And yet, a couple months later, he falls for the trick again.
Best of all, when it all falls apart they go back to the press and cry that Obama hasn’t really tried in negotiations even though they’ve offered nothing except passing the Ryan budget, with its repeal of Obamacare, in the House 500 times.
He’s too smart to be falling for it like Charlie Brown. I have to conclude that he is proposing things he actually wants. Chained CPI is actually correct in an academic way. It just doesn’t measure the devaluation of currency. That is to say Chained CPI measures the reaction to devaluation and people’s efforts to mitigate it by lowering their standard of living. The political benefit to Chained CPI is reduction of payments for trillions of dollars of programs ranging from food stamps through pensions to TIPS bond adjustments. The fact that it is bad faith amounting to theft doesn’t many (most?) in Washington.
That’s an awkward way of putting it, but it’s not too far from the truth.
Chained CPI correctly assumes that people don’t bear the full brunt of inflation because they can and do shift how they spend their money around. Something becomes more expensive, you look for a cheaper alternative. It doesn’t necessarily involve any diminution in your standard of living. You could start clipping coupons, for example, or search out cheaper but equivalent car insurance.
So, Chained CPI is considered to be a more accurate measure of the actual impact of inflation for the cost of living than the regular CPI. In this scenario, it’s true that the government saves a ton of money, but it does so because it stops overcompensating for inflation.
That’s the idea, anyway, and it is not without merit.
The problem is that seniors consume a lot of things that have few or no alternatives, like prescription drugs and access to health care. They have a lot less flexibility to roll with the punches and absorb the hits they take from higher prices. So, probably the correct thing to do is to profile how senior spend their money and do an index on those items. They need their own consumer price index.
The problem with that is that it wouldn’t save the government anywhere near as much money. And then the government would have to tell people that their benefits are being straight-up reduced. One reason why Chained CPI is preferable to other options like raising the retirement age or reducing benefits is because it is kind of backhanded. It’s harder to explain and its impact is harder to pinpoint. But it’s also because it would do less harm than the other options. You have to live a long time past 65 for you actually feel much pain from a slightly reduced CPI. And the proposal accounts for that by ramping up the rate for the truly elderly.
I think what everyone forgets when it comes to this topic is that the President has addressed the different costs that seniors have with the ACA. Closing the donut hole and eliminating a lot of copays are key ways that seniors’ costs have already been reduced. These costs are the ones everyone’s worried about and they have been included in the upgrades to the social safety net with the ACA.
That’s a very good point. You could make the argument that having had the donut hole filled, seniors can afford to give a little back and still wind up ahead. But, then, a lot of people should give a little back, and seniors shouldn’t necessarily be near the front of the line.
The thing I find amusing are people opposed to he payroll tax holiday and opposed to chained CPI. I oppose chained CPI and support the payroll tax holiday. I think you can be consistent in either assembly of things to support, but don’t act like chained CPI is going to destroy people’s lives when the payroll tax holiday arguably puts more money in people’s pockets than the difference between current indexing and chained CPI. I think it’s actually double (chained CPI averaging about 40 less a month and the holiday about 80 a month).
I don’t have your way with words, Booman.
You are mostly correct, except fr the assertion that Chained CPI measures the actual impact of inflation. The actual impact is the exact loss due to monetary factors. What people do in mitigation does not lower the actual impact. When you forgo visiting the doctor because of the expense (including gasoline) you have a loss whether you have mitigated it or not. The gasoline is another good example. Many urban dwellers don’t drive at all. The cost of gasoline affects them only indirectly. Rural people drive long distances everywhere, often in V-8 pickup trucks. It affects them drastically as does the price of diesel for farmers. Suburbanites fall in between. The city dweller can mitigate almost all of the cost. The farmer can mitigate very little.
In any case, government adjustments should cover actual impact, not mitigation. It’s like your insurance agent telling you he won’t cover your lost roof that a Hurricane blew away because you covered it with a tarp. The eating example is the most egregious. Stop eating meat because it’s too expensive while some fat cat donor keeps on gorging on lobster.
I was going to do a diary on CPI, which measures price change, whether market derived or inflation derived, but ran into trouble with the math. It seems there is an arbitrary multiplier that can be set to whatever you want. (Yeah, that’s what arbitrary means. I told you that I don’t have your way with words). If I ever solve it, I’ll do the diary.
Yup. He and the Dems made the GOP pretense to be the friend of the working man and the defender of old folks’ earned benefits possible. Like they were fronting for Roger Ailes.
In 2010 the Republicans were running on a platform of jobs, jobs, jobs. They weren’t saying anything about Medicare of Social Security. The media never asked them for specifics about their jobs plans. The Republicans were also running against the stimulus. The Republicans capitalized on the anxiety people felt about the economy and were never made to back up their claims with any solid proposals.
The Dems were way too busy criticizing their own legislative accomplishments.
“The Dems were way too busy criticizing their own legislative accomplishments. “
Truer words ne’er spoke.
Obamacare is a classic example. The blue dog decimation of 2010 is due to the degree is gingerness that the Dems took toward Obamacare. Obamacare was demonized from the start, and has NEVER been promoted adequately. Some moron, probably Obama himself, was totally unaware of the hatred on the right of this program, and never even attempted to defend/promote it. Promoted correctly, it is a good program. Treated as they have, I would not be shocked to see it removed from the statutes.
It is going to be demonized in 2014. Primary line of attack: Obamacare has cut your hours to 29, and Obamacare has stopped you from getting a job.
He definitely defended it and promoted it before the 2010 midterms but the media were overwhelmingly giving air time and voice to the critics not to mention the fact that many of them didn’t actually understand the legislation.
In fairness to the blue dogs–many of them were in districts that were majority Republican or only slight majority Democrat so they were not going to be able to win that fight had they taken it.
Never heard one peep about Chained CPI or Medicare.
Considering that I live in SD and ran as a Dem for State Senate in 2012, I think that my understanding of that component is pretty substantial and extremely clear. I probably knocked on 1500-2000 doors during the campaign, and talked to a lot of people. Even issues that I thought were good ones, like education, are not universally liked.
OK, democratic policies can attract people, if they were sold properly. That is a form of argumentation called begging the question. The issue now is “Why aren’t they sold properly?”
Call it what you want, a bad sales job or policies that are strongly disliked, we are in a serious problem position.
It’s important that we make the correct distinction: policies or understanding of the policies. If the problem is policies then the policies need to change.
However – and this has been true dating back to 1981-2 – the Democratic policies have generally polled much better than Republican policies when people are asked about them without the questioner identifying who supported which policy. But what people THINK each party supports is very different than what they actually support.
Therefore the problem isn’t fixing the policies – well, a lot of the policies could be better in many ways, but improvements don’t help if none of the fence-sitters learn about them.
As a lone campaigner in South Dakota you’re on your own – you can try to convince people door-to-door that, no, Obama didn’t raise their taxes. No, there aren’t 47% of the people who aren’t paying any income tax – in fact, Mr Retail Worker, you’re one of those 47% – it’s a numbers trick the GOP is playing.
You can try doing that – but you’re against a tsunami of wingnut propoganda without any substantial counter-support.
That’s the problem.
“you’re against a tsunami of wingnut propoganda without any substantial counter-support.” Yep, and you are up against traditional media that embraces “balance” over factual accuracy, so you have almost nowhere to turn to get the record corrected. I vividly remember early in Obama’s first turn when he was out selling policies and the media followed the right’s lead in complaining that he was out all the time giving speeches – which is the only real counterbalance Dems have.
Also, in many rural churches right wing propaganda is repeated and couched in religious terms. I live in WV, and have zero idea how to counter this blitzkrieg of misinformation.
Dataguy: Yup.
I don’t think this is true as I live in Maine and spend all my election time campaigning in rural areas – even little places that are not even incorporated. One of our absolute best Dems in the legislature is a woodsman who lives in a town that is down to one store.
I think our biggest problem is the media. They even MSNBC drove the disappointed meme heavy right up to the 2010 elections. In every conversation I had with Dems leading up to Nov. 2010 I heard the same thing. They kept saying Dems hadn’t accomplished anything, they were so disappointed. Once I started running through the very long list of things–people kept saying why haven’t I heard anything about this? Then it turned into the media saying that the Obama team failed to get the message out. Oh FFS there were constant videos, press releases, press conferences, announcements, etc.
We keep getting played by corporate media. The supposed progressive outlet is MSNBC which is owned by GE and Comcast. I call BS on the notion that they are progressive.
So, contrary to Ron Brownstein the Democrats’ advantages in presidential elections and the Republicans’ advantages in midterms are not sufficiently explained by reference to differential turnout. Winner-take-all state elections make it much more difficult for Republicans to conquer the Electoral College. But the overrepresentation of small states and the gerrymander both contribute to disadvantaging the Democrats in Congress.
Nope, disagree. The Democrats problem in the midterms, at least in the 2010 midterms, is that too many progressive Democrats stayed home because they were having tantrums that Obama wasn’t doing everything they wanted. I know this is true because I read it here. So it can’t be anything structural or something.
Turnout is how we overcome the structural disadvantage.
“The bottom line is that our elections don’t do that great of a job of reflecting the will of the people.”
They aren’t supposed to. They were never supposed to. Nobody at Philadelphia approved democracy and most were not looking for a national government to replace federation of states created by the Articles.
So the House is the one piece of the government that’s remotely national or significantly democratic.
And the silence of the constitution on the drawing of districts has empowered the party with the most power in state X to gerrymander its districts and so rig the game.
It was an is a piece of junk, that Philadelphia constitution.
A piece of junk ratified in an up or down, take it or leave it situation by the states, not the nation and much less the people thereof.
Dysfunctional election 🙁 http://linkapp.me/FOmjL
From the New Republic, Feb 14 , 2013 this :
In other words, it is even more difficult to even hope for improvement. Creating reasonably drawn, compact districts , in the author’ analysis would NOT change much.