… The gerrymander of 2011 built such a firewall around GOP control of the House that when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, Democratic congressional candidates earned 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, but the GOP retained a 234-201 majority. You might even argue it worked too well, creating the […] Read more »
Trump Did Not Break Politics
Politics, we’re often told, is governed by rules — basic principles that explain not just what’s going to happen, but what rational candidates and parties can be expected to do. … Mr. Trump is not the first to test the basic assumptions about how politics works and how we predict […] Read more »
Court Case Can Put House Further Out of Reach for Democrats
… Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Evenwel v. Abbott. It’s about whether voting districts need to have equal populations (as they do today), or whether they need to have equal numbers of eligible voters: adults who are citizens and who haven’t been disenfranchised as a […] Read more »
The Mysterious Number of American Citizens
Many Americans believe that someone, somewhere in Washington, must be in charge of tracking who is and who isn’t a citizen of the United States. Apparently, so does the U.S. Supreme Court, which just accepted a voting rights case that turns on the government’s ability to count the number of […] Read more »
The Pernicious Effects of Gerrymandering
… Gerrymandering has leached much of the broader heterogeneity out of congressional districts, contributing to the echo-chamber effect, where members’ ideological predilections are reinforced, and not challenged, back home. A corollary is the racial segregation of districts—the fact that so many Republican districts now have barely more than trace elements […] Read more »
Why House Republicans Did Even Better Than They Expected
… By winning just 52 percent of votes cast for the House, Republicans were able to win 57 percent of all House seats. Thanks in part to favorable redistricting after the 2010 Census, Republicans will likely have won five more seats than they did in 2010, even though Republican candidates […] Read more »