Hey Matt you got mentioned in the New York Times daily newsletter again. Congrats!
Republicans have been sharply critical of congressional Democrats’ H.R. 1 election reform package since it was introduced, but it’s starting to face some criticism from the left as well. “The bill is actually too sprawling to summarize fairly at column length, which is in some ways the key thing to know about it,” Matt Yglesias writes in his latest Substack newsletter. “It represents a grab bag of ideas, some of which are populist messaging points, some of which are individual members’ pet ideas, and really only one of which—the anti-gerrymandering provisions—actually tries to tackle what I think of as a genuinely very serious problem in the country. Unfortunately, while the bill taken as a whole is ‘big’ and ‘sweeping,’ the actual anti-gerrymandering provisions are kind of weak and vague. And the bill also doesn’t really do anything to address concerns that have emerged since the 2020 election and the January 6 mob that Republicans may try to steal elections. Instead, it’s actually much more focused on campaign finance and government ethics stuff that is much lower-stakes, and some of which has drawn serious criticism from the ACLU and others.”
The solution is simple: get rid of physical districts and make all elections proportional. Plan:
A) Expand the House of Representatives. Doubling might make sense, but I am open to other ideas
B) Make all elections proportional. If California has 100 seats, and the vote split is: 60% Dems, 30% Reps, and 10% Greens the seats are: 60 Democrats, 30 Republicans and 10 Greens
C) Set the threshold to whatever one seat is in each state.
This completely eliminates the issue of Gerrymandering and makes the system fair. One voter, one vote, and everyone's vote matters.
Isn’t there a ton of other stuff in HR-1, like statehood for DC and PR? I assumed the campaign finance stuff was mostly there to get cut so everyone can claim they are compromising.
Democrats worry way too much about voter ID and “dark money.” Just like it’s an article of faith among Republicans that there’s massive amounts voting fraud, Democrats devoutly believe that some significant number of voters would be disenfranchised if a photo id were required, and in both cases, the parties are wrong.
As for spending, yes, it’s wild how expensive our elections are, but as Matt points out, it turns out that spending isn’t as correlated with success as we thought. You need *some* money, but there are vanishing rates of return.
Consider a monthly donation to your state party, rather than a flood of donations during an election year.
Proportionality can't really be written into a districting plan. It's possible to draw one red district in Massachusetts. But here's my best attempt at drawing 2 of the 9 districts as red: https://districtr.org/plan/14781
If you use results from Elizabeth Warren's 2018 or 2013 underperformance, Republicans barely win both of those district I've drawn - but only one of them is geographically contiguous, and I suspect it makes it impossible for there to be either one or two contiguous districts in the western part of the state. But if you use John Kerry's win or Hillary Clinton's win, Democrats still win both of those districts, and that's about as red as it's possible to draw a district in Massachusetts. There's no way that you can draw 3 red districts, even though Republicans get over a third of the vote.
(Note that under the "evaluation" tab, you'll have to choose some race other than Charlie Baker's 2018 romp to get a realistic impression of how a federal Republican candidate would do in these seats.)
I'll repeat my oft-stated point: being popular and convincing Americans to vote for you is more important than fiddling with gerrymandering rules.
Between 2002 and 2020, the Democrats won the national 2-party vote for House seats five times. They won a majority of House seats four times (the exception being the 2012 vote that everyone, including Matt, focuses on, when they got a bare majority with 50.6% of the 2-party vote but the Republicans got a majority of the seats). In the other five elections, they got a minority of the 2-party vote and a minority of the seats.
In 2018 and 2020, the Democrats won 54.4% and 51.6% of the popular vote, and took 54.1 and 51.2% of the House seats.
I know people like Wasserman say that the Republicans can retake the House just due to redistricting, but I disagree. Have a booming economy and defeat COVID, don't let the activists define the party, and maybe have party leaders pick some especially juicy Sister Souljah moments, and get really good candidates who are well-fitted to their districts. Win a majority of the votes!
Nice piece, largely agree. After I Tweeted about it, someone sent me this fairly credible looking paper that says the net effect of Gerrymandering on the house is small. Appears not to dispute its effect on state legislatures. For what it's worth: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jowei/gerrymandering.pdf
If anything, getting some of those MA Dems to go out and very publicly fall on their sword -- "This bill will almost certainly mean that some of us don't get re-elected because it will mean MA elects some Republicans, proportional to how many MA Republicans actually vote, but we're voting for it anyways because the US House _should_ have some MA Republicans, balanced out by having the fair number of NC Democrats" -- would probably be good PR for getting the bill passed. We should be promising those MA Dems whatever it takes to get them to play ball.
After 2016 I *wish* billionaires could buy elections. If billionaires controlled election outcomes then Hillary Clinton would be president and our country would have been spared 4 years of trump.
I read recently [0] that one concern facing redistricting reform is that Dems hope to keep the House by squeezing more seats out of my home state, NY, using their newfound state leg supermajorities (and Cuomo's sex-pest weakness). The current 27-member delegation is 19/8 D/R, already overrepresenting Dems vs vote share. We expect to lose 1-2 seats due to our shrinking population and the party has its eye on 24/2 map.
It wasn't *that* long ago that New York had a 30/0 delegation. (2009, I believe, when the guy from Staten Island had a sex scandal, and the Conservative party messed up the one heavily red seat up north.)
Arguing about proportion seems unwinnable. Why not strive for cohesion and community and let partisanship fall where it may? Excessively gerrymandered districts lump people from legitimately different communities instead of allowing them to share representation. To avoid districts like the MD-3, one could start with a map of all school boundaries in a state (since they always exist are fairly granular and schools are public spaces used for polling). A computer would not have much trouble drawing a map with two rules. 1) Make the population of n districts as even as possible, and 2) minimize the edge to volume ratio. One would get compact, cohesive and even districts. Let the politics and demographics fall where they may.
The issue is that I can see why partisanship of a legislative map matters, but I can't see any reason why cohesion and community do. A representative is not a mayor - why does it matter if they represent anything like a coherent community?
Your proposal would strongly empower any rural party and disempower any urban party, because rural areas would usually have slight majorities over attached suburbs, while urban areas would usually be extremely packed.
I think it makes sense that members of a community have shared interests. For example residents of Baltimore should be able to elect a representative who would represent their interests in requesting funding for transit needs, rather than have those needs diluted by having constituents from western MD share the district. It is not clear that rural districts would have any advantage at all, and playing with the Atlas of redistricting, rural districts often become geographically larger, but they don't become more numerous.
If your 18 district state is 1/3 urban, 1/3 suburban, and 1/3 rural, then a proposal that focuses on compactness may easily end up with 8 districts that are 75% urban and 25% suburban, and 10 districts that are 60% rural and 40% suburban. Prioritizing compactness is going to mean that urban areas make up a strong majority of their district, while rural areas are more naturally going to be broken up, because you won't allow districts that surround a city.
In any case, if you want districts to be equal size, then some communities are going to have to be broken up.
One idea I had that would work better for state legislatures than Congress is to use existing county lines: rather than equalizing population between districts, you'd give different legislators different amounts of voting power to match their counties' populations. So to take Georgia as an example the Senator from Muscogee County would get about 0.84 votes on the floor, while the Senator from Richmond County would get 1.06 votes. You'd have to split a few really big counties like Fulton, and you could combine adjacent counties if they're really small (below some objective population threshold), but otherwise county lines would be sacrosanct. I tried running the numbers on this in a few states once and it was a big improvement everywhere except Wisconsin where there's just an awful natural gerrymander from the way the population is distributed. Every state has natural gerrymanders but they usually aren't nearly so extreme. This idea isn't perfect but it would have the benefit of removing 90% of the discretion and human judgment that are now part of the process.
Isn’t the clock already ticking out of time for gerrymandering changes to be implemented and in effect for this round of redistricting? even with the census delays?
Which means any changes done now would have to survive the next ten years and potential Republican majorities in the House, Senate, and Presidency?
I am not surprised that some Dems are reluctant to really combat gerrymandering. The party opposed the nonpartisan redistricting commission law here, but lots of people were somewhat appalled by the way that the Democratic controlled legislature here redistricted to entirely preserve the status quo -- with a Democratic majority, but not a super majority that would allow one party to pass budgets or raise taxes under our rules at the time. It was unpleasant to see that Democrats would rather preserve their seats, than create more competitive seats and actually win a super majority. Then we passed an initiative to do a redistricting commission, and it was those districts that led to a supermajority of Dems in our state legislature, because the Republican party did not move with the electorate of California. Moving to a top-two primary was also unpopular because it lessens party power, but it does do a little to give more centrist candidates from both parties a chance. I like election reforms that force the parties to actually persuade voters that they represent their interests. Given the big sort, top two primaries can help a more centrist candidate from the Dems or Reps get elected in the general and that creates a legislature more willing to work across partisan divides.
I've often thought that the fairest solution is to mandate that all seats at all levels (other than the Senate) be drawn by a publicly-available, open-source algorithm that is designed to create the maximum possible number of non-safe seats. This would take the political element out of the issue to the greatest possible extent. I'd be interested to hear what my fellow Slow Borers think about this.
High number of competitive seats means that when you switch from a 51-49 nationwide result to a 49-51 nationwide result, you go from a 280-155 House to a 155-280 House.
The variant of this I've heard is that a public commission should articulate what the objective, measurable standards of fairness are, then anyone can use publicly-available software to submit maps to be evaluated against those standards, and then the commission either just picks one of the top-scoring maps (say, out of the top 10), or some set of top-scoring maps gets put to a public vote. (You could even do some kind of min-max vote -- so, for each map, you tally up the votes within the districts as defined in that map, and within each district look at how many people dislike the map; the map as a whole is assigned the highest discontent score; and the map with the lowest discontent is selected.)
I don't love this idea. If I'm going totally blue sky, I think we should do proportional representation and not have the single member districts at all.
I like proportional as well, but if Congress wasn't going blue sky and decided to stick with some version of single member districts with FTP - what would be your recommendation for an anti-gerrymandering law?
The weird idea I'm toying with these days is to say that the top two candidates in every House race *both* go to Washington, but when it comes time to vote on a bill, instead of every representative getting one vote, they get a number of votes equal to (or roughly proportional to) the number of votes they got in their last election. I forget who I told about this last time I was ranting in this comment section, but I'm glad to hear more thoughts about it.
What a great idea! Weighted representation? Seems like it would be really appealing to nerds and technocrats so I assume normal people would not like it, but it really is great.
Yeah, I think people would get turned off by a rep having "multiple votes", i.e. if someone wins 60-40 they have 6 votes vs. the loser's 4, but there has to be some other way to phrase it.
I think I've argued before in favor of *not* having the rep get a number of votes in Congress equal to the number they got in the election - on the other hand, tying votes in Congress to votes received is a great way to encourage higher turnout.
I we're going totally whacky, then I liked the idea the Atlantic published that each Senate Class is treated like a national election. The parties produce a slate of candidates for the require states, the votes are held, and then you allocate a % of the seats to each party based on how they performed. You could use something like D'Hondt to determine which Senators are allocated to which State
The issue with this is that no one has a particular incentive to represent a small state because a party can win seats by aiming to run up the margins in large states. If Wyoming and California, or Hawaii and Texas, are in the same class, then the focus will be on CA/TX instead of WY/HI.
I live in a place with Multi-Member districts, and if anything it is the opposite. Individual members tend to be hyper focused on local issues, less so national issues (unless they are in leadership). This is because if you have two members from the same party, who are in competition with one another, they can't distinguish themselves with their parliament votes on national issues (because they are voting with the leadership). So they have to distinguish themselves with district specific, local issues, clientialism, and the like.
Both of my daughters worked/work for representatives. Constituent service is a big, big deal. From the top down, the representatives and staff members work their asses off trying to help residents with problems. I would hate to see that go away, such as under a proportional representation system.
Not necessarily. I dunno how it worked in other countries, but when Britain was in the EU, a region's MEPs would divide up the region between them with each undertaking constituent service for people within that sub-area.
But what was their incentive to do a good job? If their reelection didn't depend on those particular voters, I wonder how good a system for providing constituent service that was.
The way it plays out in other countries is that you do get area specific representatives. You can develop a voter base by getting known as the representative for North Where-ever, even if the district comprises the whole of Where-ever.
You can have a mixed-member proportional system, like Germany and New Zealand, where there is a representative for each seat, and then extra members chosen from a party list to top up the legislature as a whole to proportionality.
Also, multi-member districts (as under single transferable vote) still keeps constituent services as a thing, if admittedly at a somewhat attenuated level. And I have to say from my family's experience that House members aren't necessarily much better for constituent services than Senators under the current system, depending on what it is you want; I recall that about 15 years ago, my family got a lot more help on an immigration issue from our Democratic Senator's office (Carl Levin, to be exact) office than from our Republican Rep (Joe Knollenberg).
I like competitive districts, but making as many as possible has issues. In particular, there are requirements for minorities to have representation, and trying to get the maximum possible number of competitive seats would probably clash with that.
I see what you're going for. But I'm not wild about computer codes determining the makeup of the House. I know they do it now, and I don't like that, either. There is no such thing as a neutral robot.
It is impossible to draw a proportional map under first-past-the-post if you want it to be proportional when one party wins a very large majority of the vote.
If one party is winning more than two-thirds of the vote, then the minority party needs to have very high concentrations of votes to win any seats at all. Consider it nationally - a D+33 national result would make every single district blue - TX-13 is the reddest district in the nation and it's "only" R+33. An R+33 national result would result in 17 districts staying Democratic (in order of PVI: FL-24, GA-05, MA-07, NY-09, CA-34, CA-44, NJ-10, NY-08, CA-12, CA-37, NY-05, IL-07, NY-07, CA-13, PA-03, NY-13, NY-15). I'm using Cook PVI.
Note that only three of those 17 Democratic districts are in states where the boundaries are drawn by a GOP legislature (FL-24, GA-05 and PA-03) - they're not really the result of "packing", but of the intense concentration of Democratic votes in the most urban areas, and the most African-American areas - unless I've missed one, these are all majority-minority districts and all but NJ-10 (Newark) are in the inner core of cities big enough to have multiple congressional districts.
A proportional set of boundaries would have 145 districts at least this Republican and 145 at least this Democratic. That's utterly impossible.
The most partisan district in the nation is NY-15 - D+44. If the Republicans won that seat purely on the national vote, that would be an R+44 election; that's a 72-28 national generic ballot. Under a proportional system, there should be 121 districts at least that partisan, and the most partisan district should be something like D+99.8 (and equally one at R+99.8)
Within the constraints of single-member districts of equal size that cannot cross state boundaries, you cannot get proportionality outside of a relatively narrow band around 50-50. Fortunately, US election results are almost always in a relatively narrow band around 50-50.
Require proportional results (to within a margin of error of something like 5%, ie it can be off by no more than one seat in any state that isn't California or Texas) for any statewide result where no party exceeds 60% of the vote statewide, and accept that the system will inflate statewide results above that level in terms of representation.
Massachussetts was 75-21 in 2020 to the Democrats, of course they won all nine seats.
I know you mentioned you like the public matching idea even if it may not solve many problems but it does seem to me that it would be good to get members of congress not wasting their time doing fundraising calls. I feel like accomplishing that would be a huge step in the right direction in the policy making process and getting lawmakers actually working on writing laws. I also think having minimum federal standards for voting (i.e AVR) would be good for democracy as well, so I maybe wouldn't underplay the significance of the other provisions of this bill as much as you are doing, even if I agree that these other issues are trickier to deal with.
I have seen other people mention the Supreme Court issue and I wonder even if congress were to pass an ideal anti-gerrymandering bill (which they won't), would there be a movement among Democrats to do jurisdiction stripping of the Supreme Court on a bill like this? It seems to me that this would be literally the only way to allow one of these types of laws to stay on the books with the current court comprised as it is.
Matt - - can you get Substack to activate the "Reader View" capability on this site (I use Firefox). It would be, well, easier to read.
Hey Matt you got mentioned in the New York Times daily newsletter again. Congrats!
Republicans have been sharply critical of congressional Democrats’ H.R. 1 election reform package since it was introduced, but it’s starting to face some criticism from the left as well. “The bill is actually too sprawling to summarize fairly at column length, which is in some ways the key thing to know about it,” Matt Yglesias writes in his latest Substack newsletter. “It represents a grab bag of ideas, some of which are populist messaging points, some of which are individual members’ pet ideas, and really only one of which—the anti-gerrymandering provisions—actually tries to tackle what I think of as a genuinely very serious problem in the country. Unfortunately, while the bill taken as a whole is ‘big’ and ‘sweeping,’ the actual anti-gerrymandering provisions are kind of weak and vague. And the bill also doesn’t really do anything to address concerns that have emerged since the 2020 election and the January 6 mob that Republicans may try to steal elections. Instead, it’s actually much more focused on campaign finance and government ethics stuff that is much lower-stakes, and some of which has drawn serious criticism from the ACLU and others.”
The solution is simple: get rid of physical districts and make all elections proportional. Plan:
A) Expand the House of Representatives. Doubling might make sense, but I am open to other ideas
B) Make all elections proportional. If California has 100 seats, and the vote split is: 60% Dems, 30% Reps, and 10% Greens the seats are: 60 Democrats, 30 Republicans and 10 Greens
C) Set the threshold to whatever one seat is in each state.
This completely eliminates the issue of Gerrymandering and makes the system fair. One voter, one vote, and everyone's vote matters.
Isn’t there a ton of other stuff in HR-1, like statehood for DC and PR? I assumed the campaign finance stuff was mostly there to get cut so everyone can claim they are compromising.
Democrats worry way too much about voter ID and “dark money.” Just like it’s an article of faith among Republicans that there’s massive amounts voting fraud, Democrats devoutly believe that some significant number of voters would be disenfranchised if a photo id were required, and in both cases, the parties are wrong.
As for spending, yes, it’s wild how expensive our elections are, but as Matt points out, it turns out that spending isn’t as correlated with success as we thought. You need *some* money, but there are vanishing rates of return.
Consider a monthly donation to your state party, rather than a flood of donations during an election year.
Proportionality can't really be written into a districting plan. It's possible to draw one red district in Massachusetts. But here's my best attempt at drawing 2 of the 9 districts as red: https://districtr.org/plan/14781
If you use results from Elizabeth Warren's 2018 or 2013 underperformance, Republicans barely win both of those district I've drawn - but only one of them is geographically contiguous, and I suspect it makes it impossible for there to be either one or two contiguous districts in the western part of the state. But if you use John Kerry's win or Hillary Clinton's win, Democrats still win both of those districts, and that's about as red as it's possible to draw a district in Massachusetts. There's no way that you can draw 3 red districts, even though Republicans get over a third of the vote.
(Note that under the "evaluation" tab, you'll have to choose some race other than Charlie Baker's 2018 romp to get a realistic impression of how a federal Republican candidate would do in these seats.)
I'll repeat my oft-stated point: being popular and convincing Americans to vote for you is more important than fiddling with gerrymandering rules.
Between 2002 and 2020, the Democrats won the national 2-party vote for House seats five times. They won a majority of House seats four times (the exception being the 2012 vote that everyone, including Matt, focuses on, when they got a bare majority with 50.6% of the 2-party vote but the Republicans got a majority of the seats). In the other five elections, they got a minority of the 2-party vote and a minority of the seats.
In 2018 and 2020, the Democrats won 54.4% and 51.6% of the popular vote, and took 54.1 and 51.2% of the House seats.
I know people like Wasserman say that the Republicans can retake the House just due to redistricting, but I disagree. Have a booming economy and defeat COVID, don't let the activists define the party, and maybe have party leaders pick some especially juicy Sister Souljah moments, and get really good candidates who are well-fitted to their districts. Win a majority of the votes!
Nice piece, largely agree. After I Tweeted about it, someone sent me this fairly credible looking paper that says the net effect of Gerrymandering on the house is small. Appears not to dispute its effect on state legislatures. For what it's worth: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jowei/gerrymandering.pdf
If anything, getting some of those MA Dems to go out and very publicly fall on their sword -- "This bill will almost certainly mean that some of us don't get re-elected because it will mean MA elects some Republicans, proportional to how many MA Republicans actually vote, but we're voting for it anyways because the US House _should_ have some MA Republicans, balanced out by having the fair number of NC Democrats" -- would probably be good PR for getting the bill passed. We should be promising those MA Dems whatever it takes to get them to play ball.
The problem is that those MA Dems show no indication of wanting to cooperate - one of them already tried to take Markey's Senate seat!
"I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
After 2016 I *wish* billionaires could buy elections. If billionaires controlled election outcomes then Hillary Clinton would be president and our country would have been spared 4 years of trump.
I read recently [0] that one concern facing redistricting reform is that Dems hope to keep the House by squeezing more seats out of my home state, NY, using their newfound state leg supermajorities (and Cuomo's sex-pest weakness). The current 27-member delegation is 19/8 D/R, already overrepresenting Dems vs vote share. We expect to lose 1-2 seats due to our shrinking population and the party has its eye on 24/2 map.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/new-york-democrats-gerrymandering-elections/618452/
It wasn't *that* long ago that New York had a 30/0 delegation. (2009, I believe, when the guy from Staten Island had a sex scandal, and the Conservative party messed up the one heavily red seat up north.)
Peter King was a GOP rep from 93-21. Wikipedia says 2009 was the high-water-mark for Dems with 26/3.
Arguing about proportion seems unwinnable. Why not strive for cohesion and community and let partisanship fall where it may? Excessively gerrymandered districts lump people from legitimately different communities instead of allowing them to share representation. To avoid districts like the MD-3, one could start with a map of all school boundaries in a state (since they always exist are fairly granular and schools are public spaces used for polling). A computer would not have much trouble drawing a map with two rules. 1) Make the population of n districts as even as possible, and 2) minimize the edge to volume ratio. One would get compact, cohesive and even districts. Let the politics and demographics fall where they may.
The issue is that I can see why partisanship of a legislative map matters, but I can't see any reason why cohesion and community do. A representative is not a mayor - why does it matter if they represent anything like a coherent community?
Your proposal would strongly empower any rural party and disempower any urban party, because rural areas would usually have slight majorities over attached suburbs, while urban areas would usually be extremely packed.
I think it makes sense that members of a community have shared interests. For example residents of Baltimore should be able to elect a representative who would represent their interests in requesting funding for transit needs, rather than have those needs diluted by having constituents from western MD share the district. It is not clear that rural districts would have any advantage at all, and playing with the Atlas of redistricting, rural districts often become geographically larger, but they don't become more numerous.
If your 18 district state is 1/3 urban, 1/3 suburban, and 1/3 rural, then a proposal that focuses on compactness may easily end up with 8 districts that are 75% urban and 25% suburban, and 10 districts that are 60% rural and 40% suburban. Prioritizing compactness is going to mean that urban areas make up a strong majority of their district, while rural areas are more naturally going to be broken up, because you won't allow districts that surround a city.
In any case, if you want districts to be equal size, then some communities are going to have to be broken up.
One idea I had that would work better for state legislatures than Congress is to use existing county lines: rather than equalizing population between districts, you'd give different legislators different amounts of voting power to match their counties' populations. So to take Georgia as an example the Senator from Muscogee County would get about 0.84 votes on the floor, while the Senator from Richmond County would get 1.06 votes. You'd have to split a few really big counties like Fulton, and you could combine adjacent counties if they're really small (below some objective population threshold), but otherwise county lines would be sacrosanct. I tried running the numbers on this in a few states once and it was a big improvement everywhere except Wisconsin where there's just an awful natural gerrymander from the way the population is distributed. Every state has natural gerrymanders but they usually aren't nearly so extreme. This idea isn't perfect but it would have the benefit of removing 90% of the discretion and human judgment that are now part of the process.
I really like the idea of ending "one representative, one vote" in favor of "one voter, one vote".
"strive for cohesion and community and let partisanship fall where it may"
agreed.
Isn’t the clock already ticking out of time for gerrymandering changes to be implemented and in effect for this round of redistricting? even with the census delays?
Which means any changes done now would have to survive the next ten years and potential Republican majorities in the House, Senate, and Presidency?
I am not surprised that some Dems are reluctant to really combat gerrymandering. The party opposed the nonpartisan redistricting commission law here, but lots of people were somewhat appalled by the way that the Democratic controlled legislature here redistricted to entirely preserve the status quo -- with a Democratic majority, but not a super majority that would allow one party to pass budgets or raise taxes under our rules at the time. It was unpleasant to see that Democrats would rather preserve their seats, than create more competitive seats and actually win a super majority. Then we passed an initiative to do a redistricting commission, and it was those districts that led to a supermajority of Dems in our state legislature, because the Republican party did not move with the electorate of California. Moving to a top-two primary was also unpopular because it lessens party power, but it does do a little to give more centrist candidates from both parties a chance. I like election reforms that force the parties to actually persuade voters that they represent their interests. Given the big sort, top two primaries can help a more centrist candidate from the Dems or Reps get elected in the general and that creates a legislature more willing to work across partisan divides.
I've often thought that the fairest solution is to mandate that all seats at all levels (other than the Senate) be drawn by a publicly-available, open-source algorithm that is designed to create the maximum possible number of non-safe seats. This would take the political element out of the issue to the greatest possible extent. I'd be interested to hear what my fellow Slow Borers think about this.
High number of competitive seats means that when you switch from a 51-49 nationwide result to a 49-51 nationwide result, you go from a 280-155 House to a 155-280 House.
The variant of this I've heard is that a public commission should articulate what the objective, measurable standards of fairness are, then anyone can use publicly-available software to submit maps to be evaluated against those standards, and then the commission either just picks one of the top-scoring maps (say, out of the top 10), or some set of top-scoring maps gets put to a public vote. (You could even do some kind of min-max vote -- so, for each map, you tally up the votes within the districts as defined in that map, and within each district look at how many people dislike the map; the map as a whole is assigned the highest discontent score; and the map with the lowest discontent is selected.)
I don't love this idea. If I'm going totally blue sky, I think we should do proportional representation and not have the single member districts at all.
I like proportional as well, but if Congress wasn't going blue sky and decided to stick with some version of single member districts with FTP - what would be your recommendation for an anti-gerrymandering law?
The weird idea I'm toying with these days is to say that the top two candidates in every House race *both* go to Washington, but when it comes time to vote on a bill, instead of every representative getting one vote, they get a number of votes equal to (or roughly proportional to) the number of votes they got in their last election. I forget who I told about this last time I was ranting in this comment section, but I'm glad to hear more thoughts about it.
What a great idea! Weighted representation? Seems like it would be really appealing to nerds and technocrats so I assume normal people would not like it, but it really is great.
Yeah, I think people would get turned off by a rep having "multiple votes", i.e. if someone wins 60-40 they have 6 votes vs. the loser's 4, but there has to be some other way to phrase it.
I think I've argued before in favor of *not* having the rep get a number of votes in Congress equal to the number they got in the election - on the other hand, tying votes in Congress to votes received is a great way to encourage higher turnout.
It was me! I love the idea!
I we're going totally whacky, then I liked the idea the Atlantic published that each Senate Class is treated like a national election. The parties produce a slate of candidates for the require states, the votes are held, and then you allocate a % of the seats to each party based on how they performed. You could use something like D'Hondt to determine which Senators are allocated to which State
The issue with this is that no one has a particular incentive to represent a small state because a party can win seats by aiming to run up the margins in large states. If Wyoming and California, or Hawaii and Texas, are in the same class, then the focus will be on CA/TX instead of WY/HI.
I live in a place with Multi-Member districts, and if anything it is the opposite. Individual members tend to be hyper focused on local issues, less so national issues (unless they are in leadership). This is because if you have two members from the same party, who are in competition with one another, they can't distinguish themselves with their parliament votes on national issues (because they are voting with the leadership). So they have to distinguish themselves with district specific, local issues, clientialism, and the like.
Both of my daughters worked/work for representatives. Constituent service is a big, big deal. From the top down, the representatives and staff members work their asses off trying to help residents with problems. I would hate to see that go away, such as under a proportional representation system.
Not necessarily. I dunno how it worked in other countries, but when Britain was in the EU, a region's MEPs would divide up the region between them with each undertaking constituent service for people within that sub-area.
But what was their incentive to do a good job? If their reelection didn't depend on those particular voters, I wonder how good a system for providing constituent service that was.
The way it plays out in other countries is that you do get area specific representatives. You can develop a voter base by getting known as the representative for North Where-ever, even if the district comprises the whole of Where-ever.
You can have a mixed-member proportional system, like Germany and New Zealand, where there is a representative for each seat, and then extra members chosen from a party list to top up the legislature as a whole to proportionality.
Also, multi-member districts (as under single transferable vote) still keeps constituent services as a thing, if admittedly at a somewhat attenuated level. And I have to say from my family's experience that House members aren't necessarily much better for constituent services than Senators under the current system, depending on what it is you want; I recall that about 15 years ago, my family got a lot more help on an immigration issue from our Democratic Senator's office (Carl Levin, to be exact) office than from our Republican Rep (Joe Knollenberg).
I'd be curious if we do proportional representation, but then allow parties to have regional elections or assign members to specific regions.
I like competitive districts, but making as many as possible has issues. In particular, there are requirements for minorities to have representation, and trying to get the maximum possible number of competitive seats would probably clash with that.
I see what you're going for. But I'm not wild about computer codes determining the makeup of the House. I know they do it now, and I don't like that, either. There is no such thing as a neutral robot.
It is impossible to draw a proportional map under first-past-the-post if you want it to be proportional when one party wins a very large majority of the vote.
If one party is winning more than two-thirds of the vote, then the minority party needs to have very high concentrations of votes to win any seats at all. Consider it nationally - a D+33 national result would make every single district blue - TX-13 is the reddest district in the nation and it's "only" R+33. An R+33 national result would result in 17 districts staying Democratic (in order of PVI: FL-24, GA-05, MA-07, NY-09, CA-34, CA-44, NJ-10, NY-08, CA-12, CA-37, NY-05, IL-07, NY-07, CA-13, PA-03, NY-13, NY-15). I'm using Cook PVI.
Note that only three of those 17 Democratic districts are in states where the boundaries are drawn by a GOP legislature (FL-24, GA-05 and PA-03) - they're not really the result of "packing", but of the intense concentration of Democratic votes in the most urban areas, and the most African-American areas - unless I've missed one, these are all majority-minority districts and all but NJ-10 (Newark) are in the inner core of cities big enough to have multiple congressional districts.
A proportional set of boundaries would have 145 districts at least this Republican and 145 at least this Democratic. That's utterly impossible.
The most partisan district in the nation is NY-15 - D+44. If the Republicans won that seat purely on the national vote, that would be an R+44 election; that's a 72-28 national generic ballot. Under a proportional system, there should be 121 districts at least that partisan, and the most partisan district should be something like D+99.8 (and equally one at R+99.8)
Within the constraints of single-member districts of equal size that cannot cross state boundaries, you cannot get proportionality outside of a relatively narrow band around 50-50. Fortunately, US election results are almost always in a relatively narrow band around 50-50.
Require proportional results (to within a margin of error of something like 5%, ie it can be off by no more than one seat in any state that isn't California or Texas) for any statewide result where no party exceeds 60% of the vote statewide, and accept that the system will inflate statewide results above that level in terms of representation.
Massachussetts was 75-21 in 2020 to the Democrats, of course they won all nine seats.
I know you mentioned you like the public matching idea even if it may not solve many problems but it does seem to me that it would be good to get members of congress not wasting their time doing fundraising calls. I feel like accomplishing that would be a huge step in the right direction in the policy making process and getting lawmakers actually working on writing laws. I also think having minimum federal standards for voting (i.e AVR) would be good for democracy as well, so I maybe wouldn't underplay the significance of the other provisions of this bill as much as you are doing, even if I agree that these other issues are trickier to deal with.
I have seen other people mention the Supreme Court issue and I wonder even if congress were to pass an ideal anti-gerrymandering bill (which they won't), would there be a movement among Democrats to do jurisdiction stripping of the Supreme Court on a bill like this? It seems to me that this would be literally the only way to allow one of these types of laws to stay on the books with the current court comprised as it is.