FairVote Feed: Congressional Elections

The Elizabeth Colbert-Busch Guide to Running in the Other Party’s Safe Districts

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:51:07 -0700

AP Photo

It's no secret that congressional elections have a bit of a competitiveness problem. Most congressional districts invariably vote for either Republicans or Democrats. In those districts, the minority party's candidates have no hope of winning elections, and their voters have no hope of winning representation. Take the 2012 election, when Democrats didn't pick up a single seat in the 201 districts where Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by more than 4% and Republicans didn't pick up a single seat in the 167 districts where Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by at least 11%. That's an awful lot of safe districts.

But maybe you're foolhardy enough to believe you could actually break through those impenetrable partisan walls. You're a Democrat in a red district or a Republican in a blue district, and you want nothing more than to represent your district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Well, with this election-tested* guide, you too can fruitlessly struggle to overcome our increasingly hyper-partisan winner-take-all congressional elections. If you follow the guide closely, you might even feel like you have a real chance at winning your race before your inevitable failure on Election Day.

Before we get started, it goes without saying that you need to run a strong campaign, not have any personal baggage, raise at least twice as much money as your opponent, and decisively win any debates.

Once you've got that down, just follow these four simple steps.

*Guide tested in South Carolina District 1 special election between Elizabeth Colbert-Busch and Mark Sanford, May 7, 2013. SC-1 voted for Mitt Romney at 11 points above his national average in 2012. Sanford won the election with 54% of the vote.

1. Timing is everything. Whatever you do, don't run in the general election. General elections have a high turnout and are highly predictable. Voters are unlikely to split their tickets.

Instead, wait until a special election - that is, until your current representative is appointed to a higher office, retires mid-term, resigns in disgrace, or dies. It should happen eventually, if you don't die of old age first yourself. Special elections tend to garner national attention, and they allow more emphasis to be placed on the individual candidates.

2. Support the other party's policy positions. There's no way you can get elected just by representing the viewpoints of your party's supporters. Don't completely forsake them, but also don't be afraid to register your opposition to your party's most important legislative accomplishment in recent memory.

3. Family fame. You're going to want to have a close relative who is a popular celebrity. Not just a B-lister; this should be someone who has a personal legion of fans from both parties and, preferably, a TV show on which to advertise your candidacy and mock your opponent.

Speaking of which...

4. Choose your opponent wisely. This may be the most important step. If you're facing an average or even mediocre candidate from the other party, you will lose. Your opponent needs to be embarrassing.

Here's an example of an opponent who was bad, but not bad enough: in 2008, Representative Henry Brown (R), incumbent of South Carolina's District 1 (61% Republican), was forced to pay a fine for starting a fire that ended up burning down 20 acres of a national forest. Brown still won his election by 4%.

No, you'll want an opponent who's done something even more embarrassing than recklessly causing massive environmental destruction. Something like a sex scandal. Better yet: a sex scandal funded by taxpayer money.

In case the scandal took place a while ago, try and keep it current. Make sure your opponent does something new to remind everyone of the really scandalous thing he or she did, like trespassing on an ex-spouse's property. It should ideally be shameful enough that your opponent's national campaign committee pulls out all its funding from the race.

DISCLAIMER: If you somehow manage to make all of that happen, don't get too excited. You will still almost certainly lose. And if you do win the special election, you'll probably just lose in the next general election anyway. But at least you did everything you could to strike a blow for disenfranchised minority party voters all over the country!

Except for one thing: if you get tired of waiting for that perfect storm to hit your district, you could always help the U.S. House switch to using multi-member districts elected under fair voting methods that would guarantee minority party voters the ability to elect a candidate in every district in the country. No sex scandal necessary - just a federal statutory change.

FairVote's 2014 Congressional Analysis

Wed, 01 May 2013 06:38:27 -0700

Every two years, FairVote conducts a thorough analysis of congressional elections, pointing out problems and making predictions in U.S. House of Representatives districts in all 50 states, that we call Monopoly Politics. We recently released our first projections for the 2014 congressional elections, including publishing a downloadable spreadsheet with partisanship data for every congressional district in the country. Check out the media coverage of our 2014 projections, our Monopoly Politics 2012 report, and our resources on the fair voting solution:

Monopoly Politics 2014 in the New York Times and on Chuck Todd's The Daily Rundown
In part one of the 2014 Monopoly Politics report, FairVote Releases Projections for the 2014 Congressional Elections.
Download the spreadsheet with all our data on every congressional district, or view it in your browser.
View our full Monopoly Politics 2012 report and see the Fair Voting Solution
Read about the fair voting solution in the U-Richmond Law Review and in Salon

FairVote’s Top Ten List: The Breakdown of Winner-Take-All Elections

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:35:12 -0700

Want the facts faster? Take a look at this one-pager on our top 10 indicators of the breakdown of winner-take-all.

Geography has become an increasingly rigid indicator of which political party will win a state or legislative district in the United States. Voters are far more likely to vote only for candidates from a single political party, and to vote for that same party from election to election. When there is a shift in an area's underlying partisanship, it is now more likely to be away from the national political center than towards it.

The end results of these trends include:

- A Congress that is more partisan in its voting behavior than at any time in recent history, and legislative leaders who consistently use every procedural tool available to dominate the opposing party when in the majority, or to obstruct it when in the minority.

- A partisan voting consistency that means less ticket splitting in votes for president, Congress, and state elections.

- A pattern of majority domination that removes that vast majority of states from the battleground in presidential elections. This pattern incentivizes candidates to allocate more than 99% of their attention and resources on courting voters in just 10 states.

- A partisan consistency in congressional districts that makes it difficult for either party to make gains in the House outside of a shrinking band of competitive districts. The vast majority of incumbents are secure in their districts and do not have to worry about reelection.

Top political analysts have been addressing these trends, including the Washington Post's Dan Balz, the Cook Political Report's Charlie Cook and Crystal Ball's Rhodes Cook. But one factor consistently overlooked by these analysts is that this partisan gridlock can be remedied with a simple change in electoral rules. By doing away with winner-take-all voting laws, by which 50% + 1 of the vote earns 100% of representation in a single state or district, political polarization could be substantially remedied, and voters would find themselves more accurately represented in their legislative bodies.

Many people wring their hands over how district lines are drawn, highlight the dangers of voting laws designed to reduce voter participation, or bemoan the role of money in politics. But however important these issues may be, they collectively have a minor effect on electoral outcomes when contrasted with the overwhelming power of winner-take-all voting rules. Under winner-take-all, once a candidate in a race for a congressional seat or a state in a presidential race has a partisan balance three percentage points or more away from the national vote, the odds of a victory for supporters of the minority party plunge.

Once an area's partisanship is six percent or more away from the national vote, any party shift is nearly impossible.

Fortunately, we can ditch the winner-take-all voting laws that have impaired our electoral process for far too long. With simple changes to federal and state statutes, the US can be on its way to better and fairer elections. The United States has a long history of using different voting rules that would, absent any other changes, dramatically improve elections, representation, and legislative behavior. To underscore the urgency of consideration of these reforms, FairVote has made a list of the top ten biggest indicators that winner-take-all elections have contributed to the polarization and stagnation that plagues our political process.

Definition of terms:

A swing state or congressional district is one that voted within three points of the national popular vote for president (47%-53% partisanship), meaning that their partisanship leaning is similar to the nation's as a whole. Presidential elections in states and congressional elections in districts (especially if there is an open seat or a first-term incumbent) within this partisanship band are likely to be competitive in a nationally competitive election.

A safe state or congressional district is one that voted at least 8 percentage points more Democratic or Republican than the national popular vote for president (42%-58% partisanship). Barring a landslide election for one party nationally, there is virtually no chance that any of these states or districts held by the majority party will be won by the minority party.

Presidential Elections

1. Decreasing state competition: In 1988, safe states collectively held only 40 electoral votes. In 2012, they held 247 electoral votes. During that time the number of electoral votes held by swing states shrunk by nearly half, from 272 to 140.

2. Consistent voting patterns: Between 2000 and 2012, 41 states voted for the same party in every presidential election. In both 2008 and 2012, 35 of these states received less than 1/100th of the attention from the presidential campaigns that they would have received if every state received attention in proportion to its population.

3. More partisan rigidity: The number of states where partisanship shifted by five or more percentage points between elections has decreased from an average of 23 states between 1960 and 1976 to an average of three between 2000 and 2012.

Congressional Elections

4. Decreasing district competition: Between 1998 and 2012, the number of swing districts decreased from 121 to 47. There are now 284 safe congressional districts, up from 179 in 1998.

5. Increasing dominance of partisanship over local factors: Only six incumbents remain in seats that favored the other party by a margin of more than eight percentage points in the 2012 presidential election, down from 34 such incumbents after the 2006 election and down from 47 after the 1992 election. In 2012, neither party took a seat away from the other party in a district that favored the opposing party by more than eight percentage points. Only six percent of districts (26) voted for different parties for president and Congress in 2012.

6. More partisan rigidity: Comparing partisanship in current congressional districts based on the 2008 presidential elections and 2012 presidential elections, only 30 districts (7%) experienced a partisanship shift of five or more percentage points - and all but four of those districts trended in the direction of the previous majority party, making them less competitive.

7. More regional domination: In 2012, large areas of the nation were dominated by one party. Democrats swept all 21 House seats in New England while Republicans won all 22 seats in the belt of states running from Arkansas through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. In 1992, Republicans held 10 House seats in New England and Democrats held 14 House seats in this line of midwestern and western states.

8. More racial connection to partisanship: White Republicans represent 66 of 70 majority-white U.S. House districts in the adjoining nine states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. In 1991, 50 white Democrats represented these states, nearly all in white majority districts.

State Elections

9. More monopoly-controlled states: In 38 states, one party controls the governor's mansion and both state legislative houses - and the presidential candidate from the same party won 31 of those states in 2012. This is the largest number of states with one-party-monopoly governments since World War II.

10. More partisan rigidity: In North Carolina's 2012 elections for its 120-seat House of Representatives, 119 seats were won by the candidate with a partisan advantage in his or her district. In New Jersey's first election since its new two-member legislative districts were drawn by a commission in 2011, all 40 assembly districts elected two members of the same party.

As we can see, the phrase "all politics is local" has been replaced with "all politics is partisan." To see how we can fix presidential, congressional, and state legislative elections, visit

Presidential Elections: www.fairvote.org/national-popular-vote

Congressional Elections: www.fairvoting.us

Have your own favorite example of winner-take-all breakdown? Send it to us at info@fairvote.org.

Taking on American Political Dysfunction without Changing the Constitution

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:15:58 -0700

In his draft paper on Political Dysfunction and Constitutional Change, University of California-Irvine professor Rick Hasen makes a powerful case for the need for out-of-the-box thinking on American political reform. But he also makes a curious omission. Fair voting alternatives to winner-take-all elections do not receive a single mention in the paper, even though they were promoted in one of Hasen's major sources, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein's 2012 book It's Even Worse Than It Looks.

Hasen has a well-deserved reputation as one of our most thoughtful law professors, and his paper has generated considerable reaction in the political blogosphere. It posits three basic claims: 1) The government of the United States is currently dysfunctional, 2) that dysfunction could be solved by switching to a parliamentary system of governance - that is, government where the executive is chosen by the legislature, and 3) if the problem of dysfunction does not eventually solve itself, none of the commonly proposed subconstitutional rule changes will end dysfunction without switching to a parliamentary system.

Hasen's first claim is difficult to dispute. Between the never-ending budget crisis and a consistent inability to enact policies that most Americans favor, the U.S. government - in particular, Congress - is simply not doing its job effectively. The cause, as Hasen correctly points out, is increasing polarization within Congress, which is at its highest point since the end of Reconstruction. That polarization in turn is grounded in most voters' increasingly rigid party preference - a trend that FairVote has highlighted for more than 15 years.

We're not going to argue one way or another on Hasen's second claim about a parliamentary system. While it's true that switching to a system in which the majority party could pass any law it wanted would increase legislative output and decrease gridlock, doing so would be a drastic step that would require a complete restructuring of American politics. No reform option should be dismissed just because it is unfamiliar, but as Hasen himself writes, "we should not lightly change the fundamental rules of our governance."

We do take issue with Hasen's third contention that, absent adoption of a parliamentary system or government dysfunction correcting itself with time, no subconstitutional changes proposed by others are likely end such dysfunction. On the one hand, Hasen convincingly explains the limitations of some subconstitutional rule changes, most notably filibuster reform, independent redistricting and the adoption of open primaries. Fairvote has also pointed out the limitations of open primaries and independent redistricting as reform solutions, although the latter certainly has merit if applied consistently and with attention to fair representation. As for the filibuster, we have drawn attention to its problematic nature over the years, dating back to when the debate centered on Republicans complaining about Senate Democrats blocking the majority. Even so, while filibuster reform would allow more bills to make it through the Senate, it would do nothing to address the underlying causes of polarization.

After dismissing those three reforms, however, Hasen jumps straight to the conclusion that "tinkering with the internal rules of Congress or the external rules of election are likely to make only modest inroads at best in the polarization and dysfunction currently affecting our national politics." That's true, if you're only tinkering. But we're not limited to merely tinkering with our election rules; in fact, the electoral reforms mentioned by Hasen are just the tip of the iceberg of possible changes that could be made to American elections without requiring a constitutional amendment.

The biggest oversight is the potential use of candidate-based methods of proportional representation proven in American elections, which FairVote calls "fair voting." Fair voting is based on the simple and intuitive principle that legislatures should more accurately reflect the political views of all Americans. Voters would still vote for specific candidates under fair voting, but those votes would give them legislators who represent them philosophically as well as geographically. Our preferred fair voting method, choice voting (also known as the "single transferable vote"), encourages candidates to campaign for support outside of their base because it allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference.

We've drawn fair voting plans for every state, showing how combining existing districts into larger districts with between three and five members would have a dramatic impact on voter choice and fair representation. A fair voting plan could be implemented nationwide through federal statute, and would be fully constitutional. Fair voting methods have already been used effectively in important American elections, including for more than a century in elections to the Illinois House of Representatives and for local elections in major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Sacramento and New York. Proponents of fair voting for congressional elections include the Democrats' third-ranking House Member James Clyburn, along with intellectual heavyweights like Mann and Ornstein (who also advocate for the consideration of another FairVote proposal, ranked choice voting in single winner office elections).

Unlike the "tinkering reforms" Hasen dismisses, adopting fair voting would have real and powerful effects on American governance. No longer would only two party poles be represented in Congress. Instead, viewpoints from varying degrees of the right, center, and left of the American political spectrum would all have a voice in the legislature. With a stronger political center and nearly all Members of Congress sharing constituents with Members from another party due to the use of multi-member districts elected under non-winner-take-all rules, Members would be much more likely to cooperate across the aisle. Because fair voting would make every district competitive in every general election, the phenomenon of legislators being threatened only by politically extreme primary challengers would disappear.

Hasen is clearly willing to look abroad for reforms, suggesting the British Westminster system as one possible model for an American parliament, but he avoids the fact that most of the world's robust democracies have rejected American-style winner-take-all voting rules.

It is possible that Hasen omitted fair voting just because he doesn't think it's a realistic or achievable reform. But for someone considering rewriting large swaths of the U.S. Constitution, that's not a very persuasive reason (not that it's a good argument for anyone to ignore fair voting, as FairVote pointed out last month in challenging another election law luminary, Nathaniel Persily, to acknowledge the potential of fair voting).

The paper concludes on a note of caution, as Hasen writes that "it is worth waiting to see if the political system self-corrects" before shifting to a parliamentary system. That could be a very long wait, with a lot of ineffective governance and harm done to the American people in the process.

There's no need to wait to adopt fair voting. The negative effects of winner-take-all congressional elections have never been clearer and fair voting is completely consistent with American political traditions. Even if the current era of partisan gridlock does prove to be a transitory phase, fair voting would still have numerous other benefits for American elections. For one, if implemented in tandem with independent redistricting commissions, fair voting would effectively remove all partisan bias in House races - a bias that currently leaves Democrats needing more than 56 percent of the vote to earn a one-seat majority in 2014.

With fair voting, Republicans could win seats outside their strongholds, helping to broaden the appeal of the party in a way that would make them more competitive in presidential elections. If Jonathan Bernstein is right in his response to Hasen that a broken Republican Party that is the real source of government dysfunction, fair voting would give Republicans the right incentives to get their party back on track.

Furthermore, fair voting would be an ideal solution to controversies over how best to elect racial minorities, as explained by FairVote staff in a recent University of Richmond Law Review article and a blog post on Congressional elections in the South. It would very likely boost representation of women far more than millions of more dollars spent on funding individual women candidates, as highlighted by FairVote's Representation 2020 project. It would give every voter a meaningful choice, far more than any redistricting reform proposal that keeps winner-take-all elections in place.

To be sure, we still may well get presidents of one party and congressional leaders of another. No system can guarantee effective governance, but fair voting would give us a more representative legislature with individual members having more freedom and opportunity to work across the aisle to get things done. We would need to pay attention to details like handling constituent service demands, but the longstanding use of multi-seat legislative districts in many states shows that can be done well.

Hasen is right to look beyond the status quo of Washington politics toward real reform options. But he's wrong to ignore lessons from our own history and the powerful logic that the single-member district is a poor way to elect an increasingly diverse population. Let's evaluate all the options for making the current Constitution work - not just the timid ones.

Scholars like Nathaniel Persily Shouldn’t Count Out Fair Voting

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:52:15 -0800

In September of 1999, Nathaniel Persily, then a staff attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, gave nuanced testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution in support of the States' Choice of Voting Systems Act. Sponsored by Mel Watt (D-NC) and backed by the Department of Justice and other Members such as James Clyburn (D-SC) and Tom Campbell (R-CA), the Act would have lifted the single member district mandate Congress had imposed on the states in 1967. In Persily's words, the bill would have allowed "states to be 'laboratories of democracy'" and represented "what might be the most important piece of election-related legislation considered by this body in 25 years."

What drew backers like Watt, Clyburn, Campbell and the Department of Justice to the Act was the opportunity it provided states to adopt fair voting systems - that is, American forms of proportional representation in multi-seat districts. While Persily did not explicitly endorse fair voting in the testimony, he did note that fair voting tends to lead to "higher voter turnout, greater ideological and racial diversity represented in the legislature" and "a higher number of women representatives," and that any "apocalyptic forecast" of a destabilized political system "is both premature and easily avoided with the tweaking of the rules of any proportional system."

Unfortunately, the States' Choice of Voting Systems Act did not pass in 1999, nor have later versions of the bill. Persily is now an election law professor at Columbia University and one of the nation's foremost experts on redistricting. Like many top experts on redistricting, he has also been directly involved in several redistricting processes. Persily has been tasked by courts to draw legislative and congressional plans in Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, and New York. He also has done innovative work with his students, having them draw congressional district plans for all 50 states in his Draw Congress project.

Today, Persily seems to accept the winner-take-all framework when addressing the issue of gerrymandering - a common question in the wake of the 2012 wrong-winner House election. In a recent interview with the New Jersey Star Ledger, for instance, Persily was asked "what's the fix" to our clearly broken redistricting process. His response: "the redistricting process in New Jersey isn't a bad system."

FairVote begs to differ. New Jersey's redistricting process, performed by a bipartisan commission, is only not a "bad system" relative to systems in which redistricting is completely in the control of partisan interests. By any other standard, New Jersey's redistricting process produced election results that left a lot to be desired. In 2012, for example, no House race was won by less than 9% of the vote. No women currently represent New Jersey in Congress. In a state in which President Barack Obama and Sen. Robert Menendez each won over 58% of the vote, Democrats don't control a majority of New Jersey's congressional delegation.

At the state legislative level, New Jersey's system has produced mostly safe districts and highly polarized representation. Each of its 40 districts has one state senator and two assembly members, but 38 are of those 40 are represented by only one party. All 40 districts have two assembly members of the same party.

These issues persist because independent and bipartisan commissions alone will never solve the most fundamental and serious problems with our congressional elections. Such commissions are an improvement, but not a true solution.

Some of those who prescribe only independent redistricting as a fix for our congressional elections do so because they aren't even aware that a far more comprehensive reform - fair voting - even exists. But many, Persily included, do know about the significant potential benefits that fair voting could provide for American elections.

When asked how to reform the system, however, too many well-informed people like Persily don't mention fair voting. Why? The most common reason is likely that many reformers and election analysts do not believe that it is politically feasible to implement fair voting in the U.S.

This is, of course, a vicious cycle. If no one ever mentions fair voting as a serious alternative, then it seems infeasible. But if everyone who believes that fair voting would be a better system for electing our representatives spoke up in its support - or even put it forward as an option worth considering and spoke candidly about how limited any election reform can be within a single member district structure - suddenly fair voting would seem less like a far-off dream and more like an achievable reality.

Some scholars have already started doing just that. Last year, two luminaries of political science, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institute and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, confronted the limitations of redistricting reform and suggested that it's time to look seriously at fair voting in their book It's Even Worse Than It Looks. But their voices and the few others who have joined them have not yet been enough to bring fair voting to the forefront of American politics.

Even with the silence on fair voting from most opinion leaders, Americans are nonetheless receptive to the idea of candidates receiving seats in proportion to their votes. In a recent poll of Californians, for instance, 48% of respondents expressed a favorable opinion of proportional representation with just 34% holding an unfavorable opinion. It's hard to identify another area of policy in which a policy option that has such broad expert and popular support is given so little credence as a viable reform.

We strongly encourage Mr. Persily other election experts to stop holding back on expressing support for fair voting, or at least putting it forward as an option worthy of serious consideration. We can set our sights on creating a few more "not bad" systems like that in New Jersey - or we can come together to back real reforms that would actually fulfill the promise of American democracy, by guaranteeing fair representation and a meaningful vote to every voter in every election.

California and the Limits of Independent Redistricting Commissions with Winner-Take-All

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:12:05 -0800

Three months after the 2012 election, independent redistricting continues to gain attention as a panacea for American congressional elections. Making the case from the quantitative flank is Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience at Princeton and founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, whose February 2 op-ed in the New York Times purported to show that the partisan bias in the U.S. House of Representatives could be corrected nearly entirely by implanting independent redistricting nationwide in the form that it is currently used in states like California. Wang later expressed his admiration for the California commission model by tweeting, in response to a National Journal article on the defeat of Congressman Howard Berman, "What independent redistricting looks like: races blown wide open, incumbents ousted."

As FairVote has long argued, independent redistricting is a necessary reform, and we support it wholeheartedly. But proponents are simply wrong to suggest it would be sufficient if left to operate within winner-take-all elections. A perfect illustration of this point is the effect of the independent redistricting commission in California. Election results clearly show that "wide open" races and "ousted incumbents" were not the norm in California in 2012 - and are likely to become even more scarce in the state's future elections.

FairVote co-founder Steven Hill has already written an excellent Sacramento Bee op-ed enumerating the limitations of the combination of independent redistricting and the state's Top Two primary system. Hill found that independent redistricting did not create significantly more competitive races, and the average margin of victory for incumbents was "no different than it has been for the past ten years."

In future congressional elections in California, competition is likely to further decrease and incumbents will settle comfortably into their mostly one-sided districts. The Berman/Sherman race that Wang referred to was an aberration - that is, two long-serving incumbents facing off after being drawn into the same district - and one that is hardly unique to states with redistricting commissions. In elections in single-member districts that don't take place after redistricting, incumbent/incumbent elections will not exist. If Berman/Sherman is "what independent redistricting looks like," it will be 10 years before we see it have an impact again.

But more broadly, California's plan shows just how limited an effect commissions will have when left to work only within winner-take-all elections. Looking to FairVote's partisanship index (our well-tested method of grouping congressional districts into categories of likely competitiveness based on the relative shares of the presidential candidates in districts compared to candidates' national percentages), most California districts remain fundamentally lopsided and only four out of 53 have a partisan balance suggesting a real chance of regular competitiveness.

First, 42 of California's 53 districts are locked down for one party. On one side of the partisan scale, Republicans represent 10 districts with a partisanship of more than 55% Republican, including nine greater than 57.7%. Democrats are highly unlikely to win any of these districts, with none of their candidates in those districts winning even 43% of the vote in 2012.

On the other side of the scale, Democrats represent all 25 districts with a partisanship of at least 61% Democratic - districts in which the "closest" a Republican came to winning was a 28 percentage point defeat. Democrats also represent the seven remaining districts that are at least 56.9% Democratic, with all Republican candidates losing by at least ten percentages points in 2012 in those districts. That's 32 very safely Democratic districts.

Let's turn to the eleven remaining districts that have more of a chance to be competitive.

Two Republicans represent districts with a partisanship that is at least 52.8% Republican - that is, more competitive, but still tough terrain for Democrats given today's partisan voting patterns. Democrats lost by more than nine percentage points in both districts and, nationally, Democrats in 2012 won only three new seats in districts that were at least 52.8% Republican.

There are five districts with a partisanship that is between 53.2% and 56.8% Democratic. Republicans currently hold two of those districts, although both will certainly be top Democratic targets in 2014 and highly vulnerable. One was the anomalous CA-31, where Gary Miller won election because several Democratic candidates split the vote in the June primary and only two Republicans advanced to the general election due to the problematic "Top Two" system.

That leaves us with just four districts with a partisanship of 47.2% to 53.2% -- the real "competitive zone." Democrats today hold three of these seats and Republicans hold one. If more than two party changes occur in California congressional districts this decade, it's highly likely the shifts come from these four seats. If the current incumbents are strong candidates who can develop a substantial incumbency advantage in their districts, however, there may be no additional seat changes aside from the Democratic targets mentioned above.

In short, most of California is locked into one-party representation and most races will settle into perpetual landslides for the rest of the decade. Furthermore, the current plan has under-represented Republicans and, as usual, shut out independents. Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Emken, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2012, both won 38% of California's statewide vote, but Republicans won only 28% of California's House seats. One independent congressional candidate, Bill Bloomfield, came surprisingly close to winning, but it is very unlikely that any independents will win in the next decade.

Independent redistricting did some things right, and for that it deserves praise: a few more districts were competitive, the district lines were slightly more compact, incumbents were less favored, and racial minorities did earn chances to elect some preferred candidates, even if most racial minority voters were left in white-majority districts that elected white candidates. But it's illusory to suggest that California's model will create many competitive districts or provide any guarantee of a fair balance of partisan representation.

For electoral reform that actually accomplishes the goals of fair representation and competitive races for all voters, fair voting forms of proportional representation are the answer - using "super districts" that indeed should be drawn by an independent redistricting commission. We hope that Sam Wang and the many pundits that seem to agree with him take a closer look at the nature of the problem and the full array of reform solutions available to policymakers.

Geography as a Failed Unit of Representation: Why Fifty States of Equal Population Is No Solution for Presidential Elections

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:18:05 -0800

This week, an alternative map of the United States has been floating around the Internet, one that some have suggested would create a more fair and equal Electoral College. Created by artist Neil Freeman, the map redraws state lines so that all fifty states have equal populations and are both compact and geographically intuitive. The implicit idea behind the proposal is that what's wrong with presidential elections is the unequal population of states.

The project is certainly an amusing thought experiment - especially given some of the more creative names for new states, like "Shiprock" and "Firelands" (less exciting is the proposed state of "Tampa Bay"). But as an improvement to the Electoral College, the plan is woefully inadequate. Its failure is quite revealing for how so many pundits fail to grasp the value of the national popular vote and think that redistricting is what's broken in congressional elections rather than districting itself.

That's not a criticism of Freeman, who readily admits that his plan is not a serious proposal and even links to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact for a reform plan that is. However, a few commentators who have picked up on Freeman's map have been more enamored with this "solution" than the plan merits. Robert Krulwich of NPR described it as "a crazy but rational solution to our Electoral College problem," and Jim Fallows of the Atlantic similarly lauded it as a "fix."

The problem is that uneven population of states is not what's wrong with the current Electoral College system. Sure, the large state of California has 66 times more people than the small state of Wyoming, yet only 18 times more electoral votes. But the campaigns don't care. To them, a vote in California counts the same as a vote in Wyoming: they're equally worthless.

The real problems with our current presidential election system arise from two factors: dividing the nation into geographic units (states) and allocating Electoral College votes in those states on a winner-take-all basis. It's the same problem we have with U.S. House elections.

Take the fact that this new system would be even more likely to experience a wrong-winner election than our troubled system today. According to Michael Barone, Barack Obama would have won only 21 of the new states in the Freeman map, with Mitt Romney winning 29. So even though Obama defeated Romney by nearly 5 million votes in the national popular vote, his 51% - 47% edge in the popular vote would have turned into a 43% - 58% deficit in this version of the Electoral College. Although all votes would be weighted equally, this system would have yielded election results entirely unrepresentative of what the country actually wanted.

In addition, it would do nothing to halt the inequality of treatment that voters across the nation. In 2012, only ten of our 50 states drew a major party presidential candidate for a post-convention campaign event, and those same states drew more than 99% of all presidential campaign spending in the seven months after Mitt Romney became the presumptive Republican nominee.

From a cursory look at these new states, it seems that the great majority of them would remain uncompetitive, from the new safe Democratic states of Throgs Neck and Yerba Buena to the new safe Republican states of Salt Lake and Ogalalla. All this new map would do is alter a few of the areas where the candidates spend their time campaigning. By no means would it give all Americans an equal say in who becomes the next president.

In fact, the plan bears a remarkable similarity to another idea that is being more seriously touted as a fair solution to U.S. congressional elections: independent redistricting commissions. Backers of independent redistricting usually conceive of it as being governed by nonpartisan criteria of equal population, compactness, existing political divisions, and cultural coherence. Nonpartisan or not, however, any map using winner-take-all districts is necessarily going to favor one party simply due to the political geography of how Democrats and Republicans are dispersed throughout the country. It's also going to leave most voters as spectators in elections.

Just like Freeman's equal state population map, a U.S. congressional map of only single-member district seats drawn by independent redistricting commissions could easily result in wrong-winner elections. As FairVote has shown, the 2012 election would likely still have produced a Republican House despite Democrats receiving more votes nationwide even had the congressional map been drawn with "nonpartisan" lines. Emory University's Alan Abramowitz last week estimated in Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball that Democrats would need more than 56% of the two-party vote in the 2014 election to win a simple majority of House seats.

The fascination with Freeman's map as an actual improvement to our elections (rather than as a cool art project) highlights the ubiquity of an irrational obsession for geographic representation and making where you live more important than what you think. Winner-take-all elections using geographic districts can never be truly fair, no matter how the lines are drawn.

If the fans of Freeman's map really want to reform the Electoral College in a way that would make every vote equal, they should throw their support behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would ensure that every vote, in every corner of the nation, would count the same. To achieve the same objective in congressional elections, reformers should embrace fair voting forms of proportional representation in addition to independent redistricting commissions.

Dubious Democracy: Updated FairVote Report Shows Dysfunctional House Elections

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:54:24 -0800

Since 1994, FairVote has released a biennial report on American congressional elections called "Dubious Democracy." As official data for the 2012 congressional elections is now available, FairVote now presents its metrics for assessing the current state of American democracy, with comprehensive data for every congressional election dating back to 1982.

Dubious Democracy evaluates the level of competition and accuracy of representation in congressional elections for every state and every congressional district. You can see the release of our report up to the 2010 elections online here. To get the 2012 data, you can download the Microsoft Excel data sheet here.

The full Dubious Democracy 2012 report is still forthcoming, but a comprehensive investigation is not necessary to see the story that the 2012 election data tells. The trend in recent U.S. congressional elections toward uncompetitive elections and inaccurate representation continued in 2012, and by some metrics was worse than ever.

In 2012, the average two-party margin of victory was 36.5%, up 3.5% from 2010. In the aftermath of the 2011-2012 redistricting process, there were only 28 "tight races" and 33 "opportunity races," down from 36 and 45, respectively, in 2010. Over a third of all votes - 35.2% - were wasted (cast for non-winning candidates) in 2012.

The 2012 elections saw the largest overall seats-to-votes distortion since 1992: an average of 4.4% between the two major parties. Distortion was especially noticeable in 2012 because the party that won the most votes did not win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives. If seats were apportioned in proportion to the percentage of the raw popular vote in 2012, Democrats would have won 214 seats, Republicans 209 seats, and independent candidates 12 seats.

There were also five examples of states where one party received a majority of votes but the other party received a majority of seats, ranging from Arizona (where Democrats won more seats with fewer votes under a plan drawn by an independent redistricting commission) to North Carolina (where Republicans won more than two-thirds of seats with a minority of the vote).

No state broke 50% in the Representation Index - that is, in no state do more than half the eligible voters have a House representative for whom they voted. In contrast, many nations using fair voting alternatives to winner-take-all voting have a Representation Index well above 70%.

The state that ranked highest in 2012 in the "Democracy Index" (taking into account average margin of victory, voter turnout, percentage of landslide races, seats-to-votes distortion, and percentage of people voting for a winning candidate) was Minnesota. The state that ranked lowest was Oklahoma.

Be sure to check back in the coming weeks for the complete version of Dubious Democracy 2012, as well as the forthcoming Monopoly Politics 2014 report that will anticipate the likely undemocratic nature of the 2014 congressional midterm elections.

NRCC Targets Foreshadow Power of Partisanship in 2014 Elections

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:05:56 -0800

A memo from the National Republican Congressional Committee obtained by the National Journal Wednesday identifies seven Democratic Members of Congress as the primary targets for an expanded Republican majority in 2014: Mike McIntyre, Jim Matheson, Nick Rahall, John Barrow, Collin Peterson, Ann Kirkpatrick, and Ron Barber. It is no coincidence that those seven representatives also happen to be representing the seven most Republican districts currently controlled by Democrats, according to FairVote's partisanship index.

In other words, the power of partisanship in governing outcomes had led Republicans to make their top seven targets the only Democrats representing a district were Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election trailed his national average by more than four percentage points.

The NRCC's strategy is telling for two reasons. First, it shows the power of hardening partisanship in American congressional elections, as our partisanship index is based entirely on the results of the 2008 presidential race and is still a perfect predictor of the GOP's 2014 congressional strategy. For more partisanship analysis, stay tuned for FairVote's upcoming Monopoly Politics 2014 report and accompanying partisanship-based forecasts for the 2014 midterm election, using new partisanship data based on the 2012 presidential race. FairVote's Monopoly Politics 2012 report was correct in its predictions for all 333 seats that it said were safe for one party, and accurately identified the partisan lean in most of the remaining districts.

Furthermore, the NRCC strategy is another indication of the decline of the congressional moderate - especially Members of Congress representing districts that favor the opposing party. As FairVote has shown, the number of such representatives will be lower in the 113th Congress than at any other point in modern congressional history, primarily due a lower advantage for incumbents and the increased importance of partisanship for voters.

While the RNCC may not succeed in its plans to oust all seven of these Democrats, it does seem unlikely that all seven will survive. In 2012, a year in which Democrats had an advantage over Republican candidates overall by a margin of about 4%, four of the seven Democratic targets won by a margin of less than 4% and three by a margin of less than 1%. If 2014 is a relatively even year between the two parties, those four candidates (McIntyre, Matheson, Barber, and Kirkpatrick) will be very vulnerable.

On the other side of the partisan coin, Democrats in 2012 defeated every single Republican in a district where Obama bettered his average by 2% - excepting an anomaly caused by California's Top Two system in which only two Republicans were on the general election ballot in a Democratic district. Thus, they have fewer obvious Republican incumbents to target in 2014, at least based on partisanship.

Given that in 2012 no new candidates of either party were elected to a represent a district with a partisanship of greater than 54% favoring the opposing party, the number of congressional moderates is likely to fall still further in 2014. Indeed, if it's a nationally close election, it's all too possible that the small band of 'shared representation' will be confined to districts in the six-percentage point partisanship range between 46% Democratic and and 52% Democratic - just 14% of all districts.

Democrats' Edge in House Popular Vote Would Have Increased if All Seats Had Been Contested

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:32:37 -0800

In the aftermath of the 2012 House elections, many political observers noticed an uncomfortable fact: Democratic House candidates won more raw popular votes than Republicans, but Republicans won 33 more House seats than Democrats. A new FairVote analysis suggests that if both parties had run candidates in all 435 congressional districts, the Democratic margin of victory - and the amount of distortion in the election results - would have been even greater than the partisan skew indicated by the raw vote totals.

There were 45 districts in which either Republicans or Democrats did not field a candidate on November 6, including districts with intra-party races in California and Louisiana. We projected likely vote totals for each party in those districts had both parties run candidates. The projected party vote totals for a district were made using the partisanship of the district (based on President Barack Obama's 2008 vote percentage in the district), the average voter turnout in contested districts in that district's state*, and the "incumbency bump" that the incumbent candidate would likely have received (based on the average nationwide incumbency bump for each party). The actual vote totals from those districts were ignored, because they were likely distorted due to the lack of major party opposition.

This method projects that Democrats would have won about 6.5 million votes in the uncontested seats had they been contested, while Republicans would have won about 5.8 million votes in those seats. When added to the raw vote totals from contested districts, those numbers would have given Democratic house candidates overall 62.3 million votes compared to 59.4 million votes for Republicans. That's a two-party split of 51.2% to 48.8% in favor of Democrats.

FairVote has previously estimated, based on how Democratic and Republican candidates performed in open seat races relative to the partisanship of those districts, that there was an underlying voter preference for Democrats of about 52% to 48% in the 2012 election. The projected party split with every district contested fits in well with that analysis. The projected split does not control for the incumbency advantage of Republicans - meaning that even in a year in which many more Repubilcans than Democrats received a boost due to an incumbency bump, Democrats still would have won more than 51% of the overall vote had every district been contested.

The chart below shows four different methods for measuring the overall support for the two parties in House races: the raw popular vote, FairVote's projected popular vote with all districts contested as described above, FairVote's estimate of the support for each party based on the results of open seat races, and a similar estimate derived from the performances of incumbent candidates from each party.

Raw Popular Vote Party Split	Projected Party Split (All Districts Contested)	Party Split Based on Open Seats	Party Split Based on Incumbency Bump
50.5% D - 49.5% R	51.2% D - 48.8% R	51.9% D - 48.1% R	52.0% D - 48.0% R

*When using the national average turnout for a district instead of the average for each state, results were similar: about 6.6 million projected votes for Democrats in uncontested districts and 6.1 million projected votes for Republicans.