[EL] Why Geography Makes It Difficult for Democrats to Get Along

[Kogan, Vladimir]

Richard Pildes and Jonathan Rodden make a very compelling argument in their piece about the impact of electoral geography. I do want to follow up on this point: “Relatively progressive candidates can win Senate races in states such as Ohio, but the same liberal reputation drags down Democratic candidates in the decisive districts needed for overall control.”

What I think is missing from this argument is that while congressional/state legislative districts must have roughly equal population (at least at the beginning of the decade), they need not have the same number of voters. And the same factors that predict support for Democratic candidates are also negatively correlated with both rates of voter registration and turnout. As a consequence, heavily Democratic districts tend to have much lower numbers of voters. For example, here is Clinton vote share in 2016 by congressional district plotted against the total number of votes cast (normalized to 1 for the average district; unfortunately, I only have access to the Clinton and Trump vote totals, so this does not include votes for third-party candidates):

[cid:image003.png at 01D46B8A.37CF5320]

Each district is color-coded to denote whether Clinton (blue) or Trump (red) won more votes and the dashed white line is the average Clinton vote share across all districts. The central takeaway is that districts with the fewest voters skew heavily Democratic, and this works in the opposite direction of the bias that Pildes and Rodden identify.

Indeed, in the 1997 edition of Governing California, Bruce Cain made the opposite argument: The correlation between turnout and Democratic vote at the state legislative level meant that the median legislative district was to the left of the median voter in a statewide election (areas with higher turnout contributed more votes in a statewide race). He called this the “two-constituencies problem.”

Vlad

[The Ohio State University]
Vladimir Kogan, Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
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http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/
kogan.18 at osu.edu<mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu>
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