When discussing gerrymandering, there is an intuitive drive to discuss how many seats were won by a given party, and how egregious this result may be. The measure of egregiousness may come from an assumed ideal of proportionality or symmetry, or may come from a comparison with an ensemble of alternative plans.
But as we have shown, the number of elected party officials in a gerrymandered plan may be entirely typical of the ensemble; it may, for example, only be when a party is in danger of losing the majority of seats that a plan becomes a typical. In this previous post, we have made efforts to visualize how changes in the Democratic or Republican statewide vote fraction change the number of elected Democrats and Republicans in both the ensemble and an enacted plan. In this post, we create an animation of this effect.
In North Carolina, state house Republican Representative David R. Lewis famously stated that the 2016 North Carolina congressional maps were drawn “to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” We ask how robust this effect is by considering the 2016 United States Congressional voting data in North Carolina and then using the uniform swing hypothesis to vary the statewide Democratic vote percentage from 42.5% to 57.5%. We render an animation that demonstrates how the number of elected Democrats changes in the ensemble and the 2016 enacted plan with respect to the statewide Democratic vote fraction.
When the statewide Democratic vote is between 42.5% and 52.25%, the enacted plan consistently elects 3 of 13 Democrats. From 47% to 53.25%, the enacted plan is an extreme outlier with respect to the ensemble. Even as the Democrats pick up a fourth seat in the enacted plan at 52.37%, nearly all plans in the ensemble elect 5 or more Democrats. In short, under this election structure and swing assumptions, the Democrats would need nearly 53% of the statewide vote in order to gain a number of seats that are even some what typical of the ensemble of plans.
We repeat this animation in the Wisconsin general assembly, examining the 2012 United States Senate vote in Wisconsin and using the uniform swing hypothesis to vary the Democratic statewide vote percentage from 44% to 56%.
The firewall is now animated: Again, when the statewide Democratic vote is less than 50%, the enacted plan and the ensemble lead to a Republican majority and the enacted plan is typical of the ensemble; the statewide Democratic vote rises to 51% , the enacted plan becomes atypical of the ensemble, however both the ensemble and the enacted plan still yield a Republican majority; as the Democratic vote fraction continues to increase, the enacted plan becomes more atypical yielding far fewer Democrats than is expected by the ensemble. In a large range the ensemble predicts the that the Democrats should expect to receive a majority, however they do not under the enacted plan; at the higher end, the Democrats begin to expect a supermajority from the ensemble, but they do not achieve this in the enacted plan.
Gregory Herschlag
Jonathan Mattingly
