Is it true that Republicans have an unfair geographical advantage in elections for the House of Representatives?

Question

I'm not from the U.S. but someone told me that the Republican Party had an unfair advantage in elections for the House of Representatives. This advantage would be geographic.

The voters who usually vote for Democratic candidates tend to live in dense clusters, cities, urban districts. While on the other hand, the voters who usually vote for Republican candidates tend to live in rural districts.

So, much of the vote that Democratic voters cast are "wasted" on candidates who were going to win anyway. Usually, in districts where the Democratic candidate wins, he wins by a very wide margin (which is useless). But in districts where the Republican candidate wins, he wins by a small/narrow margin.

He also said something about the Republicans drawing the maps of the districts. The Republicans create one or two district extremely dense in Democratic voters, so that the Democrats win these districts with a (useless) gigantic margin. And the Republicans tend to win all the other district by small margins. But that looks more like some kind of conspiracy theory to me. Why would the districts get drawn by the parties anyway?

My question is: Is all of this really true?

And if yes, why doesn't the government do something about this? It looks totally unfair and ridiculous, so if this was true I would think that a lot of Americans would protest against this, no? Yet I have never heard of any such protest.

Answer 1

Republican Party had an unfair advantage in elections for the House of Representatives. This advantage would be geographic.

Well, "Fair" is in the eye of the beholder :)

But the geographic advantage in the House of Representatives is undisputably there. FiveThirtyEight covers it in detail in Feb 2013 post "Did Democrats Get Lucky in the Electoral College?":

However, much or most of the Republican advantage in the House results from geography rather than deliberate attempts to gerrymander districts. Liberals tend to cluster in dense urban centers, creating districts in which Democrats might earn as much as 80 or 90 percent of the vote. In contrast, even the most conservative districts in the country tend not to give more than about 70 or 75 percent of their vote to Republicans. This means that Democrats have more wasted votes in the cities than Republicans do in the countryside, depriving Democrats of votes at the margin in swing districts. Eliminating partisan gerrymandering would reduce the G.O.P.’s advantage in the House but not eliminate it.

However, to balance that advantage, the main topic of the linked article exists: Democrats have a similar, geography-based, electoral advantage in Presidential elections.

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He also said something about the Republicans drawing the maps of the districts ... The Republicans create ...

Partly true, and partly false.

False: this is NOT a "Republican" thing. Both parties do it (see Tenthustice's excellent answer for details). FiveThirtyEight (not exactly a conservative bastion) says:

Democrats were no less aggressive about creating gerrymandered districts in states like Illinois.

However, as another answer noted, Republicans had more opportunity to do this in 2010 compared to Democrats, by virtue of winning more state legislatures. Meaning that between 2010 and 2020 censuses, they can gerrymander more states than Democrats can, despite equal desire by both to do so.

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And if yes, why doesn't the government do something about this? It looks totally unfair and ridiculous, so if this was true I would think that a lot of Americans would protest against this, no? Yet I have never heard of any such protest.

Several explanations:

1. Gerrymandering may be detrimental in the eyes of individual people... but it's a swell thing for every individual politician who is granted an enormous electoral advantage by it in "their" district, no matter what party. If you can guarantee your election by 30% margin, why would you put your election at risk by giving 20% of that margin to another district to let a fellow co-partier get elected?

2. The "government" doesn't do anything about it because Constitution explicitly relegates the authority over how to do this to the state level.

Answer 2

Right off the bat, it's important to note that since 1931, Democrats have won 31 of the last 41 House elections, historically by wide margins. So if they are playing with a disadvantage, they handle themselves pretty well.

It is true that people representing urban areas tend to get comically large margins of victory. But Republicans in rural areas tend to win by large margins as well. By way of comparison: Shiela Jackson Lee, the Democrat representing Houston, won by 72% of the vote this year. But Cynthia Lumis, the Republican representing the entire state of Wyoming, won with 68%.

As to the second part of your question, you're describing gerrymandering, a very real part of American politics. Technically, gerrymandering IS illegal. But it's damn hard to prove in court.

But gerrymandering is a bipartisan phenomenon. A Washington Post analysis this year found that the two most gerrymandered states were Maryland and North Carolina, one controlled by Republicans and the other by Democrats. Of the ten most gerrymandered states, Republicans controlled six.

Does it give Republicans an advantage? Signs point to yes... right now. Republicans had a wave election in 2010, which swept them into power in several state legislatures right when redistricting was set to occur. But if Democrats gain those legislatures back in 2020, expect retribution.

Answer 3

The Daily Kos reports that Donald Trump and a Republican Representative won 218 congressional districts in 2016. That's an absolute majority.

Trump-Republican   218
Trump-Democrat     12
Clinton-Republican 23
Clinton-Democrat   182

So we can see that Trump received a plurality of the vote in 230 congressional districts while the Republican Representatives won 241 congressional districts. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the national vote. Trump also won a majority of the states and counties. So Trump clearly outperformed his national vote share in geographic regions.

The Brookings Institution found that Democrats won a lower share of House seats than their national vote share in 2016. This was one of eight elections since 1946 when this happened. In the rest, it was the Democrats who received a higher share of seats than votes. And Democrats historically received a larger bonus than Republicans ever have.

Specifically in 2016, Democrats won about 47.3% of the national vote in House elections but only 44.8% of the seats.

TL;DR: historically it's been Democrats with the geographic advantage, but in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, it was the Republicans.

Some blame this on gerrymandering. However, the most packed (partisan) districts in the country are not gerrymandered (at least not by Republicans). The ten most partisan districts are mostly located in New York City and California, where Republicans do not control redistricting. Only two of the ten are in states where Republicans redistricted after 2010: Pennsylvania and Florida. In all ten cases, the districts were located in major cities with enough population for their own congressional districts: New York City (5); Los Angeles; San Francisco; Chicago; Philadelphia; and Miami.

A larger problem is that Republicans have been outperforming Democrats in the districts that are not gerrymandered. For example, Trump won thirty states when Obama only won twenty-eight and twenty-six. Bush won at least thirty both times. Trump won about 80% of the counties. Republicans won 52% of the Senate seats, even though the Democrats had good years in 2012 and 2006. Republicans won 66% of the seats in 2016 and 2014.

Answer 4

In addition to Gerrymandering, there is the issue per-capita representation differences in the House of Representatives.

The variance ranges from roughly half-million constituents per representative (R.I.) to 1 million constituents per representative (MT): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congressional_districts#Extremes

This interactive map shows you the breakdown by state: http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/people-representative

Does it favor a particular party? I don't know. But is another variable to consider.

At the state government level, the differences can be a bit more drastic between state:

http://ballotpedia.org/Population_represented_by_state_legislators

That of course doesn't have a direct correlation with the federal level, but there's likely some indirect correlations.

Answer 5

The Republicans have an advantage insofar they control a large number of "small" (by population) Western states (the two Dakotas come to mind), that have only one Congressman based on population, but two Senators, hence three electoral votes. This compares to a large Democratic state like California, with 52 Congressmen, whose two Senators bring the electoral vote total to 54, or 4 percent (not three times) more than the number of Congressmen.

Whether or not that is "unfair" is another subject.

Answer 6

Do Republicans have a geographic advantage?

Is all of this really true?

Yes. Republicans, due to the popularity they currently enjoy in rural areas, have been able to gain a number of advantages including:

1. A disproportionate number of Representatives in the House for rural states
2. District boundaries that grant Republicans a competitive advantage in elections
3. An advantage in the Electoral College used to elect the President
4. Frequent control of the Senate

What are these advantages?

1. Disproportionate Number of Representatives

The House of Representatives was originally designed to grant each state a number of representatives proportional to their total population. However, the current rules have lead to states that are predominantly rural having a greater number of representatives per person than those with large urban areas. If a single party consistently wins seats for rural states, that party is able to have a majority in the House of Representatives without having the majority of votes overall.

2. Districts that grant a Competitive Advantage to Republicans

The vast majority of elections in the United States, including those for members of the House or Representatives as well as various state legislatures, involve a single candidate elected for an entire district. Many rural states have districts that are designed in such a fashion that if voting trends remain consistent, Republicans will win the majority of seats even if the Democratic candidates received more votes. (This is known as Gerrymandering and is discussed more below.)

3. Advantage in the Electoral College

The President of the United States is elected via the Electoral College. This system grants each state a number of votes equal to the number of Senators and Representatives that represent it. With a few exceptions, states will grant all of their Electoral Votes to the candidate who wins the most votes in that state. Whichever candidate gains the most Electoral Votes overall wins the election.

Due to the disproportionate number of Representatives (as discussed above), urban states are granted few Electoral Votes than they would if the number of Representatives were proportional to population. This makes it feasible for candidates to win the majority of Electoral Votes without winning the popular vote if they win in more rural states. This happened both with Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016.

4. Frequent control of the Senate

Each state is granted two Senators in the Senate regardless of the population. Since there are more states that are predominately rural than there are states with significant urban areas, a party favored by rural voters will naturally gain a significant number of seats in the Senate. This has been the case for Republicans who have had a Senate majority for 18 of the past 25 years and have had at least 40 Senators since 1981.

Since the Senate was designed to represent the states, I would not describe this advantage as unfair. Instead, I mention it as it is pertinent to later discussions.

How did Republicans gain these advantages?

There are many factors involved, some due to intentional efforts made by Republican legislators and others due to unintended consequences of laws governing elections and the structure of the US government.

Compromise of "The Great Compromise"

When the current structure of the United States was being designed, there were two major competing propositions. Representatives from larger, more populous states wanted each state to have a number of legislators proportional to their population. Representatives from smaller, less populous states wanted each state to have an equal number of legislators in Congress. As a compromise, the House of Representatives was designed to represent the people through proportional representation and the Senate was designed to represent the states with a fixed number of Senators per sate. This agreement is known as The Great Compromise¹.

As the United States grow, the number of representatives in the House grow as well. The ever increasing size of the House led to conflicts over how to properly apportion seats; eventually it was agreed to cap the number at 435, the size the House had reached after the 1910 census². However, because each state is expected to have at least one representative, these 435 can no longer be spread evenly across the country.

For example, compare how Congressional seats are apportioned³ to the least and most populous states⁴, Wyoming⁵ and California⁶ respectively. Wyoming has one representative who represents approximately 600,000 people while California has 53 representatives who represent approximately 39,500,000 people or about 1 representative for every 745,000 people. For California to have the same proportion of representatives to voters, it would need 66 representatives; that's 13 more than it currently has.

(Note: I'm using approximation because I feel the exact numbers are less important than the illustrating the clear discrepancy.)

This demonstrates that more populous states are at a disadvantage as they have fewer representatives than they would if the number of seats was still based solely on total population. Conversely, less populous states have an advantage. Because these less populous states consist mostly of rural areas and voters in rural areas favor Republicans⁷, Republicans gain the advantage of having a disproportionately larger number of seats in the House of Representatives.

Since the number of representatives for a given state influences the number of Electoral Votes granted to that state, this translates into an advantage when electing Presidents via the Electoral College. Using California and Wyoming as examples again, Wyoming gains Electoral Votes (1 Representative + 2 Senators) while California gets 55. That's one vote for every 200,000 people in Wyoming but one vote for roughly every 718,000 people California. Voters in Wyoming essentially have 3.5 times the influence on Presidential elections!

Party Politics

Though the Founder Fathers were concerned about "factions" (i.e. political parties)^{8 9 10}, they did explicitly account for them when writing the Constitution. Political parties in the United States didn't emerge until a decade after the Constitution was signed¹¹. (The dominant parties of today, The Democratic Party and The Republican Party, weren't formed until 1828¹² and 1858¹³ respectively.) At the time the Constitution was ratified and shortly thereafter, political conflicts tended to be between different states or across different parts of the federal government (i.e. Congress versus the President).

Many checks and balances created by the Founding Fathers to ensure no one group exercised too much power. These were designed with the assumption that there would be a certainly level of antagonism between different parts of the government. In today's political climate, though, this antagonism is greatly diminished when the government is controlled primarily by one party. (This is evident in the correlation between Congress's productivity¹⁴ and the party alignment of Congress and the White House.¹⁵) Political parties provide the means and the motive to operate across such divides.

One consequence of this is that, if one party gains enough control, it can potentially act without effective opposition and enact measures that give that party advantages that will keep it in power. This leads to a positive feedback loop that is difficult for opposing parties to combat.

Having an advantage in elections for the House and the President as well as frequent control of the Senate means that Republicans are in a better position on the federal level to gain and maintain advantages. At the state level, meanwhile, the popularity of the Republican party in rural states means that measures that provide electoral advantages (intentionally or not) are less likely to be opposed.

Gerrymandering

This is the big one in the OP and is touched on in other answers. There are plenty of great resources out there about Gerrymandering, so here's the short version: it's using past voting patterns to predict future voting patterns and then designing districts that will produce the most favorable results for a particular party based on those expected patterns. This involves "packing" to create a small number of districts dominated by the opposition and "cracking" to spread out of the rest of the opposition into districts that your party will win by modest margins.

After the 2010 Census, Republicans controlled the majority of State governments and thus could redistricting as they saw fit. Using the latest information technology, they were able to gerrymander to an extent not previously seen.

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering.)

How do Republicans maintain these advantages?

Why would the districts get drawn by the parties anyway?

The founding fathers intentionally delegated most responsibilities to state governments, including running elections and drawing districts. Though some states have independent commissions that draw districts, others kept that power in the hand of legislatures. Remember, many of these rules were setup before partisan party politics became the norm.

Why doesn't the government do something about this?

The Senate is unlikely to change in any meaningful way since it is a cornerstone of our government. The number of representatives could easily be changed, but I am unaware of any significant efforts to do so. As for preventing gerrymandering, this would be perceived as overreach by Congress; even if a federal law was passed, it would likely be challenged and may not survive in the courts.

It looks totally unfair and ridiculous, so if this was true I would think that a lot of Americans would protest against this, no?

Generally speaking, demonstrations are reactions to specific incidents. Such protests do provide the opportunity to highlight systematic problems but are typical not caused by them.

As for why the American public isn't advocating for changes that would nullify Republican advantages, it's important to note that people need to first be aware of the situation then consider a problem worth prioritizing. There many possible explanations as to why voters haven't been successful in pressuring the government into making changes that would reduce or eliminate the advantages Republican's enjoy.

These include: - Voters may not be aware of the situation or may not understand it sufficiently. - Rural voters may see the benefits that Republicans enjoy not as an unfair advantage but as a necessary protection against being out-voted by urban areas. - Voters are prioritizing other issues. - Politicians, particularly Republicans, have an incentive to maintain these advantages as it makes it easier for them to stay in power.

TL;DR

Rural states in the United States currently have a number of advantages when it comes to representation, particularly in the federal government. Because Republicans are popular in rural areas, they are able to leverage these advantages. The reasons why the underlying causes haven't been addressed are varied and often involve speculation. Suffice to say, there hasn't been a sufficient effort to eliminate the arguably unfair advantages that Republicans enjoy in elections.

Sources

1. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-was-the-great-compromise.html
2. https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Permanent-Apportionment-Act-of-1929/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_congressional_districts
4. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/usa-states/compare/wyoming/california
5. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/WY
6. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/CA
7. https://medium.com/@davetroy/is-population-density-the-key-to-understanding-voting-behavior-191acc302a2b
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
9. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address#20
10. https://www.history.com/news/founding-fathers-political-parties-opinion
11. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses
13. https://legacy.voteview.com/political_polarization_2015.htm
14. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1065912917722233
15. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/us/california-republicans-midterms.html

Answer 7

Summary: It's complicated. Results from the 2012 and 2006 elections show that, statistically, Democrats should have won all the seats, but results from the 2000 and 1994 elections show the Republicans should have won most (in 2000) or all (in 1994) of the seats. The problem cannot be resolved via simple statistical analysis (below).

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2012#Results_summary, of the 122,346,020 votes cast total, Democrats received 59,645,531 or 48.8% of the vote, Republicans received 58,228,253 or 47.6% of the vote, and the remaining 4,472,236 or 3.7% of the votes went to other candidates (%ages don't add to 100% due to rounding).

If Democrats received 48.8% of the vote in every district, and Republicans received 47.6% of the vote in every district, the Democrats would've won every seat.

However, probability doesn't work that way. If you flip a fair coin 100 times, it's highly unlikely to get exactly 50 heads: there's a 95% chance you'll get between 40 and 60 heads, a 99.5% chance you'll get between 30 and 70 heads, but there's even a small chance (0.5%) that you'll get fewer than 30 or more than 70 heads.

Let's apply this methodology (called the "binary distribution") to the problem at hand.

Because the binary distribution only applies when there are two choices, let's consider only major party (Democratic and Republican) votes. In this scenario:

• There are a total of 117,873,784 cast for major parties.

• Republicans received 58,228,253 or 49.40% of these votes

• Democrats received the remaining 59,645,531 or 50.60% of these votes.

Let's now consider the House district with the fewest number of votes. According to http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=255728.0 and backed up by http://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/2016election/, this appears to be Texas's 33rd district with 126,369 votes.

NOTE: I didn't look at every single number if the PDF, nor did I confirm the validity of https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oArjXSYeg40u4qQRR93qveN2N1UELQ6v04_mamrKg9g/edit#gid=0, but the argument below works even if the number is relatively close.

With 126,369 votes, you need 63,185 votes to win.

If the districts were evenly populated with Democratic and Republican voters nationwide, you'd expect 49.40% or ~62,425 voters in this district to vote Republican. Of course, the chances of that happening exactly is very low, so we also calculate the standard deviation which happens to be 125 in this case.

What are the chances of a Republican win? Since 63,185 is 760 or about 6 standard deviations above the average, the chances of a Republican victory are about one in a billion.

The chances are even smaller in districts with more voters. With roughly even distribution of Democrats and Republicans, the chance of Republicans winning even one seat are less than 1 in 2.3 million.

The results of the 2006 election are even more convincing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2006, since the Democrats won by a larger margin.

However, the results of the 2000 election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2000) tell a different story. Without going through the gory math (available at https://github.com/barrycarter/bcapps/blob/master/STACK/bc-geovantage.m), the Democrats had only a 1.3% chance of winning a given district, so their winning 212 seats would be next to impossible, statistically speaking.

Going back even further: statistically, the Democrats had virtually no chance of winning a single seat in the 1994 election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1994), but actually won 204 seats.

Ultimately, the problem goes deeper than statistics. You could run the numbers on a state-by-state basis (allowing for state bias towards a candidate), but there's no good reason to believe states are a fundamental unit of bias: bias could occur at the county level, urban vs suburban level, etc.

Answer 8

This question popped up at the top again and it reminded me of this recent article:

http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-democrats-urban-geography-demographics.html

While it doesn't specifically talk about the Federal House of Rep's, it does go into the broad geographic issue that democrats are facing: Over the past several decades, rural democrats have moved to the cities.

This has left very high concentrations of democrats in urban areas. This is where the geographic disadvantage happens. Since representatives not only represent people--but geography, vasts swaths of our country are in very rural, mostly purely red areas. These areas also have the lowest concentration of population, so there is a geographic discrepancy here in that mathematically, we can have more republican representatives even though there are fewer overall constituents that they are representing.

Answer 9

House Control in Census Year Gives Gerrymandering Power
Republicans won a majority of seats in 2010. This was a census year, which happens every 10 years in the United States, and gives the party controlling the House redistricting power. House Republicans used this opportunity to gerrymander congressional districts in their favor -- an advantage that would last from 2012 through 2020.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/republicans-gerrymandering-house-representatives-election-chart/

Project REDMAP
Project REDMAP describes the Republican effort to gerrymander congressional districts after 2010 using new software to help optimize their partisan advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

Since 2010, these have been the outcomes of House of Representatives races, helping to illustrate the margin of their advantage.

Year: 2012
Democratic votes: 59,645,531. Share of major party votes: 50.6%
Democratic seats: 201. Share of House seats: 46.2%
Republican votes: 58,228,253. Share of major party votes: 49.4%
Republican seats: 234. Share of House seats: 53.8%
Republican advantage: 4.4% more seats than proportional

Year: 2014
Democratic votes: 35,624,357. Share of major party votes: 47.1%
Democratic seats: 188. Share of House seats: 43.2%
Republican votes: 40,081,282. Share of major party votes: 52.9%
Republican seats: 247. Share of House seats: 56.8%
Republican advantage: 3.9% more seats than proportional

Year: 2016
Democratic votes: 61,776,554. Share of major party votes: 49.4%
Democratic seats: 194. Share of House seats: 44.6%
Republican votes: 63,173,815. Share of major party votes: 50.6%
Republican seats: 241. Share of House seats: 55.4%
Republican advantage: 4.8% more seats than proportional

Year: 2018
Democratic votes: 60,572,245. Share of major party votes: 54.1%
Democratic seats: 235. Share of major party seats: 53.8%
Republican votes: 50,861,970. Share of major party votes: 45.6%
Republican seats: 199. Share of major party seats: 45.9%
Republican advantage: 0.3% more seats than proportional

Therefore, after 2010, all four election cycles have broken in the Republican party's favor, by an average of 3.35% more than a proportionate distribution of seats.

Answer 10

The Voting Rights Act is a major factor in this issue. In many states and counties, the federal government has required that a quota of districts be set up that are easily winnable by blacks, or by hispanics, or by a coalition of the two. This quota makes it much harder for white Democrats to be elected.

Gerrymandering is most glaring when it turns an evenly split populace into districts that result in a legislature that is very unbalanced. The opposite of gerrymandering is most glaring when it deprives a uniformly distributed minority party of any legislative seats. The Voting Rights Act seeks to prevent the latter phenomenon from happening to "protected" minorities.

Take a hypothetical jurisdiction. Suppose:

• 30 % are in minorities "protected" by the Voting Rights Act.
• 70 % are not in these minorities.

Suppose that jurisdiction-wide elections are competitive -- Close to a 50 / 50 split between Democrats and Republicans.

For many years, Democrats have won about 60%-70% of Hispanic votes, and 85-95% of black votes. Suppose that in our hypothetical jurisdiction, the "protected" minority vote is split 25 - 5. For the jurisdiction-wide elections to be competitive, this implies that the remaining vote is split 25 - 45.

As implemented (though not necessarily as written), the Voting Rights Act causes about 30% of the legislative seats to be easily won by protected-minority Democrats. Notice that a disproportionate number of Democrats are in these districts. This means that unless the remaining Democrats concentrate in enclaves, non-minority Democrats are both unlikely to win in the minority districts (by design), and are unlikely to win in the non-minority districts (because they are a spread-out political minority).

For two generations, ambitious white politicians (in jurisdictions subject to Voting Rights Act quotas) have been noticing the handicap that white Democrats face in getting elected to legislative positions. There has been a tendency (once Republicans become a majority of the white population) for white politicians to switch from the Democratic party to the Republican party. This tendency causes affected states to "snap" from having legislatures that are dominated by Democrats (with the minority seats plus about half of the non-minority seats) to being dominated by Republicans (with most of the non-minority seats).