North Carolina Study Looks At Republican Advantage Due To Gerrymandering

Republicans control both houses of Congress but this does not mean that they represent a majority of the voters. They control the Senate due to small Republican states having the same number of Senators as larger Democratic states. Republicans benefit in the House due to the concentration of Democrats in urban areas, leading to Democrats winning a smaller number of seats by larger numbers. The Republican advantage in the House has been increased due to gerrymandering.

North Carolina Public Radio has looked at a study on the effect of gerrymandering in North Carolina:

Back in 2012, more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans in North Carolina’s Congressional elections. But Republicans ended up winning nine out of the state’s 13 seats that year. Those numbers piqued the interest of researchers at Duke, who decided to seek a mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. They recently published a study with their results…

When Mattingly and Vaughn tabulated what would have happened had residents voted the same way but in differently drawn districts, they were surprised. Mattingly turns to his computer to pull up their work, which summarizes how the balance of the congressional seats would have come out under those 100 different maps.

“Right here, if you look at what’s happening,” explains Mattingly, “here we have this bar chart with seven and eight Democrats elected. That happened over 50 percent of the time- and the vast majority of the time we had somewhere between six and nine Democrats elected over 95 percent of the time.”

Mattingly says this chart- and the rest of the study- shows mathematically that the outcome of the 2012 congressional election- with four Democrats elected- was not representative of how people voted.

Gerrymandering currently helps Republicans more than usual because of Republicans taking over the state legislature in several states in the 2010 Republican sweep, taking place in a midterm election year when Republicans have an advantage. Democrats will have an advantage in battles for control of the state legislature in 2020 due to their advantage in general election years.