Making Sense of Redistricting

I'm working on a cold beer at the Westville Pub (Wedge IPA if you're interested) while waiting for new tires to get put on my car.  While I've been here, I've gotten a call from a smart reporter from the Citizen-Times who is (like I am) trying to make sense of the new Census numbers and what they mean for redistricting--particularly in North Carolina.  Not a bad way for a politics and beer geek to spend a rainy day.  I'll hopefully have something more intelligent to say soon, but in the meantime, here are a few random notes about, or inspired by redistricting and the new Census :

• North Carolina population increased by over 18% since 2000.  That's the largest increase of any southern state (unless you consider Texas the South.  And let's be honest--no state that considers beef to be bar-b-que can be the South).
• We're now the 10th biggest state in the country (up from the 11th).  Despite this gain, we don't pick up any congressional seats.  
• Most of the pick-ups were in the sunbelt.  In the traditional South, South Carolina and Georgia picked up seats.  In the questionable South, Texas and Florida picked up seats as well.
• Despite this increase in population, North Carolina is unlikely to make any move to increase the General Assembly's capacity to govern.  I'll have more on this soon.
• Although we're not picking up seats in NC, the General Assembly can still redraw district lines.  I don't expect this to have too much influence on the 11th Congressional District (I don't see how it could look substantially different), but it could on districts throughout the rest of the state.  It will probably have the greatest impact on state legislative seats.
• Mike McDonald at George Mason has a nice set of resources on redistricting here.
• As this Census suggests, the country's population keeps climbing, but despite this >200% increase in population since the early 1900s, we've held at 435 seats in Congress for over a century.  See this book for a case that we should increase the size of the House.

A Few Quick Links

• The battle for the 2012 Presidential election calendar has begun.  Check out the always interesting Frontloading blog for more.
• Nice article by Rob Christensen about the talk about independent redistricting commissions,  Turns out the Republicans supported it when the Democrats were in charge.  Now that the Republicans are taking over, guess who thinks they are a great idea?
• The Tuckreader reports on an NC Policy watch piece showing that the poorest counties are the ones investing the most money in the lottery. 

Just in time for The Holidays (2 years ago)

If you are interested in North Carolina politics and you don't have it already, I hope you'll check out our edited book on NC politics, which came out a couple of years ago.  If you can get past the stuff Gibbs and I wrote, then there are some really terrific chapters in this book covering all of the major parts of North Carolina politics.  The book really is a who's who of Political Scientists who cover the state so I hope you'll pick up a copy.

You might also want to check out Rob Christensen's excellent historical treatment of the same subject.  Rob's the preeminent journalist covering Tar Heel politics and after reading this book, you'll see why.

I think the two books complement each other quite nicely. 

Moving Towards Purple, Again

I wrote before on the decline of Democrats on County Commissions in NC here and here.  The story there was that all of the focus on the national level has missed the real story in North Carolina: that North Carolina is a divided state that has been moving towards purple for a while.  It therefore shouldn't be surprising when Obama wins the state, but the Republicans keep a number of important seats in Congress.  I have been wanting to simulate this analysis with the General Assembly for a while, but state legislative historical data are surprisingly hard to come by.  Fortunately, Jeff Stonecash at Syracuse was kind enough to send me his data from 1901-2008.  I cleaned it up in a few places, added the last few elections and here's the result:

The bumpy lines are the actual percent Democrat in the state Senate and House.  The smoothed lines with the long title (sorry--I meant to change it, but didn't have time) represent a fancy way to smooth the data so it's easier to see the trend.  This is interesting in isolation, but it's even more interesting when we compare it to other states around us.  Consider South Carolina:

How's that for a nosedive?  I think the Palmetto state left purple behind a while ago.  Looks pretty red to me.  Also, for historical comparison, look how strongly Democratic it was until the 1960s--we're talking 100% Democratic. 

Most of the South looks similar, but check out this weird outlier: West Virginia:

Somehow the Democrats have gained ground in WV.  I know WV isn't really the South, but I still find this surprising. My friend and colleague Roger suggested that it has to do with the lack of race being an issue in WV, or perhaps with the industrial (instead of agricultural) base of the state's economy.  Gibbs wondered about the influence of the Byrd machine.  I'm not sure the reason, but I sure find it interesting.

Looking Forward to 2012

Sure it's too early to be looking forward to 2012 and sure we have a lot of actual, you know, policy to be talking about, but the folks at PPP have recently completed two interesting polls in North Carolina that I'd like to speculate about. Of course this makes me part of the problem of highlighting horse-race coverage at the expense of policy, but what the hell?

First, PPP polled GOP voters in North Carolina about who they plan to vote for in 2012.  I graphed the results below:

My guess is that every Democrat who's reading this blog is licking their lips at the prospect of a Palin candidacy and, at least early on, Republican voters might be up to the challenge.  I don't know about you, but I'll be watching Sarah Palin's Alaska with a slightly different eye now.

PPP also polled general election voters (without a partisanship screen) and found tested a few match-ups:
- Obama vs. Romney (tied)
- Obama vs. Huckabee (Huackabee up, but barely within the margin of error)
- Obama vs. Palin (Obama up)
- Obama vs. Gingrich (tied)

Perhaps more interesting, PPP also reports their results in bivariate form so we can see whether how many Obama voters are planning to defect to the Republican party and how many McCain voters are planning to defect to the Democrats. If we see of Obama voters planning to defect, then that would be a terrifically bad sign for the incumbent President.  Fortunately for Obama, however, that is not what the results suggest.  There are just as many McCain voters are planning to vote for Obama as there are Obama voters who are planning to vote for McCain. Simply put: Obama is not losing any ground in the Tar Heel state (at least thus far).

Of course, a lot can (and will) happen in the next months and years.  And a good deal of it will likely be bad for the incumbent

Another Way to Look at the 2010 Election Outcomes

Most of the pundit attention about the last election has focused on the changes in the partisan distribution in Congress and the state legislatures.  This, of course, makes sense.  Party identification is the single-most important variable in American politics.  If you want me to predict how a legislator votes and you can only give me one piece of information about that person, it would be party ID.

Most important variable doesn't mean the only important one, however.  A large literature in both American and comparative politics shows that male a female legislators act differently.  Women introduce different kinds of legislation, vote differently, and even relate to their constituents differently. Further, when there are more women in office, women voters tend to feel more efficacious towards government.

With this in mind, I called the folks at the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics to see if they had updated their data on the number of female legislators to reflect last month's election returns.  Although they hadn't gotten it all on their web site, they had collected it and were nice enough to share it with me and I graphed the results below.

As you can see, female representation dipped a bit in 2011, both in NC and nationally.  Although I don't know for sure, I assume this is because female legislators are more likely to be Democrats and this was, as everyone including my basset hounds knows, a bad year for Democrats.

Two parts of this trend worry me.  (1) We weren't exactly knocking the top out before.  We were hovering around 25% representation for a group that makes up half the population.  Now we're decreasing.  That's not good.  (2) As I discussed above, men and women  act differently when in office.  A dip in the number of women in office suggests that we might see a small dip in bills of interest to women.  (3) State legislatures are like the AA ball of national politics.  Some people stay in AA forever, but almost everyone in the majors played in AA at some point.  State legislatures help train people for national politics, but if we don't have as many women in the farm system, very soon we won't have as many in the majors.

County Commission Article in the N&O

Today's N&O includes an op-ed by Gibbs and me based on the county commission data discussed here last week