Don't count your chickens until you've looked too closely at how sausages are horse-traded, or something like that
Tim Cavanaugh | October 20, 2006, 3:24pm
Eric Alterman, thinkologist for The Nation and prolific Reason pen pal, has been hinting darkly for a while now that the big Democratic midterm victory is going to end with Santa shaking his head sadly and saying "We'll just have to cancel Christmas Winter Holiday! And the children have been so good this year!" While Alterman's never quite willing to consider that the left is just selling a product few Americans want to buy, he's got a strong point about how districting has greased the ladder for the Democrats, linking to this interesting study:
Why are things so tough? Looking at the 2004 election, the Democrats won their victories with an average of 69% of the vote, while the Republicans averaged 65% in their contests, thus "wasting" fewer votes. The Republicans won 47 races with less than 60% of the vote; the Democrats only 28. Many Democrats are in districts where they win overwhelmingly, while many Republicans are winning the close races—with the benefit of incumbency and, in some cases, favorable redistricting.
I find gerrymandering issues heap-big confusing—isn't there a pretty low ceiling to how much you can redistrict your way to victory at the national level? (That is, I can see how it works to gerrymander a district at the local level, but when you're talking about all 535 seats in Congress, shouldn't it tend to even out?) But as Delaware Dave Weigel reminded me the other day, since the days of the Contract With America, the GOP has had plenty of time in control of a variety of state houses to set things up. It's going to take some doing for Powerhouse Pelosi to orchestrate a national turnover, and a general sense that "Americans are unhappy with the direction of Congress" is not enough to do it.
Studying how the Republicans have stacked the deck against Democrats (sort of like how the Democrats did the exact same thing to Republicans until the 1990s) takes some of the sheen off President Bush's performance as head of the Republicans, but not much. As I never tire of pouring icy water on political hopes, I'll point out again that Bush is still way ahead of the average presidential-coattails performance in off-year and midterm races. Even if the GOP lost both houses in November, Bush would still be ahead of the average. He's already an electoral success for his party. How such a small man had such a big effect is something future historians, with their smellevision and massive frontal and parietal lobes, will have to puzzle out.
kevrob | October 21, 2006, 1:03pm | #
There are several demographic trends at war with each other inside the U.S. population, and I'd hesitate to predict which one will dominate politics in the first half of Century 21. To wit:
1.) The huge number of immigrants. Only those who arrive through official channels are going to be eligible to vote, unless some sort of amnesty, however qualified, is enacted. But a plurality or even a majority of new naturalized citizens will be Democrats, and the citizen-kids of even the illegals are also likely to trend that way.
2.) The comparative fertility of conservatives of the church-going stripe v. their sisters who are more or less secularist, from the professional woman to the more..bohemian..of lifestyle. It's not that lefties and Career Women don't have children, but they have fewer than the Red State Moms do. Does the membership of NARAL think its going to outbreed the Baptist Ladies' Sodality?
3.) The power of internal migration. One result of the shift of population within the U.S. is that the old Northeastern states have been losing seats in the Congress and the Electoral College to our nation's warmer climes for some time. Florida, California and Texas are out-clouting New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania. You also get weird effects, such as the influx of non-white immigrants to CA being offset by an out-migration of middle-class whites to states like Nevada and Utah. Both groups may just be following employment opportunities, but some people who are "Red Staters" in their souls just got sick of living in a blue one.
It is possible that immigrant-heavy states may become
more Democratic, while conservative Sun Belt states, which have been Republican strongholds for some time, will continue along that path. Extrapolating existing trends without limit is a good way to make stupid predictions, though. I imagine life will throw up enough complexity to make monkeys out of the prognosticators.
Ahhnold's attempt to replace political-map drawing by the Legislature with a state commisiion failed, but Iowa has had one for a while, and people there seem pretty happy with it. In many states, the decennial mapping trauma has been a wrangle among incumbents intent on nailing down even safer seats, party operatives trying to game the system to increase the number of seats they hold, and racial and ethnic interest groups trying to carve out districts some of their members can win. The latter are often backed by the federal Justice Dept., especially in the states under special scrutiny from the Voting Rights Act. The whole mess frequently winds up in the laps of judges anyway, which is why the Iowa Plan has such appeal. If you lose a redistricting lawsuit, and the judiciary chooses to impose someone else's map, you can get screwed but good. A commission may not allow you to steamroll your opposition, but you won't get run over, either.
Kevin
joe | October 22, 2006, 9:42pm | #
PapayaSF,
"and an air force is a totally non-controversial extension"
Among census takers, demographers, anthropolotigists, and staticitians, incorporating statistical analysis to improve the accuracy of the count is as totally non-controversial as using air power is among the professional military. The only controversy that exists over incorporating modern statistical methods into the census is that whipped up by partisans with an interest in inaccurate, biased census numbers. I do not for a second believe that this phony "controversy" - on with as much grounding in scientific evidence as the link between marijuana smoking and spree killing - has any relevance whatsoever to the proposal's constitutionality.
Let me run a not-so-hypothetical by you: a census taker gets forms back from every house on Elm Street except one. He knows it's there, he knows that people live in it. Like a good census taker, he follows up, leaving messages and knocking on the door, but it keeps getting slammed in his face. Perhaps the people who lived there are the remains of a family murdered by the Khmer Rouge, and they don't like to deal with the government. Or perhaps they just travel a lot. Neighbors report that there are a few people living there, but they don't know how many. They report seeing kids. They think the house has been divided up among more than one household, but they're not really sure.
He can "actually enumerate" the houseing unit, so obviously he reports that. What about the people - since he doesn't have the opportunity to "actually enumerate" them, should he write the number of people he "actually enumerated" there: zero? What about the number of households?
Should that census taker provide population, household, and ethnic-group figures for that block that he knows to be untrue? Or should he go beyond reporting what he's actually been able to count first hand, in order to provide the most accurate information he can?
You know that right definition for an "actual enumeration" is? One that actually enumerates everyone, as closely as the Census bureau can get.
joe | October 23, 2006, 8:11pm | #
PapayaSF,
"Frankly, I doubt that this happens often enough to be statistically significant..."
Frankly, you are wrong about that.
"IIRC, it was Democrats and liberal social scientists who wanted to add in estimates of people they couldn't count."
Yes, of course, the statisticians and anthropologists at the Census Bureau, and the American Statistical Association, are liberal Democrats. How do we know this? Why, they made a proposal that would not have been good for the Republicans. So they must be biased, and wrong.
'It was "Our statistical estimate says there are X thousands of homeless in this city, so let's add them to the census count."' Yes, it was statisticians and anthropologists who knew how to idenfity what the undercounts were. Why are you assuming that they don't know what they're talking about, or that they're cheating? Because they're telling you something you'd rather not hear? Because the undercounts they've identified are concentrated among groups of people you don't like? Because the outcome of a better census would benefit the Democratic Party?
You've only read the spin about this, and you've concluded that you know who is making a legitimate argument, and who is a partisan cheat. Well that's just great. It's this blinkered partisanship, this refusal to acknowledge inconvenient, scientific truths, that's gotten this country into so many messes over the past six years, and you still refuse to learn your less.
You can't ignore the truth just because you don't want to admit it's the truth!
There's a good book titled "Who Counts?" about the debate, if you'd like to learn more about this issue. If you'd rather wallow in your comfortable, self-serving ignorance, fine. But there is absolutely no question that the methods the Census Bureau recommended, and that the Democrats in the Congress endorsed, would have made the census more accurate. None. The benefits of statistical sampling in the census have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and it is a serious disservice to this country, and an injustice to the people who live here, to sabotage the operations of the government for partisan gain.
