In “split-control” states, Republicans won 6.2 percent more seats than expected when they held the governorship; when Democrats held that office, Republicans won 6.5 percent fewer seats than expected.
Americans will elect thirty-four governors to four-year terms this fall. They will still be in office after the 2020 Census and will have a say in how states redraw their Congressional and legislative district plans. All states where legislatures draw district lines except North Carolina grant the governor the power to veto any plan. In states where control over the branches is split between the parties, this process should lead to compromises acceptable to both parties. As well see, however, the evidence from the redistricting after the 2010 Census suggests governors hold all the cards.
In nine states, politicians play no direct role as redistricting is left up to nonpartisan commissions. Courts, too, can override the lines drawn by legislatures. This year’s dramatic redrawing of the lines in Pennsylvania follows similar judicial interventions in Florida and New York. The New York decision affects my analysis since it applied to elections beginning with 2012. (The other decisions have yet to come into force.) I have added New York to the commission list, but have analyzed it, and California, separately as well.
I have also excluded the seven states which have only one Congressional district like Wyoming and Alaska since gerrymandering is not possible with no lines to draw. That leaves 43 states which can be categorized as follows:
- maps drawn by nonpartisan commissions or courts (8 states);
- maps drawn by Republican legislatures facing Republican governors (16 states)
- maps drawn by Democratic legislatures facing Democratic governors (6 states); and,
- maps drawn when either the houses of the legislature were held by opposing parties, or where the legislature had unified control but faced a governor of the opposite party (13 states).
To avoid relying too heavily on a single year, I have added together the votes cast for Republican and Democratic House candidates in each group of states for the 2012-2016 elections. I have applied the same method to seats won, again summing up the number of Republican and Democratic seats won across all three elections. That method produces these results:
House Votes and Seats Won 2012-2016 by Redistricting Method
The first column reports the Republican percent of the total two-party popular vote summed across the three elections, 2012, 2014, and 2016. In the sixteen states where Republicans held both houses of the state legislature and the governorship, they won 56.5 percent of the two-party House vote and 71.7 percent of the seats. In solidly Democratic states the Republicans won both a minority of the popular vote and of the seats awarded. The results for commissions and courts is complex; I will deal with it in a later article.
In various articles here I have described the natural inflation of the proportion of seats won due to the operation of our first-past-the-post electoral system. As parties win larger and larger proportions of the vote, they gain an ever-increasing share of seats. I have estimated this inflation factor using both biennial election results back to 1946, and across states in 2012. Both methods produce equivalent results, for instance.
To estimate the share of seats awarded you need only square1 the value of the ratio (Republican Votes)/(Democratic Votes) to get the ratio (Predicted Republican Seats)/(Predicted Democratic Seats). This approach gives rise to the third column in the table, the proportion of seats that are predicted to be won by the Republicans after applying this “square law” rule.2 In the entry for Republican control, that party’s 56 percent share of the House vote should produce a share of about 63 percent of seats. In practice, the Republicans won nearly 72 percent of the seats. The final column measures the over- or under-representation of the Republicans in the House as a percentage gain or loss compared to the predicted share. In this case, the Republican’s 72 percent is about 14 percent higher than the expected 63 percent. This figure provides a criterion for evaluating how over- or under-advantaged a party was compared to expectations.
The normal expectations for states with unified control are confirmed: Republicans win a disproportionate share of seats in states where they controlled the redistricting process, and won disproportionately fewer seats than expected in states where the Democrats were in control. Notice that the size of Republican advantage in states that party controlled is larger than the disadvantage the Republicans faced in states controlled by Democrats, +14 percent versus -4 percent.
By this measure states with some form of split party control show hardly any partisan advantage at all. Republicans won a share of the seats awarded in these states nearly equal to their expected share. However, it turns out this overall result hides a lot of significant variation.
We can identify two different forms of split control:
- ones where both chambers of the state legislature are held by one party but the governor is of the opposite party; and,
- ones where the chambers of the state legislature are held by different parties.
As it turns out there are nearly equal number of each type of split control; in seven states unified legislatures faced an opposition governor, while in six states the chambers themselves were split. Once we break out these various patterns, the power of governors becomes clear. In both types of split control, the governor’s party is disproportionately advantaged during redistricting. In fact, if we group these split-control states together simply by the partisanship of the governor, Republicans were over-represented in seats awarded by 6.2 percent where they held the governorship; when Democrats held that office, Republicans were under-represented by 6.5 percent.
These results are rather striking. They suggest that opposite-party governors can force a redistricting map that is actually more favorable to the governor’s party than to the legislature’s. Similarly when the two legislative chambers are held by opposite parties, it is again the governor who appears to determine which map wins approval. It appears the governor’s veto is a more powerful weapon in the fight over Congressional district lines than the legislature’s control over drawing the lines themselves. This fact could weigh heavily over redistricting fights in states like Colorado, Michigan, Florida and Georgia where Democratic governors may win election and end up facing Republican legislatures. In Massachusetts and Maryland the reverse will likely hold true.
1The longitudinal estimate was 2.04; the cross-sectional estimate was 2.08. For simplicity I have rounded down to two, which is well within the confidence intervals for each estimate of beta.
2The tendency for first-past-the-post systems to disproportionately advantage the winning party was first observed in elections in the United Kingdom. There the coefficient reached three, giving rise to the name “cube law” rule, since cubing the ratio (Labour Votes)/(Conservative Votes) does a good job of predicting the ratio (Labour Seats/Conservative Seats). Following this tradition, I have named the US version of this relationship the “square law” rule.
