Not Yet Depressed Enough, Michigan Democrats? Let's Look at the results of the US House Gerrymander!

One last look at the 2014 Michigan gerrymander results. It'll be a quick one, since it's after 5 pm on Friday evening and quite honestly I could use a stiff drink after looking at these depressing numbers for the last couple of days.

US House of Representatives cumulative vote results:

• Democratic candidates, 1,506,455 votes (49.1%)
• Republican candidates, 1,458,264 votes (47.6%)
• Other candidates, 101,989 votes (3.3%)

Congratulations Michigan Democrats! More people voted for you! You have ...

Yeah, if you've read the earlier posts you know the drill by now. Here are the actual results that matter:

Michigan's 2015-16 delegation to the US House of Representatives:

• Nine Republican candidates
• Five Democratic candidates

Average margin of victory in these enormously safely drawn districts:

• All candidates, 27.6%
• Democratic candidates, 43.2%
• Republican candidates, 18.9%

I reckon this is a good time to also mention the notion that is now supposedly popular in some Republican circles, that we should change Michigan law to award our electoral votes on the basis of this bizarre gerrymander instead of the current system of awarding the votes to the candidate who gets the most votes. In 2012 this would've given nine votes to Romney and seven to Obama, even though more Michiganders voted for Obama.

I'm sure that right around now some of my Republican amigos are congratulating themselves on the utter ruthless efficiency of their party's gerrymander. But the simple truth is that this is killing democracy in this country.

It's killing freedom.

If you support this gerrymander you are saying that you care more about imposing your values on others than you care about freedom. Remember that the next time you look in a mirror.

Oh, and Democrats who say, "We just need to win the 2020 election so that we control the next gerrymander" -- and you know who you are -- you are every bit as bad.

If a foreign invader came to America and imposed such a deeply warped system upon us we would all take up arms to oppose it. So why is it that nobody seems to care because it was imposed by a group of technocrats with big data?

Beats me.

But I do know this. I need a drink.

The Michigan Gerrymander: the Oakland County Commission

Since a few people seemed surprised by the sheer impact of the GOP gerrymander on the 2014 election results in my post yesterday on the election results, I reckoned I'd share a few other numbers just to make it clear that the fix wasn't just in for our state legislature. The fix was in everywhere from my county commission to the Congressional delegation we're sending to Washington, DC.

Let's start locally with the Oakland County Commission, where the Republican incumbents at the state level rewrote county redistricting law in 2011 to ensure that the GOP had sole control over Oakland County Commission redistricting. The result was a gerrymander that is truly breathtaking in its audacity and success. What could be useful campaigns and elections to determine the future and direction of Oakland County have been reduced to hollow shams, nothing more than a bit of electoral kabuki to give the media something to fill space.

Before we proceed, a quick reminder: the gerrymander works by packing as many of the losing party's voters into as few districts as possible and by spreading the winning party's voters across districts to provide safe but comfortable margins of victory in as many districts as possible. Beyond the immediate impact on the voting electorate in each district, it also undermines our options as voters by severely discouraging good candidates from the minority party from running at all. Gerrymanders tend to make themselves visible by weirdly shaped districts on a map, but not every gerrymander is as visually evident as the bizarre-looking 11th Congressional District in Oakland County. The easiest way to spot a gerrymander is by looking at its results.

Oakland County Commission countywide vote count:

• Democratic candidates, 191,842 (46.4%)
• Republican candidates, 215,472 (52.1%)
• Other, 6,580 (1.6%)

It wasn't a great day for Democrats in Oakland County, which has in recent years become a very close swing county with a lot of voters willing to split their ticket. In 2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer lost Oakland County to Republican Rick Snyder by 56,522 votes, nearly half of the 129,547 statewide margin of victory. But Democratic US Senate candidate Gary Peters -- who comes from Oakland County -- won the county over Republican Terri Lynn-Land by 66,741 votes on Tuesday. So there were more than 100,000 ticket-splitting voters up for grabs.

The Democrats lost the total county commission vote by 23,630 votes (5.7%). In the abstract that might translate to an 11-10 Republican majority. In gerrymandered Oakland County that translates to a 14-7 Republican majority. That 14-7 count was essentially cemented in place by the gerrymander created by the Republican Party in 2011, which created 14 very safe Republican districts by packing as many Democratic votes as possible into just seven districts.

How safe are the Oakland County Commission seats? The average margin of victory in all races this year was 34.3%. The closest race was in the 5th district where John A. Scott (R - 11,142 votes, 57.9%) beat Markus Tincher (D - 8,026 votes, 41.8%) by 3,116 votes, a 16.2% margin of victory. The average Republican margin of victory in 2014 was 28.1%. The average Democratic margin of victory was an even more astonishing 46.7%. 

The county commission results for 2012 are a bit trickier to sort out because five candidates (four Republicans, one Democrat) ran unopposed. The 2012 election resulted in the exact same 14-7 margin in county commission seats. The top two Democratic candidates in 2012 (Obama and Stabenow) won Oakland County by an average of 83,763 votes while the top two Democratic candidates in 2014 (Schauer and Peters) only managed an average margin of 5,109 in Oakland County. It's safe to say that the overall electorate tended somewhere around 50,000 to 100,000 votes more Democratic. That overall Democratic surge narrowed the margins of Republican victories, but it obviously had zero impact on the final outcome. 

Kudos to both parties for at least giving folks somebody to vote for in every district this year, I guess. I have great respect for those candidates of both parties who fought an essentially hopeless uphill battle. Most of them did it without real hope of victory for their seat, but to support the principles and values they believe in. That's an admirable undertaking.

But as far as the Oakland County Commission goes, they're playing in a rigged game.

A Few Thoughts on the 2014 General Election Results

First things first. Here are this year's results for Wolverine Lake Village Council.

The candidates with the top three vote totals get a four-year term. Fourth place gets a two-year term. We had five candidates for the four total slots this year:

• John A. Magee, 882 votes, 24.6% (Four-year term)
• Michael Stack, 778 votes, 21.7% (Four-year term)
• Mark Duff, 695 votes, 19.4% (Four-year term)
• Ed Sienkiewicz, 657 votes, 18.3% (Two-year term)
• Ron Cumbo, 560 votes, 15.6%
• WRITE-IN, 13 votes, 0.36%

Thank you to everybody who supported me -- most especially my dedicated campaign staff of Monique and Katie the Beagle who hand-delivered a ton of flyers around the village over the last few weeks. (Monique also did a lot of other stuff that was less fun than walking around the neighborhood: formatting and typesetting the flyers, keeping track of the campaign account, and putting up with a distracted husband for the last couple of months. Katie the Beagle's other contributions included a lot of naps.)

I shall of course immediately seize upon my first-place finish as a mandate for my program to replace our current police vehicles with low-mileage old Jaguar XJ8Ls.

What? That wasn't what you voted for?!

Keep that outrage in mind when all my fellow politicos who were elected yesterday seize upon the results as a mandate to do crazy-ass things they never mentioned during the campaign. (My Jaguar cop-car program makes perfect sense, though. The Jaguars have more legroom than our aging Dodge Chargers, but cost much less than a new Chevy Tahoe.)

Moving outside of Wolverine Lake, let's take a look at the Michigan results. How about we start by tallying up the results of the Michigan House of Representatives voting? (Numbers tallied from the Detroit Free Press Election Results site.)

• Republican Party, 1,457,867 (48.6%)
• Democratic Party, 1,526,453 (50.8%)
• Other, 17,827 (0.6%)

Congratulations, Michigan Democratic Party! Despite losing the gubernatorial election you managed to win back the Michigan House of Represent ... oh, wait a minute ... sez here that the Republicans lead 60-47 in state house seats and have small leads in the three seats still undecided.

(If this was a Hanna-Barbara cartoon Scooby Doo would be doing an adorable double-take right about now. Alas, this is the cartoon that we call our legislative electoral system in this state.)

That's what a gerrymander looks like. You win the most votes, and you have double-digit deficit in the results that matter.

Well, how'd things go for the Democrats in the Michigan State Senate?

• Republican Party, 1,518,102 (50.4%)
• Democratic Party, 1,469,332 (48.9%)
• Other, 22,626 (0.8%)

Gosh, sorry about your close defeat there Democrats. Still, that's going to give you a very narrowly divided chamber. That should really give a lot of clout to the moderates from each party who ... oh, darn. There's that pesky gerrymander again. The Republicans will have an enormous supermajority of 27 state senators to just 11 for the Democrats. There's one seat up for recount, but the Republican candidate has a sixty vote lead that'll probably hold up. Get ready for a lot of far-right bills coming out of our State Senate for the next four years.

I absolutely hate to say it as an elected official, but when people tell me that they don't bother to vote because the system is rigged -- in a lot of cases they're right.

This off-year election was the year that hammer of the post-2010 gerrymander really struck home in Michigan. It's going to be a loooooong decade for Michigan Democrats.

My other Michigan post-election observations seem fairly minor by comparison. I could do some Wednesday-morning quarterbacking of Mark Schauer's gubernatorial campaign, since I thought some of their messaging was off-target and a bit tone deaf. But overall I thought he was a good candidate who ran a decent campaign. This wasn't a drubbing at the polls, it was a close (51%-47%) loss. I had the chance to meet Schauer in a couple of smaller venues way back at the start of the campaign and he struck me as a decent guy who went into public service for all the right reasons. So I hope he finds a good venue for that.

I was genuinely pleased that Gary Peters won the US Senate seat. That outcome seemed pre-ordained given the polls and the dismal campaign run by his opponent, but you never know until the votes are counted. But I think he'll be a good Senator for all of us in Michigan. He's another guy I got to meet early on in the campaign ... I actually ate lunch next to him at a fundraising barbecue and we ended up discussing dog parks. (That's probably a sign I've been in municipal government too long ... there I am sitting with a future US Senator and what do I want to talk about? Dog parks.)

Nationally? Eh, if you're enough of a political junkie to read this far you've probably already read more punditry than anybody could want to about the national outcome. Overall, I thought it was a pretty typical sixth-year, mid-term election for the party with a sitting president, though the final results were a bit worse than I hoped. Losing the Senate hurts.

My guess is that Obama spends his last two years in office vetoing a lot of awful stuff. I hope I'm wrong, and something useful for all of us gets accomplished. (How about a roads-and-bridges bill, everybody?! Anybody? [Crickets]) But I don't see anything in the continuing disappearance of moderates from both parties that makes me think we'll see anything useful in DC in the next couple of years.

Final thought on the election? If there was one thing that I felt lacking in Democratic candidate campaigns across the ticket and across the country it was a real lack of a positive vision for America. That matters. Far too many Democrats this year defined themselves in opposition to whatever the farthest right wing of the GOP was doing or saying. There's plenty to oppose there, so I understand the urge. But that's an excellent way to lose on Election Day.

So here's my free advice to anybody, anywhere who wants to run for office.

Tell people what you want to do in that office. Don't be afraid to give them details. Tell them what you stand for and where you want to take us and make *that* the basis of your campaign. That's called leadership. You don't get it from consultants. And you don't get it from user-testing campaign slogans. You get it from your heart. 

If you're going to campaign, campaign from your heart.

This n'that to kick off 2013

I've been a neglectful blogger thus far in 2013, so I reckoned I'd at least put together a little post with some updates and a bit of conversation about what the start of 2013 looks like to me.


The Grumpy Old Man Update

The second half of 2012 was a bit of a nag for me, healthwise.  My busted and disclocated finger pretty much hurt like hell right into the fall, I tweaked my back again, and then Monique and I managed to come down with *two* rotten colds right in a row during the holidays.

Sheesh!

I have some friends and family members who've dealt with genuine life-threatening illnesses in the last year, so I'm truly grateful that none of those woes were anywhere in that neighborhood.  But I did notice that it really had an impact on my overall productivity.  Sometimes I like to think that I mostly just sloth around and don't do much, but the last six or eight months made me realize how much I usually do get done. One of the reasons you've all seen less blogging around here lately is that the blog had to take a bit of a back seat as I tried to at least take care of the minimum on other fronts.

So I'm going to try to take a bit of better care of my overall health in 2013 because it helps me to do the other things I want to do.

(On the other hand, I'm also thinking about trying to play in an old boys' rugby match in Savannah in March, so "better care of my overall health" has some challenges right from the start.  But aiming for a few old boy events each year keeps my overall motivation to stay in shape a lot higher than it would be otherwise, so it's still an overall plus.  I'll just try not to bust anything this year.)


Writing

Random acts of poetry are hereby officially reinstated at the ol' Patio Boat blog.  I had thought last year that I'd try writing and polishing a few poems and actually submitting them to some magazines, something I hadn't done in 20 years or so.  In reality I wrote very little poetry last year.  Part of that may be the aforementioned productivity decline.  But I think a big part of that was the direct result of cutting off my primary publication outlet.

The truth is that although I published a few poems in magazines way back when, I was always much more the sort of poet who would noodle around with something, show a few friends, and then move on.  So why fight it? If I write something fun or interesting, I'll post it up here.  Hopefully that'll make me a bit more likely to write something fun or interesting this year.

Otherwise on the blog? Eh, I'll post something when I have something interesting to say.  The Ol' Patio Boat blog remains what it has been pretty much from the start, a place for me to write down some thoughts and share them with those of you who are interested, mostly in the form of first-draft ramblings with dubious sentence structures.  A more commercially viable blogger would've broken this melange into four or five discrete and well-edited posts. But you all just have to put up with this.  Or not.  Nobody's forcing you.  Go watch a cat video on YouTube if you want. See if I care.


The Broadcast News Ban Grows

I want to personally thank the U.S. Congress for the monumental stupidity of the unending fiscal-cliff debacle in December. They finally got me to do what I probably should've done years ago: change the dial on my old clock-radio from our NPR news station to the classical music channel. And fortunately for my peace of mind this happened before the airwaves filled with unending details of school shootings.

I banished television news a few years ago, and I had pretty much banished radio news from the rest of my morning. The remaining holdover was waking up every morning to the headline news.  In truth, it was a pretty effective wakeup call.  Nothing will get you out of bed to turn off the radio faster than a terrible news story.

But it was also a pretty depressing way to wake up, and it was taking a toll on my psyche. I had begun to wake morning in despair about the world. Now I wake up to a random bit of symphony or concerto and generally think, "Gosh, how pretty." The downside is that it's a lot harder to actually wake up and get out of bed while lying in a warm bed and listening to lovely classical music. For now, I'll take that risk.

I've banned the radio news in the morning a few times before as part of a news ban.  This time it feels more permanent.  We shall see.


The MGB Slumbers

The Michigan roads are covered in salt during the wintertime, so my little MGB is tucked away under cover in the garage.  Salty roads are the mortal enemy of rust-prone British sports cars.  Alas, I'll have some work to do before all is ship-shape for the first Spring drive.  Here's the current list:

The lighting and wiring woes continue -- There was good progress on this front last year, but my right rear taillight went out again during my final drive of the fall.  I need to solve that.  The poor little car has two problems, really. First, many of the connections are now 37 years old and worn, dirty, or corroded. Second, many of the newer connections made by previous owners weren't done properly. Hopefully cleaning and/or replacing some of those connectors will have the lights back in business.

Sigh. I know you all continue to be shocked that my old British sports car has electrical issues, but there it is.

The overdrive/wiper and turn-signal switches, plus the horn -- My overdrive switch slowly began failing last year, and is pretty much kaput. This makes me sad because the overdrive is a positive boon whenever I top 50 mph. To fix it, I'll need to take apart a bit of the steering column, which means that it might be an opportunity to also fix or replace my turn-signal switch (which doesn't turn off after the turn) and maybe even figure out how to make the regular horn button in the middle of the steering wheel work again.  I love my A-OOGA horn, but it's not always convenient when large trucks bear down on me and I need to make a loud and joyous sound **NOW**.

The hole in the driver's seat -- Somehow last summer I tore a small hole in the leather seat. I tried covering it over with duct tape and managed to make it into a larger hole.

This is why I can't have nice things.

It needs fixing, and I'll probably need to find somebody who knows what she's doing, which means that I'll probably do best to take the seat out of the car and haul it over to Bev's Canvas Covers, which did a bang-up job replacing the zippers on my tonneau cover and did a great job on the seats for my neighbor's pontoon boat.  Removing the seat to get its upholstery fixed has has another benefit. It would make it easier to work on the steering-wheel console, and it would probably also make it easier to ...

Install the shoulder belts -- The MGB currently just has lap belts. I did buy a new pair to install last summer, before I got distracted by the broken finger and the broken fuel pump and the electrical woes.  The MGB is a relatively safe car for a tiny mid-70s convertible, but replacing those lap belts for actual shoulder harnesses is an important upgrade that would make me feel better about hauling people around in it.

Put it all together and it's a good-sized project list that I'd be more inclined to tackle if my garage wasn't 25 degrees. (Note to self: add "Build heated, insulated garage with more room" to the list of vital MGB repairs.)

All of this during the winter when I can't drive anyway makes me start to look at other cars and dream that they don't have their own list of issues -- as in, "Oooh, look at this pretty Jaguar convertible on eBay. The ad says everything works!" -- but really I'll be happy again with the FUN MG as soon as its warm enough to get back to work on it, which should be soon enough.

Alas, thanks to the ever-increasing pace of global warming, old British sports cars are an increasingly weather-appropriate choice in Michigan!


Politics

I'm focusing on village issues in 2013. Now that we've put the worst of the financial hardships behind us (Knock on wood!) we're in a good place to work in making Wolverine Lake the best community it can be. Besides, current national and state politics just make me despair for democracy and our republic. (Thus the aforementioned news ban!)

One of the things I've had some interest in doing is digging into some real statistical analysis of redistricting and the gerrymander.  But that has begun to feel a bit to me like doing a tree count in the midst of a forest fire.

I could rant at length, and I'm sure I'll come back to write more about this eventually (fair warning!) but in the meantime let me pass along four things I've been thinking about that would help to restore some sanity to our badly broken political process. Each is worthy of a long post and discussion of its own, but I wanted to write them down somewhere before I turn my back in disgust, and the end of this long, rambling blog post to kick off the new year is as good a place as any:

1) Abolish the Electoral College -- This one's such an easy constitutional amendment that even a non-lawyer like me can write it: "The President and Vice-President shall be elected by a direct vote of the qualified voters."

2) Eliminate the Gerrymander -- I'm sure there's a good way to word the requirement. But what it means is that legislative districts should be drawn by non-partisan commissions to maximize compactness and to follow permanent political boundaries to the greatest extent possible.

3) Open primaries -- Primaries shall not be restricted to partisan races. They shall be open to all qualified candidates. The general election will consist of a runoff between the top two vote-getters in the primary.

4) Eliminate term-limits for the legislature -- This really only applies to Michigan or other states that have enacted legislative term limits.  It might not be quite as useful as the first three, but the unending spectacle of an amateur hour in Lansing that's generally run by lobbyists has made me firmly believe that term limits for our legislature were a mistake.


And that's it.  I'm out of lunchtime to write this post, and I'm sure I'm out of readers of this post by the time I'm typing this sentence. So if you doggedly made it to this paragraph let me just say, "Have a great 2013!"

The Naughtful Naughties: Gerrymandering and an Electoral Results Database Plea

No data-based post today. Instead I'm going to have a long generic discussion of the theoretical gerrymandering, followed by a plea asking whether anybody can steer me to a good database or set of online tables of electoral results, especially for US House elections and/or state legislatures.

Why am I asking for such a thing you ask? So far we've looked at a few sets of economic data. But at some point this year I'd like to take a look at another phenomenon whose effect I think worsened during the Naughts: gerrymandering.

As databases and data analysis has grown more sophisticated over the years, it has become easier for redistricting committees to design districts that tilt towards one party or another. In cases when a single party controls the redistricting party, this allows incumbents to draw districts that maximize the number of representatives that there party will have.

The way this is done is to design as many "reasonably safe" districts for the incumbent party, and to crowd as many voters from the other party into a very few "overwhelmingly safe" districts. "Reasonably safe" districts tend to have something like a 55%-45% to 60%-40% advantage for the incumbent party, while "overwhelmingly safe" districts can have an advantage for the out party of anywhere from 75%-25% to 90%-10%.

Let me give you an example. Let's say we have a state with ten million voters and 100 state house seats. For sake of our example, we'll split our voters into five million voters that favor Party A and five million voters that favor Party B.

In an absolutely even mathematical construct, we would have 100 districts, each of which has 50,000 voters from Party A and 50,000 representatives from Party B. In a completely neutral election these districts would split randomly, 50 for Party A and 50 for Party B.

Geography and demography is not a random mathematical construct of course. Because different areas favor different parties, what we might reasonably expect would be a bell-shaped curve in which we have something like five "overwhelmingly safe" seats for each party, ten or fifteen "reasonably safe" seats for each party, and perhaps as many as 50 or 60 seats that could potentially be up for grabs in each election, depending on which way the political winds are blowing.

However, a clever gerrymander will shift the apportionment. Let's say that Party A is in power. They can then draw up districts that look something like this:

Reasonably Safe for Party A - 83 seats
55,000 from Party A
45,000 from Party B

Overwhelmingly Safe for Party B - 17 seats
25,000 from Party A
75,000 from Party B

(One of those "overwhelmingly safe" seats for Party B needs to be a 35,000-65,000 split to make the math work perfectly, but that's still an overwhelmingly safe margin.)

What effect does that sort of districting have on our 100-seat legislative body?

The most obvious, of course, is that the body will vote overwhelmingly for the positions of Party A on each and every issue. And because their advantage is so large, they will have no incentive in considering or including even part of the platform of Party B as they craft legislation.

But what about cases in which redistricting is shared between the parties? Even in these cases the redistricting is being drawn by incumbents. So it shouldn't surprise anybody if the redistricting tends to favor creating safe districts for incumbents. We may end up with a legislature that is split 50 seats to 50 seats; however, what we are likely to have in district makeup is something like this:

Safe for Party A - 50 Seats
60,000 Party A
40,000 Party B

Safe for Party B - 50 Seats
40,000 Party A
60,000 Party B

The popular description of this phenomenon goes something like this:

Instead of a system in which the electorate chooses their representatives, we have a system in which the representatives choose their electorate.

Whether there is a single-party or shared gerrymander, there is very little chance that we will see seats change parties during the decade that follows the redistricting. This means that the real election to choose the person who holds that seat is the party primary, in which that parties nominee for the general election is selected. Independent voters either shun party primaries or are shut out of them altogether, depending on that state's rules. Primaries also see low voter turnout and tend to be dominated by the most active segments of each party's electorate, the "wings" of their party. In the case of Democrats and Republicans, these tend to be the liberal and conservative bases.

This means that in our gerrymandered legislatures, if you want to represent a district, you should have policies that favor the wings of the party for whom that district is safe. In our single-party gerrymander this means that not only do we have a legislature with representatives who favor Party A, we have a legislature that overwhelmingly favors the most extreme factions of Party A with a noisy minority from Party B. In our two-party gerrymander we have a legislature with 50 representives from the wing of Party A and 50 representatives from the wing of Party B. In either case there's no electoral incentive for the representatives to govern from the center of the poltical spectrum.

Thus, does gerrymandering push centrists out of power altogether.

In our theoretical gerrymandered legislature we would expect to see extreme partisan rancor, very few representatives crossing party lines for votes, legislation that favors the most extreme positions of the controlling party, and a growing sense of disenfranchisement among centrists. The more sophisticated the gerrymandering, the more likely we are to see those behaviors.

Does this sound like a legislature near you? You may have gerrymandered districts.

Was gerrymandering any worse during the Naughts than in previous years? That's why I'd like the data in a nice, convenient bundle. So we can see whether reality matched my nice theoretical construct above.

If gerrymandering is afoot, I would expect to see a pattern in which the average margin of victory is greatest in the year following a redistricting (2002, for this decade) and slowly decreases as voters shift and move. And if it's worse in this decade than previous decade, I would expect to see a pattern in which the average margin of victory for US House and state house elections is larger in this decade than in previous decades.

The data's out there, and looking up individual elections is easy enough. But if somebody's already compiled it all in a single place, I'd just as soon not replicate the effort, and would appreciate you steering me in that direction. Muchas gracias!