Category: 2020

Is The Electoral College Racist?

Back in August, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted an Instagram story criticizing the Electoral College, calling it “a scam”. She went on to claim that “the Electoral College has a racial injustice breakdown. Due to severe racial disparities in certain states, the Electoral College effectively weighs white voters over voters of color, as opposed to a ‘one person, one vote’ system where all our votes are counted equally.” Unsurprisingly, her comments faced severe criticism from the right, which railed particularly strongly against the accusation that the Electoral College is racist.

So is it true that this institution makes white votes more powerful than others? Well, this is something we can test. We ran fifty-thousand simulations of presidential elections featuring a generic Republican facing down a generic Democrat. From these, we determined how much of a swing state each state is, and multiplied by their number of electoral votes to create a rating of how powerful each state is in presidential elections. Dividing this rating by the number of voters in the state gives us an index of how powerful each individual vote is. But this isn’t the full picture.

The concept of “wasted votes” is the main metric being used to assess gerrymandering today, that being the practice of drawing district boundaries to the benefit of one party over the other. Two techniques are used to achieve this: “Packing” and “cracking”. Packing is where you draw a district to lean as strongly as possible in favor of one party, packing all their voters into this one district such that the party is far less competitive in every other race. Cracking is where you spread a party’s voters out evenly between many districts such that they make up 40-45% of the population in every race. Therefore even though that party’s voters may make up almost half the population, they win none of the elections.

In the below example, green voters have been packed into one district and cracked across the rest, resulting in the purple party winning 5 out of 6 elections despite having only as many voters as the green party.

Gerrymandering Example

The wasted votes system counts any votes cast for a losing candidate as wasted. Therefore if most elections are being won by the same party by small margins, a huge number of the other party’s votes will be judged as wasted, effectively detecting cracking. Additionally, votes cast for the winning candidate above the 50% they need to win the election are also judged as wasted. This detects packing, as if a candidate wins a huge proportion of the vote, a large number of their votes will be wasted.

Applying this to our analysis has a profound effect on the results, leaving only the votes that make an impact on the election. For example, Republican votes in Upstate New York are discounted as these Republicans are not represented at all in the Electoral College. Additionally, many Democratic votes used to build up enormous margins in New England are treated as wasted as you don’t get any more electors for winning by 30% than by 1%. This leaves us with a clear picture of which votes count, and how much they count for. By studying the race of each voter, this information is used to calculate the average power associated with a white, black, Hispanic, and Asian vote.

The results of this are striking. On average, white votes are worth 1.13 times the average vote. Black and Hispanic votes are each worth 0.81 times the average, and Asian votes just 0.75 times. This can be attributed to a few factors. Firstly, the all important Midwestern swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa) are disproportionately white. Also, many non-white voters are packed into big cities in safe Democratic states like California, such that many of their votes are wasted running up the score in landslide elections. Additionally, many black voters are “cracked” across the South, forming large minorities which can never muster up quite enough votes to win the state.

To understand better how the disparity in representation arises, we can look at which states are the main sources of each race’s voting power. White voters are fairly evenly distributed, so the breakdown for white voters shows the main sources of their voting power being the key swing states around the country, the only surprise being the increasingly competitive Texas.

W

By contrast, black voters are much more concentrated in the South, and so their voting power is much more dependent on Florida, perhaps the only really competitive Southern state. However black voters are also able to exert their influence in Virginia, where since the Obama era they have formed the basis of a slim but surprisingly sturdy Democratic majority. Georgia and North Carolina also score highly as a result of large ethnic minorities coming increasingly close to flipping these states in what would be a major coup for Democrats. Interestingly, large black populations in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana and Tennessee wield very little power in the Electoral College as they almost all vote Democrat, but these states never go blue.

B

Hispanic voting power is even more concentrated, with five states providing over half their electoral influence. Texas and Florida each provide 16% of their voting power, with most of the key swing states having only small Hispanic populations. The importance of their role in Texas cannot be overstated. Although the Texas GOP may lose Hispanic voters by large margins almost all the time, the fact that these margins are closer to 50 points than 90 means Republicans are still able to win in this racially diverse state. In other words, it doesn’t just matter whether you win or lose a demographic, the exact margin is crucial. Arizona, a new swing state, is another key source of Hispanic voting power, and is sure to be getting a lot of attention in 2020.

H

Finally, many Asian voters are packed into coastal cities in deep blue states, with very little presence in any swing state, resulting in their minimal electoral influence and the absence of any concerted efforts to win them over.

A

This analysis suggests that AOC is probably correct at least in her assertion that due to the Electoral College, white votes count for more than those of voters of color. There is also potential for this to be reversed in the future, as increasing non-white populations in Texas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia could make these states increasingly competitive, and perhaps even turn them reliably blue as has happened in Virginia. But for now, tens of millions of Americans are forced to live with the reality that their vote has little to no impact, and this disempowered group is disproportionately non-white.

What The Midterms Results Tell Us About Politics

The madness of the midterms is over, and the results are pretty much as expected, with Republicans building up their Senate majority but losing the House. In fact, of the races called so far, our model correctly predicted the overall results of 97.2% of them. We predicted a Senate result of 48 Democrats to 52 Republicans, very close to the probable final result of 47-53. The House model gave a similarly accurate prediction of 239-196, against the probable final result of 234-201. At first the night looked tough for Democrats, with mixed early results in Florida, a slight surprise in the defeat of Indiana Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly, and the defeat of Amy McGrath in Kentucky’s 6th congressional district. These early results seem to have played an outsized role in forming the narrative of the election, that of a good but still disappointing night for Democrats. But make no mistake, this was a blue wave. Democrats successfully competed in suburbs to win a solid majority in the House, won the popular vote by a wide margin (about 8 points), and did surprisingly well in the Senate given that this year’s map was very good for Republicans.

The next most significant takeaway is probably that incumbency matters much less than it has in the past. America voted along partisan lines to an unprecedented extent, with very little ticket-splitting. The highest profile casualties of this were Democratic Senators in the red states of Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota. Even in Montana and West Virginia where the Democratic Senate incumbents won, they did so by surprisingly small margins, and in Florida, which isn’t even that red, Republican Rick Scott beat Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. By the way, watch out for Rick Scott in 2024, a popular and seasoned Governor come Senator from a swing state, whose term is ending in a Presidential year, is definitely someone to be aware of when the rumours about who’s running for President start to circulate.

Next, voter engagement was off the charts, with a turnout of 49%, the highest midterm turnout since 1914! This isn’t even much lower than the 56% turnout for the Presidential race in 2016. Of course these numbers are still very low compared to most Western democracies, but if this trend holds it seems perfectly plausible that we see extraordinary turnout in 2020 when the fate of Trump’s Presidency will truly be in play, 70% turnout begins to seem perfectly possible.

Thirdly, healthcare is by far and away the most prominent issue in politics right now. Democrats built their campaign on protecting the healthcare system, and to some extent it drove their victory, as it seems to be an argument they are winning – in a recent poll, 44% of those sampled said they trusted Democrats more on healthcare, compared to just 34% for Republicans. The next most important issue was immigration, perhaps unsurprisingly given Trump making a migrant caravan in Mexico a prominent issue during the final days of the campaign. These were followed by the economy, then gun control. It’s likely that these are the issues that will shape the elections in 2020, as politicians can see the incredible extent to which they have engaged the public. An economic downturn could spell the end of the Trump Presidency, or continued growth could form the basis of his re-election campaign. And it seems beyond doubt that the Democratic nominee will make healthcare a major talking point, and bring it up as often as they can.

Thinking about 2020, 2018 taught us a lot about what the electoral map is going to look like in 2 years time. Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all veered away from Republicans, while Democrats enjoyed little joy in the Sun Belt. The Sun Belt is a collection of Southern and South-Western states which lean Republican, but Democrats dream of turning blue by turning out large ethnic minorities. The Sun Belt usually means Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, and sometimes Georgia and Texas too for the more ambitious Democrats. The best path to victory for Democrats in 2020 is now clearly via the Upper Midwestern states, which gives extra weight to Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchars’ potential Presidential campaigns, as they both have proven ability to appeal to Midwestern voters. But don’t discount Beto O’Rourke. He may have lost, but in a way that’s good for him, he now has more time to build up his campaign infrastructure, visit the early primary states, and prepare for another battle. He lost by a surprisingly small margin of only 2.6 points, and managed to electrify and thrill the Democratic base in a way that no one has really done since Obama. Add that to extraordinary fundraising abilities, and you have a very very strong contender for the Presidency.