Who would benefit if Electoral College is changed?
By now you've likely heard about the ideas floating around in some blue states to change their electoral vote rules -- going from winner-take-all to allocating them by congressional district (CD) instead. They're changes that most agree would heavily favor Republican presidential candidates (at least in the near-term) in places like Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, because Republicans carry a lot more districts in these states, even as they lose the state overall.
But if you don't follow every twist and turn of congressional districting (and, really, we couldn't blame you) then that last point might sound counter-intuitive: why don't congressional districts in a state break the same as a state's overall partisan balance? Why, exactly, would this rule change shift things so dramatically toward Republicans? Whether or not it really happens, we thought this was a good time to leave aside the debate and take a quick look at the numbers that drive this -- how the districts break down.
Democratic congressional districts tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic, while Republican-held seats are not as lopsided for Republicans. This spreads Republican voting power over more districts, even if they're outnumbered statewide. Statewide, Democrats run up big margins in a few CDs, much as they do in a handful of counties, that carry them to a statewide win. This tends to be true nationwide. In our partisanship table below, we show the patterns.
On average, our partisan index (average party vote across multiple recent races) in Democratic-held congressional seats is +14 points; i.e., the average Democrat should run in this district with about 64 percent in most years. Meanwhile the partisan index in GOP-held seats is a comfortable, but not nearly as large, +8 points; the average Republican CD would be expected to go 58 percent Republican in most years. In 2012 in particular, the average winning Democratic candidate got 67 percent of the two-party vote, the average winning GOP candidate got 62 percent in contested races.
Changing to district allocations means that this difference doesn't matter, though. Like World Series games, a win is a win and it doesn't matter by how much.
It isn't looking too likely to happen in Michigan, for example, but it's a good illustration of the point. In 2012 President Obama won the state and happened to get more votes ("won") within 5 of 14 congressional districts. A plan that had instead allocated electoral votes by CD (with a bonus two to the statewide winner) would have given Romney more of Michigan's EV's, 9 to 7. In Virginia, which Obama also won statewide, Romney would have come away with 7 EVs and Obama, 6, under a CD-based plan. (If the bonus two went to the winner of more districts and not the statewide vote winner as some have offered, it would have been an even bigger reversal of Romney 9 and Obama 4.)
How do these patterns come about? Some of it is due to partisan gerrymandering of CDs, and some of it is simple geography. Democrats tend to live in more concentrated geographic areas - closer-in suburbs and cities. Moreover, the desire and the legal necessity to make sure states' Congressional delegations have enough minority representation tends to lead to very heavily Democratic districts, as well, when lines are drawn. Rural areas, by contrast, tend to vote heavily Republican. Districts that cover large pieces of rural and exurban areas form a big part of the GOP's House majority.
(It's worth noting as an aside here that the system is designed so that rural voters carry at least a little more influence in national government than their population levels would project. There are minimum numbers of House and Senate seats - and thus electoral votes - for all states regardless of population. So to use a well-known example, North Dakota, for instance, has three electoral votes, and saw 332,000 people vote in 2012 - or roughly one electoral vote per 110,000 voters. By contrast California had 13 million voters in 2012 to award 55 electoral votes, or one Electoral Vote for every 236,000 people, nearly half as much per-voter Electoral influence as North Dakotans. (Yes, it's based on population not turnout, but you get the idea.))
Looking at how Congressional delegations compare to Presidential vote in a state, we see what impact that has in the House. Below, you'll see that the party split in the House delegation usually looks nothing like the state's partisan split of voters, overall. (Of course, there are particular things about the House candidates that affect this, but general point still holds.)
Consider the states with at least five congressional districts (in the ones with fewer, this becomes more idiosyncratic.) Just looking at the bigger states first, you see the differences right away. In California and Texas the House delegations tend to exaggerate statewide partisanship: the Democrats' share of the California delegation (72 percent) is even higher than Obama's already-large statewide number (60 percent); in Texas the GOP delegation holds 67 percent of the seats (24 of 36) while Romney got 57 percent of the statewide vote. In Florida, the dominance is reversed and Republicans do better at the Congressional level: Obama won the state with 50 percent of the statewide vote but Republicans hold 63 percent (17 of 27) House seats.
In Pennsylvania Republicans have almost three-quarters of the delegation in another state Obama won easily, and in Virginia, it is much the same story. (By contrast, in some New England states, we see Democrats control delegations easily, like in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where they hold all the seats.)
In most states, the CD lines are drawn by state legislatures and governors, so the party that controls state government tends to favor - no shock here - districting plans that give their party an edge in the congressional delegation. Political insiders will be quick to tell you that the biggest wins in the 2010 midterms weren't just the GOP's takeover of the House, but their widespread triumphs in the state capitals, which set up the party to draw lines in its favor last year. Democrats, for their part, did much the same in states where they could. It's yet another reminder that under our federal system, representation goes up through levels - and state and local legislative elections sometimes matter a whole lot more than the attention they get.
And while this has long been true of whoever controls a state's districting, after 2010 the GOP did especially well to give its voters enough voting power to compete in a lot of districts -- and not to stack its voters in such a way as to "waste" votes in a couple of landslide districts.
(Making geography bend to partisanship, though, isn't always easy, which is why you see congressional districts taking on odd-looking shapes, with far-flung lines, twists and turns sometimes stretching out miles in search of the next batch of Republican- or Democratic-leaning precincts to add in, as well as accounting for minority representation. Some court cases over district lines do get contentious, but by and large this is simply how it's done: the framers left it to the states to decide how to draw districts...Though it is, arguably, more partisan now than Madison and others might've hoped.)
So what would happen to presidential campaigns, and what might Democrats do if the playing field shifted in this way? In the near term 2016 would look like an easier climb for the GOP. Perhaps Democrats' candidate calculus would shift toward one with appeal in both rural and suburban areas to try to put more rural districts in play, and close that gap in any CD-allocation states. Maybe a western or red-state senator or governor would argue that point to try to boost their stock in the party primaries.
But the tactical "battleground" spotlight might well move away from these CD-allocation states entirely. With so many districts looking like foregone conclusions, as we've seen, campaigns would be faced with tough decisions about whether to put resources in to try to get another Electoral Vote or two, unless the overall election were very close. If it were, we'd see the campaigns narrowing in on very specific regions within those states.
Based on our partisan indexes, there are only a few partisan districts in these states that look like potential tossups where candidates might engage. The rest of the CDs, though, are all-but-certain and would probably be avoided in much the same way candidates didn't campaign in solidly blue California or deep-red Oklahoma this year. In Virginia, for instance, only one or perhaps two of its districts might be fought over based on the partisan profile, but no others appear naturally close. As a whole, it is unlikely Virginia would be seen as a national "battleground" state at all. Similarly, Pennsylvania would probably see very little action. (In fairness, it didn't get much this year either, but has in the recent past.) The state has perhaps four or five of its districts that could go either way, but campaigns might think it more cost-effective to look for bigger hauls elsewhere in winner-take-all states.
But the largest change might come in terms of the battleground state list, as Democrats perhaps would look to put new states in play to make up for the loss, though this would not be easy. Arizona might be on their radar, Missouri might come into viewing range with the right candidate, though 2012 results there don't give them a lot of reason for optimism just yet. They'd need to win states like that to make up the differences for what was lost in a Michigan, Pennsylvania or Virginia. Some (perhaps overly optimistically) are aiming longer-term at Texas or Georgia.
For their part, looking longer term, Republicans would have to guard against any unintended consequences ahead. In 2016 the Democrats would be trying to hold the White House for a third consecutive time - something that is not historically easy to do. (President George H.W. Bush was the last to do it in 1988.)
So it is not unreasonable to think a Republican candidate would have a shot at winning Virginia outright - about a two-point shift would do it; Obama won by 150,000 votes in 2012 - and if that happened, Republicans might wonder if they're leaving three or four electoral votes on the table under a new plan...or whether is it more worthwhile to trade that chance for an all-but-guaranteed handful of electoral votes in the state. Similarly, it isn't certain that places like Wisconsin, which looked like a bona fide battleground for most of this past year, or Pennsylvania, are entirely out of reach for future Republican candidates either.
And all of this would create an interesting new dynamic in down-ballot races; if presidential candidates were not visiting a state, that can change advertising and turnout operations for local level candidates. It also affects the calculus of ad dollars spent (or not spent) and in which media markets, which is a big factor in national campaign fundraising and strategy.
In Pennsylvania some are reportedly thinking of a proportional split of electoral votes based on the statewide vote overall, not by CD. Currently, no state does this, though we do see this kind of formula in delegate allocation plans in the parties' primaries. It's not on the radar, but a fun experiment to think of what would happen if all the states divvied up their votes proportionally, not by congressional district. The national results would have been very different from the actual 2012 results: Obama 273 to Romney 265. (However, there's rounding involved in those calculations, and we have to assume some rounding rules here since this is simply an exercise. If this really ever became law, states would have to set the rounding rules, much as they do in primaries' delegate allocations. So for example: Missouri where Obama won 45.2% of the major party vote, he receives 5 of the 10 electoral votes. If there is no rounding, Obama is allocated 4.6% electoral votes. In reality, Obama won 0 electoral votes in Missouri.) This would generally come closer to a national popular vote's proportion, though still weighted to give larger states more electoral votes.
Whether or not any of these ideas really come to pass, it's always interesting to dive into how much the landscape affects the way the battles play out. Intriguing, too, would be over the very long term to see how this changed as districts are reallocated and redrawn again after 2020. Based on current projections southern and western states figure to keep gaining districts (perhaps a couple more of Texas, for California, Colorado and others) and maybe continued decrease for the upper midwest and northeast.
