r/politics • u/slaysia • Dec 19 '17

Democrat wins Va. House seat in recount by single vote; creating 50-50 tie in legislature

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/democrat-wins-va-house-seat-in-recount-by-single-vote-creating-50-50-tie-in-legislature/2017/12/19/3ff227ae-e43e-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?utm_term=.82f2b85b50fa
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145

u/amlybon Dec 19 '17

Dems already got like 53% of the votes, the fact that it's split like that is solely because gerrymandering.

14

u/hobovision Dec 20 '17 edited Dec 20 '17

Eh, 53% of the votes leading to 50% of the seats really is not too bad. There are many district drawing algorithms that won't lead to a better outcome. Gerrymandering is a huge problem, but it's really when you have a +10% lead to a minority of representation that it can definitely be blamed on partisan districting.

8

u/dittbub Dec 20 '17

depends what % repubs and independants got.

3

u/feanor0815 Dec 20 '17

but reps only got 43% of the vote... so its 10 points difference leading to a split house... this is fucked up! FirstPastThePost is stupid and evil!

4

u/hobovision Dec 20 '17

Well, shit, that's awful. That's exactly what gerrymandering does.

We need to move to some kind of proportional representation. Group like 3-5 reps/senators into one voting district and apportion them as close to the vote as possible.

-34

u/[deleted] Dec 19 '17

No. That's complete bullshit. It's because Dems run up margins in places like Alexandria and Fairfax. They win seats THEY drew for THEIR members with 80% of the vote.

59

u/joggle1 Colorado Dec 19 '17

They didn't draw the districts, the Republican legislature did. A critical technique of gerrymandering is called 'packing' where you place as many of your opponents into a single district as possible, hence why Democrats won some districts by 80% since they were strategically placed together, reducing their numbers in other districts that would otherwise be more competitive.

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u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

Dude, no one packed alexandria or fairfax. And democrats competed in all but 6 seats. Republicans competed in only~70

30

u/tt12345x Virginia Dec 20 '17

A Republican House pushed through a Republican bill that the Republican then-Governor Bob McDonnell signed to turn Virginia into the 5th-most gerrymandered state in the nation. But somehow Dems are responsible for being packed into districts? Ooookay.

Today we found out that if Republicans only lost the popular vote by 231,177 votes, instead of 231,178, they'd have won a house majority in Virginia. That is bizarre.

-15

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

I don't think you understand that delegates don't run on the same ticket as governors. They're separately elected offices.

9

u/tt12345x Virginia Dec 20 '17

I'm well aware. I'm talking about the HoD statewide vote totals.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

Yes, but there wasn't a Republican running in all seats, not even close

2

u/tt12345x Virginia Dec 20 '17

Yes, because Democrats are packed into gerrymandered districts.....

1

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

Dude. They're not.

Geographic clustering means Democrats tend to live more densely.

Let me give you an example.

We have a state with 10 million people. 6 million are Dems, 4 million are Republicans. The state has one big urban area and the rest is suburban and rural. There are 4 million people in the city, and 6 million not.

So lets draw our districts, compactly and keeping like communities together. We'll have 4 districts in the city and 6 million in the suburbs/rural area.

So we have 4 city districts. The city votes 80% Democrat. That means in the city there are 3.2 million Dems and .8 million Republicans. That's 4, very safe Democrat districts.

Now, lets take a break, is it unreasonable to assume that a city is 80% democrat? No. Quite honestly, no. Most cities vote ~80% Democrat, this is because of the new Obama coalition voters where he focused on winning cities big to win states and the Democrat losses among rural whites since 08.

So now we're onto the rest of the state with 6 million people, thats 3.2 million Republicans and 2.8 million Democrats. Thats 6 kinda safe Republican districts. We haven't even gerrymandered or drawn lines for partisan purposes.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jowei/gerrymandering.pdf

Please, stop just shouting gerrymandering and understand Democrats geographic clustering.

So yes, thats 6 GOP districts and 4 Dem districts in a state with 4 million GOP voters and 6 million dem voters and we haven't even touched suburban preference for GOP downballot or off year voting patterns among core minority groups. And there hasn't been a lick of gerrymandering. The only way to get 6 Dem districts is through gerrymandering.

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u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17 edited Aug 27 '20

[deleted]

-19

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

Dude, Democrats win Alexandria with 80-85%.

I'm on the side of fact.

Unless you gerrymander them to reach out into western loudoun, dems will win those with 85% of the vote.

23

u/joggle1 Colorado Dec 20 '17

Democrats got 53% of the vote in the House of Delegates while Republicans got 44% of the vote yet the split in the house is (barely) 50-50. It took a 9 point advantage by Democrats to break even, and that was by a single vote (ie, by chance). When it takes nearly a 10% popular advantage to even break even on the number of districts, there's zero doubt that the districts are heavily gerrymandered.

If you care about the side of facts, then why did you say 'They [Democrats] win seats THEY drew for THEIR members'? The Republicans controlled the legislature and the governorship in 2010 when the districts were drawn and they excluded Democrats from the process entirely. Is this really up for debate?

-8

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jowei/gerrymandering.pdf

No, they included black democrats because black democrats didn't want to lose their voter base.

You literally have no idea how geographic clustering works. Democrats win BIG in places like Arlington, Alexandria, and northern Fairfax. Your arguing that districts shouldn't be contiguous and compact because that hurts dems because of geographic clustering.

And that 53% /44% figure is untrue that's the governor's race. Republicans outperformed the top of the ticket significantly.

19

u/amlybon Dec 20 '17 edited Dec 20 '17

No, 53/44 it's true for for House elections as well. And if you don't count write-in/independent it becomes 55/45 (still favoring dems). I've just ran the math myself using data from official VA election site: http://results.elections.virginia.gov/vaelections/2017%20November%20General/Site/GeneralAssembly.html

1

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

You're counting all races. Dems challenged all but 5, Republicans only played in ~70.

13

u/joggle1 Colorado Dec 20 '17

No, it's the House of Delegates race, the governor race had slightly different results. I assume a Twitter source isn't sufficient for you, so I wrote this Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $infile = shift;

open INFILE, "<$infile" or die "Unable to open input file $infile";
my $in_result = 0;
my $which_party = 0; # 1 = dem, 2 = rep, 3 = oth
my $add_rep;
my $add_dem;
my $add_oth;
my $total_dem = 0;
my $total_rep = 0;
my $total_oth = 0;
while (<INFILE>) {
  if (!$in_result) {
    if (/raceResults/) {
      $in_result = 1;
      $which_party = 0;
    }
  } else {
    if (/partysm">(\w+)/) {
      if ($1 eq "Democratic") {
        $which_party = 1;
      } elsif ($1 eq "Republican") {
        $which_party = 2;
      } else {
        $which_party = 3;
      }
    } elsif (/votes">(.+)</) {
      my $tmp = $1;
      $tmp =~ s/,//;
      if ($which_party == 1) {
        $add_dem .= "+" . $tmp;
        $total_dem += $tmp;
      } elsif ($which_party == 2) {
        $add_rep .= "+" . $tmp;
        $total_rep += $tmp;
      } elsif ($which_party == 3) {
        $add_oth .= "+" . $tmp;
        $total_oth += $tmp;
      } else {
        print "Strange, partysm not set\n";
      }
    } elsif (/\/tbody>/) {
      $in_result = 0;
    }
  }
}
close INFILE;

print "Dems: $add_dem\n";
print "Reps: $add_rep\n";
print "Other: $add_oth\n";

print "Total Dem: $total_dem\n";
print "Total Rep: $total_rep\n";
print "Total Oth: $total_oth\n";
my $total = $total_dem + $total_rep + $total_oth;
print "Total: $total\n";
printf "Percent Dem: %.2f\n", ($total_dem / ($total * 1.0)) * 100.0;
printf "Percent Rep: %.2f\n", ($total_rep / ($total * 1.0)) * 100.0;

It parses the official results from the state's webpage. Here's the script's output:

Dems: 4639+13366+3759+8878+10294+6916+15161+15667+12495+12077+10378+9486+11197+12540+9050+12783+9234+14333+11760+8390+9333+15466+17865+13770+20522+22596+24149+18877+16023+21407+15004+22985+18761+22094+18243+31417+18947+29706+27670+19308+11366+15244+14830+19235+9982+12056+12761+25419+11797+8773+8177+11344+15623+11551+12530+10656+17036+19761+19775+20391+24287+16655+14697+20041+16245+16483+12864+20292+9127+11174+10077+10093+11843+16865+18234+9918+16541+15996+10764+18873+15988+11591+15766+14947+9319+9945+10043+10720
Reps: 14848+7803+13572+15282+18402+16795+17560+18311+16413+14025+10458+10318+15505+19284+16513+15997+16686+20966+14344+11309+19014+17370+17351+17688+11106+14461+11842+15139+15355+12658+12653+16723+13146+5723+15110+11967+4391+9518+13476+13782+18087+18792+18652+15758+13330+17507+12163+19223+22394+18572+12365+19425+14869+13803+22736+20768+13162+16048+13173+10835+11454+7707+11236+14022+13877+10625+11601+19841+24363+18561+16548+11720
Other: 42+33+40+596+518+3695+167+30+54+27+26+496+36+88+507+1171+668+39+1433+35+803+745+19+56+755+36+6683+101+39+30+35+45+49+21+481+39+34+46+20+1718+1815+1305+51+1705+48+2317+45+1576+1421+1599+706+1171+1573+51+40+51+1031+6362+298+50+67+43+816+26+297+863+51+41+498+37+804+25+59+40+42+42+1931+1062+69+670+500+74+47+6146+183+1045+1471+3362+110+1152+636+640+38+27+28+48+48+40+66+255+2373+37+2944+92+446+43+517+40+675+22+470+56+62+28+32+40
Total Dem: 1304241
Total Rep: 1076081
Total Oth: 75947
Total: 2456269
Percent Dem: 53.10
Percent Rep: 43.81

So yes, it really was 53% to 44% and that's rounding the Republican result up by 0.2% and rounding down the Democrat percentage by 0.1%.

I made the script's output verbose so you can verify how it's adding the numbers for Republicans, Democrats and other parties/write ins.

You reference black Democrats, but the only redistricting Republicans were forced to do since 2010 was in the congressional districts, not the House of Delegates. You'd have to give me a source that they were ever forced to change anything by Democrats there (Democrats tried, but failed in another suit).

You're making the same claim as the GOP in regards to 'self-packing' in cities. It's true that it's much easier to gerrymander cities, but it isn't true that it's a necessary outcome of people living together--certainly not to the level of packing seen in Virginia.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

No. Count the competitive diistricts only. Not one in which there wasn't a republican challenger.

21

u/gramathy California Dec 20 '17

You don't understand what district packing is, do you? Partisan gerrymandering gives high margins to one side to keep those voters out of other, more contentious districts.

-10

u/[deleted] Dec 20 '17

Holy shit, please answer me. How can you pack a city that votes 80% Dem?

You're literally trying your hardest to remain ignorant. There are cities, and whole swathes of the state, that vote 80% dem and they're big enough for multiple districts.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jowei/gerrymandering.pdf

Just, read that paper.

4

u/livefreeordont Delaware Dec 20 '17

That’s literally the point of gerrymandering. Let’s say Dems and Reps each have 1 million voters. If Dems have 300,000 voters in just 2 districts and win those in landslides then Reps have the narrow majority in the other 8 or so districts