There is no shortage of projections on how the 435 House seats will be reapportioned following the 2010 Census and like anything else, they range from modest changes to volatile, far-reaching changes. [And you can also see Nate Silver's attempts to update the 2007 projections -- the basis of both the linked projections above -- here.] What's funny is that both the links cite the same source, Election Data Services, yet describe very different projections. Well, the CQ article cites EDS while The Washington Times uses a combination of the EDS projections and those from Polidata. The Polidata end seems to be adding all the volatility. As such, I'm going to lean on the more conservative EDS projection (Silver's is in between but closer to EDS.).
[Alright, get to the point. How's the map going to look in four years?]
Well, here you go, complete with map and seat gains/losses:
[Click Map to Enlarge]I jokingly ended the electoral college map slideshow with a blank map that had the election date of the 2012 election on it. But that one wasn't accurate; it didn't reflect the changes due to reapportionment that will happen between now and 2012. So what do we know about the changes? As all the articles that discuss the upcoming apportionment typically say, the South and southwest gain while the Rust Belt and into the northeast states continue to lose seats. But a blank map isn't really telling you a whole lot, is it? How about a real world application?
What would the McCain-Obama contest have looked like if this projected 2012 map was used instead? [Well, I made that one too.]
[Click Map to Enlarge]McCain would gain three electoral votes on Obama and that is it. For the record, the Polidata projection, wacky as it is, would only yield McCain a few additional electoral votes. In a year that tilts toward the Democrats, those changes are manageable, but in a year with conditions triggering a more competitive contest, those changes might help the GOP. Then again, if the changes in Colorado and Nevada are lasting, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia remain competitive, and Arizona and Georgia continue to trend toward the Democratic Party, they may benefit the Democrats.
UPDATE: One other way we can look at the changes more in-depth is to examine how that six electoral vote shift toward McCain in the projected 2012 apportionment changes the outlook on the Electoral College Spectrum. So, we can see how/if the campaigns' target states would have shifted if the map was different.
In September 2008, there was a time when Colorado or New Hampshire would have put Obama or McCain over the top in the electoral college. If Obama had won all the states favoring him up to and including Colorado the president-elect would have netted 269 electoral votes. The same was true of John McCain in terms of New Hampshire. Obama would have needed New Hampshire and McCain would have needed Colorado to cross the 270 electoral vote threshold. But Colorado eventually swapped positions with New Hampshire and moved into sole possession of the "victory line" distinction. To win Colorado, then, meant that the winner was the victor in the presidential race (...if they won the other states ranked behind the Centennial state).
Would that have been the case, though, if the 2012 map were in place for this past election?
| The Electoral College Spectrum* | ||||
| HI-4 (7)** | ME-4 (155) | NM-5 (260) | ND-3 (377/164) | AK-3 (62) |
| VT-3 (10) | OR-7 (162) | CO-9*** (269/278) | GA-16 (161) | KY-8 (59) |
| DE-3 (13) | WA-11 (173) | VA-13*** (282/269) | WV-5 (145) | TN-11 (51) |
| NY-30 (43) | NJ-15 (188) | NV-6 (288/256) | AZ-11 (140) | KS-6 (40) |
| IL-21 (64) | IA-6 (194) | OH-19 (307/250) | SD-3 (129) | NE-5 (34) |
| MD-10 (74) | WI-10 (204) | FL-28 (335/231) | LA-8 (126) | AL-9 (29) |
| RI-4 (78) | MN-10 (214) | NC-15 (350/203) | AR-6 (118) | WY-3 (120) |
| MA-11 (89) | PA-20 (234) | MO-10 (360/188) | TX-36 (112) | ID-4 (17) |
| CA-55 (144) | MI-17 (251) | IN-11 (371/178) | MS-6 (76) | UT-6 (13) |
| CT-7 (151) | NH-4 (255) | MT-3 (374/167) | SC-8 (70) | OK-7 (7) |
| *Follow the link for a detailed explanation on how to read the Electoral College Spectrum. **The numbers in the parentheses refer to the number of electoral votes a candidate would have if he won all the states ranked prior to that state. If, for example, McCain won all the states up to and including Colorado (all Obama's toss up states plus Colorado), he would have 274 electoral votes. Both candidates numbers are only totaled through their rival's toss up states. In those cases, Obama's number is on the left and McCain's is on the right in italics. ***The point between Colorado and Virginia is where Obama crosses (or McCain would cross) the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidential election. Obama would need Virginia and McCain would have needed Colorado to have surpassed that barrier. That line is referred to as the victory line. Under the actual 2008 electoral college distribution, Colorado was the state that each candidate needed to cross 270. | ||||
Well, no. That reapportionment-triggered shift toward McCain would have brought Virginia into the mix on the cycle's final Electoral College Spectrum. As was the case in the Colorado/New Hampshire situation, no one state would have been the Victory Line state. Instead, the possibility of an electoral college tie would have been put on the table. Both Virginia and Colorado would have to be won fo either of the candidates to pass the 270 electoral vote barrier. Of course, Obama won and held a six state cushion beyond that, but if the race had been, say, five or six points closer, Virginia would have been in play and the likelihood of an electoral college tie would have increased substantially.
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18 comments:
Oddly, I thought of the fact that the blank map didn't reflect likely 2012 EV distribution and thought of asking you how you knew it would stay the same.
Some thoughts: If this holds true, it will be the first time since the 1920 census that California does not gain an EV.
Some of these Republican pickups might not be bad news for the Democrats, if Arizona and Georgia start to move towards becoming swing states (Arizona is probably closer than Georgia to that distinction despite the fact that Obama did better in Georgia. Georgia will probably be slower to change - but that's a discussion for another time that I believe we've already had).
Of the changes in traditional swing states: OH, MO, NV are probably good news for Dems and FL and PA good news for Republicans. IA is unclear - Obama won it big but McCain had the twin disadvantages of not competing there in the primary and opposing ethanol subsidies. We'll have to see what happens when two candidates compete there on a more even footing.
We'll see how this impacts Congress as well.
These population changes are a double-edged sword. My sense is that a lot of them are led by Democratic-leaning demographics. The electoral college means that adding Democrats to a red state is good for the Republicans until it's suddenly very, very bad. I agree with Jack that Arizona is probably already to that point, and Nevada certainly is. Georgia still only goes Democratic in a year that's a Democratic landslide anyway, so for now that's good for the Republicans. Same with Texas, for now.
Josh,
I think you and Jay Cost are right that it will take a good performance by Obama in the next four years to be a realignment. I believe it was David Gergen who pointed out that the Reagan election was not the most recent realignment, but that the Nixon election in 1968 that was the real realignment even though it was a close election after a landslide loss in 1964. If we take Presidential election years ending in 8 as the baseline and looking over the past century we find:
1908-1948 Dem 24 Rep 16
key elections 1912 and 1932
1928-1968 Dem 28 Rep 12
key election 1932
1948-1988 Rep 24 Dem 16
key elections 1968 and 1980
1968-2008 Rep 28 Dem 12
key election 1980
1988-2012 Rep 12 Dem 12
key election 2008?
For a true realignment the Democrats will need to win three of the next four elections.
While I agree with Scott that "adding Democrats to a red state is good for the Republicans until it's suddenly very, very bad", I don't think any of the states that actually gained electoral votes are examples of this. I think the biggest concern for the Republicans right now should be Virginia. The influx of Democrats wasn't enough to give the state any more congressional seats/EVs, but I think that state has made a long-term move from safe Republican to swing state.
North Carolina is making a similar move but on a much slower scale -- it won't become competitive in run-of-the-mill elections for at least another decade, probably longer.
As for the states that actually gained, the only one I think Republicans need to be even remotely worried about is Florida. Then again, given the fact that Florida represents 10% of the electoral college, perhaps they should be concerned even if the odds are relatively slim.
Another interesting point is how Democrats leaving the state is bad for Republicans in one state: Louisiana. Most of the population loss in that state obviously comes from New Orleans, which was much more Democratic-friendly than the rest of the state. Nonetheless, this is a state that has gone Republican in presidential elections more often than not over the past four decades, and it just lost an EV. On the other hand, a lot of the people who left Louisiana just moved to Texas, which is redder than Louisiana anyway. So this may be a wash.
Finally, can I be nitpicky for a moment and point out that the "updated" map for 2012 just changes numbers without actually changing the size of any of the states? I realize it's a lot of work for fairly minor results, but it would be interesting to see the states actually resized to reflect their new strength.
Before we get too out front (so to speak) about the 2012 map, we should consider that all these map-coloring exercises could become a quaint relic of our pre-democratic past by 2012.
Perhaps wishful thinking, but that would be the kind of change I could believe in!
SD,
I don't know that North Carolina is that far behind Virginia. The Tar Heel state is lagged relative to Virginia, but I don't know that it is a decade behind. Having said that, if 2012 is an election on a more level playing field, I would expect North Carolina to move back into the Republican column.
Take a five point shift nationally toward the Republicans that is distributed evenly across all, for instance. Virginia is a dead heat and North Carolina is on the cusp of what FHQ would consider a toss up at the outset of primary season in 2012.
Ooh, that map point is nitpicky. But that's a good nit to pick. As all these maps have indicated, this is a template that Paul Gurian, here at UGA, has graciously shared with me. He wrote the code for it in Apple ClarisWorks -- something I have no familiarity with and is obsolete at this point anyway. Regardless, let me channel Paul for a moment to make a couple of points.
1) He did not change the map, as far as I can tell, following the 2000 Census. I have a couple of those 2000 election maps somewhere, but I'll have to track them down to check.
2) One thing that Paul has included and I took off the map when he handed it over to me is a note that the states are roughly proportional to the number of electoral votes it has. That "roughly" basically implies that a one or two electoral vote shift isn't going to change things all that much. However, after 2010, there will have been 2 censuses and it may be time to reevaluate the size of some of those states.
I'll run it by him and see what he thinks (since he'd be the one to edit it).
Matthew,
I've been in practice of throwing water on the National Popular Vote Plan fire in the past. My argument has always been that if a change was going to happen with the electoral college, it would have happened after the 2000 election, but I'm wavering a bit in that regard.
I spoke with someone last week who made the argument that how 2000 played out hampered the chances of anything happening on the reform front. The drawn out recount argument kept people focused on how that was going to be resolved as opposed to the structure that brought about the discrepancy.
In other words, if there was no 537 vote argument in Florida and we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that Bush had won the state, but had lost the popular vote, there may have been a real vocal consensus for change the day after the election.
Instead, we didn't determine a winner until well into December and by that point everyone was ready to move on from discussions of the electoral college or anything dealing with the presidential election.
I thought that was an interesting way of thinking about it; one I hadn't really considered.
But I still think that NPV or any other reform will need another electoral college/popular vote disparity to trigger a change. So yes, I think it is wishful thinking. I have to admit that the plan is a clever way of circumventing the constitutional amendment process, though.
I will argue with some of what appears in that blog post you linked. Some of those numbers are misleading.
1) The plan has passed 21 state legislative chambers not legislatures.
2) That 1181 state legislators supporting the plan sounds impressive, but what's left out is how large a proportion of total state legislators that represents.
The National Conference of State Legislatures says that total is 7382. 16% is a nice amount of support, but they'll need to garner a lot more support to get that passed in the 3/4ths of the state legislatures necessary to enact the plan. I just don't see that happening before 2012.
But that's just me.
Signed,
The wet blanket
I recognized the selective presentation of the facts (by a leading pro-NPV activist). I can't predict how likely NPV is to move forward.
I just hope you are wrong, because some day I would really like to live in a democracy.
Since NPV has been brought up, let me rail against it one more time. I contend that the NPV is less democratic than what we have now. With the power of the media in the country, any savvy political campaign director would buy time and spend campaign visits where they could garner the most votes for the least amount of cash. Rather than battleground states, the focus would shift to the largest media markets. Small-town America would be left behind. Large cities would gain much more clout. If you really want more democracy, adopt the Maine/ Nebraska plan where electoral votes are divided by state and congressional district. That way many more states become battleground states and some votes would not be more equal than others.
I may end up being wrong, but my intuition tells me that it will be a while before I'm proven wrong.
However, I think we've got the two most likely reform possibilities on the table now.
NPV is inventive, as I said, in that it circumvent the amendment process that would otherwise be require to abolish the electoral college.
Maine/Nebraska is also an idea that avoids the amendment process and we have seen some action on that front as well. California discussed it during the late summer of 2007 and a bill to divvy up electoral votes as Maine and Nebraska also made its way through the North Carolina General Assembly that year.
If Maine/Nebraska was adopted across all 50 states I would also like to see a simultaneous move to create bipartisan commissions to deal with redistricting. That would potentially maximize the number of competitive districts on the congressional and presidential levels. Of course, that will likely raise the cost of campaigning, as candidates would have more places to visit.
But talk about wishful thinking. I think that one takes the cake.
This is bad. I wanted links for those NC and CA bills and Googled it only to find that I had Googled it previously.
Even if some sort of nonpartisan redistricting is done, going by CD would still hurt the Democrats. As it is now, there are about 25 more districts with Republican leaning PVIs than Democratic. I just can't see any way that redistricting can completely neutralize that, especially considering that some states are drawn to favor Democrats.
It's just a case of urban areas being more Democratic than rural ones are Republican, and the fact that rural areas are so sparsely populated that you generally have to draw in at least part of a small city to get enough population for a CD, so you wind up taking a bunch of Democrats and putting them into a Republican district. This works far less the other way around.
Anon,
I agree with you. I suspect the Democrats would be hurt to some extent by an across-the-board switch to non-partisan redistricting. But my comment was based on increasing competition, not helping the Democrats. So instead of vanishing marginals that David Mayhew described, we get reappearing ones.
RE: Virginia and NC becoming competitive -- I should clarify that when I speak of NC being safely red for the moment, I am talking only about presidential elections. For state politics, it never switched from being dominated by the Democrats. So with that in mind, my statement that it'll be at least a decade before it becomes competitive and your statement you expect NC to go GOP in 2012 if the playing field is more level are pretty much equivalent.
The fact that NC is still dominated by Democrats at the state level makes it harder to say, so I'm just going on gut feeling there. But in Virginia, what's happening in other offices seems to indicate a trend more firmly, if only because it has something to move away from. But perhaps I'm overstating how far to the left Virginia has moved. I don't think I'm understating North Carolina's move with regard to presidential elections, however.
RE: National Vote -- Just this year, three states (Hawai'i, Illinois, and New Jersey) passed the NPV Compact. It's at 18.5% of the necessary number of EVs for it to take effect (a year ago it was at 3.7%). I don't think it'll happen soon, but I think 2008 proves that you don't need a contested election to make headyway on it.
RE: using the NE/ME system nationwide -- If the congressional districts that exist were reasonable, I could get behind this. As it is, I personally think we need to abolish congressional districts altogether and have our representatives elected statewide via Single Non-Transferable Vote (for those unfamiliar, and without going into too much detail: Parties put forth as many candidates as they want. Everyone in the state can vote for a single candidate. For a state with X seats in Congress, the top X vote-getters are elected.)
As for whether a move to the NE/ME system would benefit Democrats or Republicans, I've no idea. There are plenty of blue districts in red states and vice versa. I think the only way to answer this would be to find a by-district breakdown of the presidential election, and I don't know if anyone has such a thing.
RE: Maps -- I'm prepared to believe that a chance like New York's drop from 30 EVs to 29 would be imperceptible. But I suspect changes like Iowa's drop from 6 to 5, or Nevada's jump from 5 to 6, would be more obvious. That being said, I wouldn't recommend changing it until the actual numbers are known, unless of course you're just really bored. :-)
RE: Electoral College Reform -- I like the idea of NPV, but personally I'd be happy if they simply kept the current system but gave each state a number of EVs equal to its representatives instead of its reps + senators. Roughly one state in seven has 3 EVs, which to my way of thinking means their votes are effectively triple-counted in the presidential election. I find that ridiculous. The "winner take all" aspect of the EC, while not ideal in my opinion, is a minor problem compared to the triple-counting.
i think ohio and pennsylvania will continue to be swing states,colorado, nevada, new mexico will be challenges for the republicans to win. north carolina, indiana and montana will probably remain republican. arizona,georgia,north dakota, and missouri will be challenging but not impossible for the democrats. while iowa,virginia, minnesota and new jersey are also challenging but not impossible for the republicans. the closest state of all will probably be new hampshire
I find this subject so fascinating, but I think you've slightly underestimated the flow of votes from the North to the South. Here are my predictions for 2012:
Florida: +2, 29
Georgia: +1, 16
North Carolina: +1, 16
Pennsylvania: -1, 20
New Jersey: -1, 14
New York: -2, 29
Massachusetts: -1, 11
Ohio: -2, 18
Illinois: -1, 20
Michigan: -1, 16
Louisiana: -1, 8 (due to the effects of Hurricane Katrina)
Iowa: -1, 6
Minnesota: -1, 9
Texas: +4, 38
Arizona: +2, 12
Utah: +1, 6
Nevada: +1, 6
Oregon: +1, 8
California: -1, 54 (not because of population loss but due to the fact that the rate of growth has slowed in comparison to states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas).
I've posted a little bit about this on my own blog and will definitely continue to watch it. I eagerly await the results of the 2010 Census.
I find this subject so fascinating, but I think you've slightly underestimated the flow of votes from the North to the South. Here are my predictions for 2012:
Florida: +2, 29
Georgia: +1, 16
North Carolina: +1, 16
Pennsylvania: -1, 20
New Jersey: -1, 14
New York: -2, 29
Massachusetts: -1, 11
Ohio: -2, 18
Illinois: -1, 20
Michigan: -1, 16
Louisiana: -1, 8 (due to the effects of Hurricane Katrina)
Iowa: -1, 6
Minnesota: -1, 9
Texas: +4, 38
Arizona: +2, 12
Utah: +1, 6
Nevada: +1, 6
Oregon: +1, 8
California: -1, 54 (not because of population loss but due to the fact that the rate of growth has slowed in comparison to states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas).
I've posted a little bit about this on my own blog and will definitely continue to watch it. I eagerly await the results of the 2010 Census.
I don't think Dems or republicans (well the ones we see these days) are going to win, pretty soon it's going to be Conservative vs liberal. I think that Republicans will win these elections. 2012 is predicted by the 2010 national elections outcome. (well we already know that they're going to win over the democrats in widespread margins because of Mass).
Plus California has lost a lot of its population, so yeah that's why we're losing 1 electoral vote in this state. Has nothing to do with growth. Population of a state = amount of electoral votes the state will hold.
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