The Political Implications of the Census

Yesterday, the U.S. Census Bureau released the national and state figures for the U.S. population, which when  for the House of Representatives in 2012 will increase seats in Republican-leaning states at the expense of Democratic-leaning ones. In this piece, originally posted on the Monkey Cage, our friend Joshua Tucker, associate professor of Politics at New York University, examines the effects that the reapportionment will have.

I wanted to follow up on Andrew Gelman’s post on the Monkey Cage yesterday about the political implications of redistricting following the new census. As has been reported in the media, if Obama carries the exact same states he did in 2008 again in 2012, he would end up with six fewer electoral votes. Interestingly, though, this means that if you rank the states in order of largest margin of victory for Obama, the same state that guaranteed him the presidency in 2008, Colorado, would give him the presidency in 2012, although with bare minimum of 270 electoral votes (instead of 276 in 2008). Put another way, Obama could still be reelected without winning Virginia, Ohio, Florida, the 2nd CD in Nebraska, Indiana, or North Carolina. Moreover, it is clear that there are now going to be more House seats in states that tend to send more Republicans to the House of Representatives.

That being said, I wanted to address the larger implications of the post to which Andy linked by Kaiser Fung. Fung raises an interesting question: will people who tend to vote for Democrats in Boston continue voting for Democrats if they move to Arizona? This type of question falls under a more general category of what political scientists call the being “cross-pressured,” or when one’s socio-demographic characteristics push one in different directions politically. Consider simply a blue-collar worker living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her co-workers are likely to be primarily Democrats, and her Cambridge neighbors are likely to be primarily Democrats. Thus, both of these demographic characteristics push her towards supporting the Democratic party.* Move the same person to an exurb of Phoenix, Arizona, and suddenly her neighbors may push her towards the Republican party while her co-workers pull her towards the Democratic party. Now she is “cross-pressured.” Ted Brader, Andrew Therriault and I have some new work on cross-pressured citizens. We find that in both the United States and Poland, cross-pressured citizens are less likely to express feelings of partisanship, less likely to participate in elections, and even less likely to be interested in politics. This suggests that Fung may be overstating the ability of loyal Democrats in Boston or Pittsburgh to continue behaving the same way politically once they move to Arizona.

That being said, what I have not yet seen is a good explanation of exactly who is accounting for the growth in population in the South-West of the United States. It may be the case that it is Northerners and Easterners who are moving to the South-West. However, it may also be the case that the Latino population of these states is growing faster than non-Latino populations in the rest of the country. If this is the case, then there is less of a chance of the cross-pressure mechanism that I described in the previous paragraph changing people’s political behavior, as we do not expect members of a growing Latino population to face different cross-pressure from the existing Latino population.** Then we would be heading toward a scenario much like the one Ezra Klein suggested: more electoral votes in states that tend to vote Republican today, but a hastening of the day in which these states (read especially: Texas, Arizona) may no longer be reliably Republican.

Furthermore, it is not a priori known that all of the new House seats in the South-West will automatically go to Republican candidates. For example, as the AP reports today

Boyd Richie, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said Hispanic and black population growth account for the additional seats, and he vowed to fight for a redistricting plan that takes their numbers into account.

While Republican domination of the Texas legislature probably makes this unlikely to happen, it is important to remember that the opposite effect may be at work in the North-East: Democratic legislatures may seek to make sure that seats that are lost are seats currently held by Republicans.

All this is to say that the simple narrative of “Republicans gain from census redistricting” certainly masks a more complex reality, and it is going to take quite a while before we can write the final chapter on the political implications of the 2010 census.