Tag: congress

EDIT: I originally said Oregon’s 5th district was still undecided; it was actually Oregon’s 6th district, containing the far southwestern suburbs of Portland

We still don’t know all the members of the House of Representatives for the incoming 118th United States Congress. We don’t even know which party will be in the majority.

Here’s what we do know so far, presented in the usual Mapping Democracy map style. White ? hexagons are seats that are still undecided. Click for a larger view.

The current count by party is Republican 212, Democratic 203. Twenty seats are still up for grabs: one each in Alaska, Maine, New York, and Oregon; two each in Arizona and Colorado; and twelve in California. Halfway, at 218 seats, is enough for control – so Republicans must win six of the remaining seats to hold the advantage. That seems likely, but whothehellknows.

If Republicans do get the majority, what happens? Obviously, it would be harder to pass legislation with different parties controlling the House and Senate – but maybe not impossible. Remember that Republicans in the House will face the same Joe Manchin Effect a the Democratic Senate – the closer the margin, the more people will need to be convinced to vote for the party line. And representatives from competitive districts will have an incentive to show their voters that they are willing to stand up to the party line.

With gerrymandering, are there enough competitive seats to make a difference? Yes, obviously – after all, there are still 20 seats up for grabs now, nearly a week after votes were cast. Here are those districts, with information about where they are:

Alaska at large: the entire state

Arizona-1: the northeastern quarter of the state, plus a gerrymandered bit of the northwestern suburbs of Phoenix – parts of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley

Arizona-6: the northeastern suburbs of Phoenix, including parts of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley

California-3: the rural Sierra Nevada mountains and the northeastern suburbs of Sacramento, including Roseville

California-6: the northern half of the city of Sacramento, and parts of Arden-Arcade and Rancho Cordova

California-9: Stockton and surrounding areas of San Joaquin County

California-13: Merced and surrounding areas

California-21: Fresno and the southern San Joaquin Valley

California-22: The eastern half of Bakersfield and rural areas to the north

California-27: Northern Los Angeles County, including Lancaster, Palmdale, Glendora, and Pasadena

California-34: The eastern part of the city of Los Angeles

California-41: Moreno Valley, Palm Springs, and the southern part of the city of Riverside

California-45: Irvine and northern Orange County

California-47: Long Beach and coastal Orange County

California-49: Oceanside and San Juan Capistrano

Colorado-3: Pueblo, Grand Junction, and the rural western third of the state

Colorado-8: Northeast of Denver

Maine-2: Mostly-rural northern and eastern Maine

New York-22: Utica, Binghamton, and surrounding areas

Oregon-6: The southwestern suburbs of Portland

As results are announced in these 20 districts, I’ll update the non-misleading map accordingly.

Democracy in the United States is not what it first appears.

Last week, we looked at how maps of the U.S. Senate can mislead, and I showed a new map that visually reflects the reality of state-by-state Senate representation, and also leaves room for additional information.

Today, we’ll the same thing for the more complicated example of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Unlike the Senate, where each state is represented equally by two Senators, representation in the House is based on population as recorded in the once-a-decade national census. The United States is divided into 435 Congressional Districts, and with a 2010 U.S. population of about 310 million, each House member represents about 700,000 people.

Districts are set and voted on at the state level, which means no matter how few people live in a state, that state is guaranteed to have at least one House member. The number of House members per state varies from one each in the lowest-population states (from Alaska to Montana) to 53 in California. The boundaries of each district are set by the state legislature or an entity they assign. Districts must be contiguous (no enclaves or exclaves), but other than that anything goes. This opens House representation to all sorts of partisan strategic fuc kery – but much more on that later.

The question here is: how can we visualize U.S. House membership in a way that fairly shows the distribution of power, and also leaves room for other information? I’ll follow the same approach I used to visualize the U.S. Senate.

Most depictions of the House of Representatives that I have seen fall into one of two categories.

This:

or this:

As we saw with the Senate, each of these views has advantages and disadvantages. The map view makes a clear connection with U.S. geography and shows district borders accurately, but the vastly different sizes of the districts make it look like a vast sea of red, when in reality the House has a Democratic majority. The dot view makes it clear that all districts enjoy equal representation, but at the price of making an abstract visualization that looks nothing like the United States.

And as with the Senate, why not combine the advantages of both, and add some more information to the visualization?

Like this (click to open a larger version in a new window):

Each hexagon represents a single representative. The hexagons are color-coded, blue for Democratic, red for Republican, and white for vacant (Louisiana-2 is blue because the seat will be filled in a runoff special election on April 24th, but both candidates are Democratic).

States are outlined in yellow borders, each in its approximate position and orientation. In addition, whenever possible I put each district is in approximately its correct place in the state. For example, Florida’s 1^st Congressional District sits at the western tip of the Florida Panhandle including Pensacola (and is represented by Republican pedophile Matt Gaetz, allegedly), so its hexagon at the far northwestern end. Florida’s 26^th Congressional District includes Homestead and Key West (and is represented by Republican Carlos Giménez), so its hexagon is at the far southern tip.

As usual with images on this blog, you can click on the image to see a larger view, and in this case, I would definitely recommend it so you can read all the names. The linked image is quite large (3600 x 1996 pixels), so it may take time to load and you may need to scroll to see it all.

From now on, whenever I talk about the House, including in posts about future elections, I will use this map. I have some ideas about how to improve the map, and I’d love to hear yours.

So what’s next? As I alluded to above, real congressional districts are not hexagons. They are usually designed by state legislatures – and because state legislatures are partisan, districts can be drawn in a partisan way. And they are.

Welcome to Mapping Democracy!

Democracy in the United States is not what it first appears.

There are many reasons for this, of course, but I am convinced that one of the reasons is that the maps we use to understand are democracy are misleading. Consider the U.S. Senate: two senators per state. Most depictions of the Senate that I have seen fall into one of two categories.

This:

or this:

Each of these views has advantages and disadvantages. The map view makes a clear connection with U.S. geography and shows which parties represent which states, but it the different sizes of states obscure the fact that each Senator, regardless of how much land area the state takes up, gets exactly one vote. The dot view makes it clear that states are equal, but at the price of making an abstract visualization that looks nothing like the United States.

Why not combine the advantages of both, and add some more information to the visualization?

Like this (click to open a larger version in a new window):

Each state, no matter how large or small, no matter how many or few people live there, is represented by two Senators. So in this visualization, each state has a yellow outline, and is placed approximately in its appropriate position and orientation. Maine is the tip of the mammoth’s trunk, Florida is its front hoof, Washington state is its tail, and so on.

Each state consists of two hexagons, one per Senator. Hexagons are color-coded by party: blue for Democratic, red for Republican, and light blue for the two Independent Senators who have joined the Democratic caucus.

And that’s another advantage of this map compared to the first: Ohio is not represented by a Senator from the Purple Party, it is represented by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Republican Rob Porter. Lastly, each hexagon is labeled with each Senator’s name.

As usual with images on this blog, you can click on the image to see a larger view, and in this case, I would definitely recommend it so you can read all the names. The linked image is quite large (3600 x 1996 pixels), so it may take time to load and you may need to scroll to see it all.

From now on, whenever I talk about the Senate, including in posts about future elections, I will use this map. I have some ideas about how to improve the map, and I’d love to hear yours. And if you know anything about American democracy, you can probably guess what’s next.

Welcome to Mapping Democracy!

There’s a lot more to our democracy than just the President. On Wednesday, I showed you a map of current U.S. Senators, and explained how the clustering of similar states fools your eyes and brain into seeing our urban-rural divide as a divide between the coasts and the middle of the country.

Today, I map the U.S. House of Representatives. The map is below. As before, each hexagon shows one elected representative. I show all the representatives for a single state together, enclosed by a thicker yellow line; the number of representatives varies from one each (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont) to fifty-three (California).

I also tried to keep the locations of districts within states roughly geographically accurate. For example, New York’s 26th District covers the city of Buffalo in Western New York, and so in the map it is second from the left in New York.

Red shows Republican representatives, blue shows Democratic representatives, and white shows a few vacant seats whose incumbents died or resigned in the second year of their terms. The single splotch of yellow is Michigan District 3, represented by Justin Amash, who switched to the Libertarian Party in April 2020 and became the first third-party representative in seventy years. Unfortunately for third parties everywhere, he is not running for re-election. Each district is labeled with the name of the person who represents it (and bite me for having the same last name and first initial, Adam Smith [D-WA9] and Adrian Smith [R-NE3]).

The map below is so compressed that the names are extremely hard to read, so if you’d like to see who represents where, click for a larger version.

What can we learn from this map?

House districts are designed to give equal representation to all Americans, so by definition and by design the House shows a more accurate picture of the state of American democracy. Each district is home to about 700,000 people (the 308.7 million people in the 2010 U.S. Census divided by the 435 available seats). The specific boundaries of the districts are set by state legislatures, sometimes with hilarious consequences, but that’s a post for another day.

The map makes it much clearer that the blue/red divide (the colors are still arbitrary) is driven not by state boundaries, nor by each state’s positions within the nation. Rather, the partisan divide is actually an urban/rural divide. It’s easy to see that in this map, where I have graffiti-circled and labeled the metro areas of Denver, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta. Those areas tend to elect Democratic representatives, while the rural areas of their states tend to elect Republican representatives.

Now that I’ve got these maps of the composition of the U.S. Senate and House today, I can use them to predict what the composition might be after next month’s elections. That’s coming next, along with an updated prediction for the 2020 Presidential Election.

It’s been fun using maps to track current polling for the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. But there’s a lot more to our democracy than just the President. Because each state’s electoral votes are equal to the number of senators plus representatives, it’s easy to go to from elected legislators to Presidential electoral votes. Or the other way around. And so it’s easy to turn a map of electoral votes into a map of Senators.

And so. The map below is organized roughly-geographically, and shows the Senators from each state by name. Roses Republican Senators are red, violets Democratic Senators are blue, and light bluie shows the two independent Senators, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Angus King (I-ME), both of whom caucus with the Democratic Senators.

It’s hard to see the names in the regular-size map below, so click on it to see a larger version.

Looking at Senators displayed on a map like this, with equal importance given to all states and thematic geography, shows how the rules of the Senate exacerbate the urban/rural differences that keep us divided.

Every state has both urban and rural areas, but states with similar urban/rural percentages tend to cluster together: more urban on the east coast, west coast, and the western side of the Great Lakes, and more rural everywhere else. That, combined with the traditional yet 1000% arbitrary red-and-blue color scheme results in a map with large stretches of red and large stretches of blue. Look how lonely Doug Jones (D-AL) and Susan Collins (R-ME) are as the sole members of their parties for miles around.

I’ll be using this map for many purposes in the future, starting with making predictions for the 2020 Senate election… soon. I need to look at the polls in a lot more data. That was a typo, I meant “look at the polls in a lot more detail,” but honestly “look at the polls in a lot more data” is way better. But first…

You can probably guess what’s coming on Friday, and why it’s 4.35 times more work.