Racial Disparities in Gerrymandering's Stranded Voters

• In Event: Race, Voter Suppression, and Institutions’ Impact on Voters and Outcomes

Abstract

Despite its broad reach and reverberating effects, partisan gerrymandering has been understood and studied quite narrowly. We have, for example, several sophisticated tools to quantify the fact that, with a properly gerrymandered map, a party can win the minority of the vote but a majority of the seats in a legislature. What we lack, however, is an understanding of how partisan gerrymandering is done and to whom. Several important works find a representational burden that occurs when one lives in a county that has been unnecessarily split into multiple congressional districts. It is, for example, harder for such voters to recognize incumbent and challenger names and thus cast informed votes. Startlingly, several papers finds that voters in this situation are likely to see fewer government projects benefit their county. Worst off are voters in a county where most others live in a different congressional district. Here I explore whether there is a racial disparity in the likelihood of winding up a stranded voter in one's county. I find, in fact, a vast disparity such that whites are far, far less likely to be rendered a stranded voter relative to African American and Latino/a voters. I argue that what amounts to a racial gap in access to representation renders gerrymandering a tool of exclusion and inequality. Thus mapmakers are not merely advancing partisan power, but reducing political influence and diluting the voice of people of color.

Author

• David Niven, University of Cincinnati