The New York Gerrymander That Wasn’t (That Extreme)

New York’s new congressional plan has attracted attention as one of the most aggressive Democratic maps of this cycle. So I was curious to see how it scores along various metrics. First, its projected efficiency gap of 5% pro-Democratic is substantial but not enormous. (The same is true of its projected declination.) Second, the New York plan has seven (of twenty-six) districts projected to be decided by fewer than ten percentage points. (By comparison, the Texas plan has just three (of thirty-eight) such districts.) And third, the New York plan is about 0.5 seats more pro-Democratic than the median map produced by a nonpartisan computer algorithm. (The enacted plan is estimated to have 22.3 Democratic seats, compared to a median of 21.7 Democratic seats in the computer simulations.)

The takeaway seems to be that the New York plan is a moderate — not an aggressive — Democratic gerrymander, which will also include a nontrivial number of competitive races. Why is the perception of the plan different from this reality? Probably because the 2010s New York plan was somewhat biased in a Republican direction. Moving from a modestly pro-Republican plan to a moderately pro-Democratic plan feels like a big shift. But of course, the status quo ante isn’t any kind of privileged benchmark. Both absolute fairness (captured by measures like the efficiency gap and the declination) and relative fairness (captured by the computer simulations) are better baselines, and they tell the same story of a substantially but not severely biased map.

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