Geography, Not Voting Rights Act, Accounts for Most Majority-Minority Districts. 538

'The Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act on Tuesday — which struck down one provision of the law outright, neutered another and set a precedent that could eventually threaten the rest of the legislation — may reduce the pressure on states to create majority-minority districts when they engage in Congressional redistricting after each decennial census.

I’ve seen a lot of speculation on Twitter about the effects this ruling might have on the partisan composition of Congress, but most of it doesn’t get the story quite right, in my view. The problem is that most people are putting too much weight on gerrymandering and not enough on geography.

There’s no doubt that the tendency of racial minorities to be concentrated in a group of overwhelmingly Democratic districts hurts the Democratic Party as it seeks control of the United States House. In the chart below, I’ve sorted the nation’s 435 Congressional districts based on the percentage of the vote they gave to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama last year.

The asymmetry is self-evident. There were 44 Congressional districts in which Mr. Obama won by at least 50 percentage points last year, compared with only eight for Mr. Romney. These hyper-partisan districts are far past the point where a Democratic candidate for Congress could lose under almost any circumstance, so they create wasted votes for Democrats. As a result, Mr. Romney won the majority of Congressional districts (226 out of 435) last year, despite losing the national popular vote by roughly four percentage points. And Democrats gained only eight seats in the House despite winning a (very narrow) plurality of the aggregate popular vote for the chamber.'

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/majority-minority-districts-are-products-of-geography-not-voting-rights-act/?hp