Jonathan A. Rodden - Why cities lose: the deep roots of the urban-rural political divide

I N MOST DEMOCRACIES, the path to victory is simple: win more votes than your competitors. For the Democratic Party in the United States, however, this is often not good enough. For example, in the 2012 election, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received 1.4 million more votes nationwide than Republican candidates, but the Democrats ended up with only 45 percent of the seats in the House. In 1996, the Democrats also won the popular votethat is, the total votes cast across all of the individual raceswithout winning control of Congress. Democrats must win big in the overall popular vote, as they did in the blue wave elections of 2018 and 2006, in order to win a majority of seats in the House.

The Democrats problem with votes and seats is even more pronounced in state legislatures. Consider the state of Michigan, where it has become commonplace for the Democrats to win the statewide popular vote without winning a majority of seats in either chamber of the Michigan legislature. In 2012, for instance, the Democrats received around 54 percent of the total votes cast in elections for both state legislative chambers in Michigan, but they came away with only 46 percent of the seats in the Michigan House of Representatives, and 42 percent of the seats in the state senate. This has been happening over the last decade in the other states of the industrialized Midwest as well, including Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Most recently, it happened in Virginia in 2017, and once again in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2018.of 2019, the Republican Party has controlled the Pennsylvania Senate for almost forty consecutive years, even while losing the statewide popular vote around half of the time. The Republicans have controlled the Ohio Senate for thirty-five years, during which time Democrats won half of the states US Senate elections and around one-third of the gubernatorial elections.

The popular vote is also largely irrelevant, of course, in determining the composition of the US Senate. Democrats have won more votes than Republicans in elections for eleven of the fifteen Senates since 1990, but they have only held a majority of seats on six occasions. Yet underrepresentation of Democrats in the US Senate is no mystery. It happens because, as a legacy of the bargain made at the Constitutional Convention in the eighteenth century, large Democratic states like California and New York have the same Senate representation as small Republican states such as Wyoming and the Dakotas.

But in Congress and state legislatures, districts are drawn to be as equal as possible in population. For example, Democratic California and Republican Wyoming both get two senators, but California sends fifty-three representatives to Congress while Wyoming sends only one. And within states, legislative districts are required by law to be very similar in population. It is puzzling, then, that Democrats have been able to dominate the national popular vote in presidential and Senate elections since 1990not to mention party registration and party affiliation as expressed in opinion surveyswhile only winning control of Congress for five of the last fifteen sessions. And it is puzzling that there are so many purple and even blue states like Pennsylvania where citizens routinely elect Democratic senators, governors, and attorneys general, but where Democrats have had little chance of winning a majority of the congressional delegation or state legislature.

For many frustrated Democrats, the explanation is simple: partisan gerrymandering. Republicans gained control of many state legislatures in time for the most recent round of redistricting in the early 2010s, then drew odd-shaped boundaries that packed as many Democrats as possible into a handful of districts that they easily won, leaving the remaining districts with Republican majorities. Armed with sophisticated geospatial software and a large budget, Republican operatives carefully drew maps that distributed

There is much truth to this widely accepted account, but it provides an oversimplified and ultimately misleading answer to a complex question. Why Cities Lose demonstrates that the Democrats problem with votes and seats goes much deeper, and is far more intricate, than the impact of a handful of political operatives in a room with a computer. Without a doubt, gerrymandering makes things worse for the Democrats, but their underlying problem can be summed up with the old real estate maxim: location, location, location.