How Democratic Votes are Diluted in Pennsylvania

The Republican-controlled Pennsylvania General Assembly is battling the newly-elected Governor over, well, just about everything.

This is a Governor elected by about ten points, which is the generally accepted definition of a landslide.

But, we hear from an echoey chamber -- the Republicans gained seats in the General Assembly in that same election, so the new Governor should defer to the will of the voters.

Yeah. But not quite.

Pennsylvania is so Gerrymandered that last year the Republican State Senate candidates received about 53% of the vote statewide. Yet they won nearly 83% of the contested seats. That's right -- they walked away with almost 1/3 more of the available seats than they should have in a balanced district setup.

On the House side, where the districts are smaller and hence harder to Gerrymander, they still managed to overcompensate. In State House elections in which Republicans did not run unopposed, they received just over 52% of the vote statewide. Yet, they were awarded with nearly 70% of the contested seats.

Essentially, the Republicans had a bout a 4-point margin over the Democrats in the GA elections. Not a serious foundation to build a case against the policies of a Governor who won in a landslide.

Methodology -- I looked at all contested 2014 GA races which had a nominated D & nominated R running. I ignored write-in races. I rounded all candidate totals to the nearest 100 votes -- eg. 15,453 votes became 15,500 votes. I then totaled the votes received by R & D candidates and compared the total statewide percent vote received by Rs & Ds with the percent of seats won by each party. I ignored third-party candidates.

Here are the raw numbers.

Senate - 16 seats
13 (82%) won by Rs with 609,200 total votes (53.6%)
3 (18%) won by Ds with 527,000 total votes (46.4%)

House - 83 seats
56 (67.5%) won by Rs with 844,400 total votes (52.7%)
27 (32.5%) won by Ds with 757,700 total votes (47.3%)

This kind of result is, by the way, why the move is on to award electoral college votes by district.

By Gerrymandered district.