Still Ain’t Representin’: South Carolina

*Turns out South Carolina is doing just peachy.*

Last summer, I calculated what the U.S. House of Representatives would look like if the U.S. used statewide proportional representation by party registration to elect congresscritters:

Those focused specifically on Texas and California, but since the gerrymandering wars have continued and expanded, I’ve done the same with this series:

Alabama’s shot at gerrymandering greatness was (probably temporarily) put on hold by a federal court this week, but we almost had another contender; their legislature adjourned without passing their gerrymander though.

So let’s look at what’s up with South Carolina.

Like Tennessee, South Carolina’s Republicans were lookin’ to eliminate Democratic-leaning districts completely.

But that was blocked by a fairly large group of Republicans in the legislature joining all the Democrats in voting against the proposal, after which the legislature adjourned.

So South Carolina will go into this fall’s election using its previous Congressional map.

And just how gerrymandered was that map?

South Carolina, when I ran these numbers, had voter registrations of:

30% Democrat
45% Republican
25% Other

But it had 1 Democratic representative and 6 Republican representatives, which is 14% Democrat, to 86% Republican.

To actually represent their voters accurately, that Congressional delegations should have been:

2 Democrats
3 Republicans
2 Others

That’s a pretty extreme imbalance: the Republicans have twice the representation they should, and the Democrats have half what they should.

Other parties, as usual, are still out in the cold.

So, while South Carolina does deserve credit for not making their representation worse, their Congressional map was already very gerrymandered.

And, as the saying goes: it’s not enough to be less bad; less bad is still bad.

We can do better, folks.

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arkady

Author at This Needs Fixin'

a pseudonymous observer of Things That Need Fixin'