At first glance, it looks like gerrymandering really hit Utah Democrats hard on Tuesday. But that may not be the whole story.
While all of the votes haven’t been counted yet, so far Utah Democrats got 36% of the statewide Utah House vote on Tuesday, but only won 22% of the 75 seats up for election. Meanwhile, Utah Republicans got 60% of the statewide vote and won 78% of the elections.
That suggests the state House is gerrymandered to an extreme degree in favor of the Republicans, since Democrats got 14% fewer seats than their statewide vote totals, while Republicans won 18% more seats than their vote would suggest. That theory is known as the “efficiency gap” which boils the issue down to a single number. However, according to an article in The Atlantic, the theory is deeply flawed:
In some cases, it leads to unintuitive conclusions. For example, you’d think that a state where one party wins 60 percent of the vote and 60 percent of the seats did things right. Not so, according to the efficiency gap. If you do the math, that state would get flagged for extreme partisan gerrymandering—in favor of the losing party. Perversely, then, the easiest remedy might to be rig things so that the minority party gets even fewer seats.
Another problem is that the efficiency gap takes no account of political geography. In Wisconsin, most Democrats are concentrated in cities like Milwaukee, producing lopsided races there. To the efficiency gap, that could look like nefarious packing, when in reality it’s simple demographics. Similarly, if several nearby districts all swung toward one party in a close election year, that completely natural outcome could get flagged as cracking.
More than half of the votes for Democratic House candidates came from Salt Lake County this year. That makes sense since it’s a traditional Democratic stronghold. But, that electoral performance was a bit wasted as just over ⅓ of the Utah House seats are located there.
Democrats got 55% of the Salt Lake County vote, and won just over half of the seats (maybe more, depending on late results), while Republicans got 45% of the vote, and appeared to have prevailed in 13 of the 28 seats.
Perhaps a better measure is statewide party registration numbers. Democrats make up just 12.7% of active voters in Utah according to the most recent stats from the Utah Elections Office, while Republicans make up 47.9%. By those numbers, Democrats outperformed their registration numbers by nearly 25%, while Republicans underperformed their numbers by more than 30%.
An analysis from the Associated Press using the “efficiency gap” theory suggested that Republicans won three more seats than they should have in 2016 because of partisan gerrymandering.
