So Which Chamber Is The 'More Conservative' in the NC General Assembly?

This posting appears at WFAE's The Party Line--the graphics have been included here.

With the Republican-dominated North Carolina General Assembly nearing the end of its long session, many observers have taken to characterizing the legislature’s work under unified GOP control.

For left-leaning groups, the legislature’s treatment of minorities, the poor, education, and environmental protections have lead some leaders to describe the Republican-controlled state government as “Robin Hood in reverse.” 

Other observers outside of the Tar Heel state have described the “unimpeded GOP” as driving the “state hard to the right.” 

Republicans would contend, as Governor Pat McCrory noted in a number of media interviews recently, that they are implementing what they had campaigned in 2012 on, while seeking to put their stamp on state policies. 

But putting aside the partisan characterization on both sides, is there a way to independently analyze where both political parties, particularly in the legislature, are on an ideological spectrum?

In some new research on American state legislatures, two political scientists have used a dataset of roll call votes to scale the two majority parties in each state to place them on an ideological continuum.

This research mirrors the research on the U.S. Congress that lines up members of Congress in terms of most liberal to most conservative, most notably based on roll call voting on economic issues.

Using roll call votes from 1996 to 2010, the state legislative ideological scores indicate where the two parties have aligned themselves in the fifty state assemblies, from most liberal to most conservative. 

If using zero as “moderate,” a score moving towards +1 would indicate a more conservative legislative party, while a movement towards -1 would indicate a more liberal bent to the legislative party. 

As depicted in the below graph for the House conferences and Senate caucuses in the North Carolina General Assembly, the Republican Senate caucus has been the most conservative group in the state legislature since 1996.

State Republican senators have ranged consistently in the more conservative end of the spectrum, with their Republican breathren in the NC House have been moving more and more conservative in their orientation. 

Among the Democrats in the legislature, the House conference has remained consistent in its moderate-to-liberal leanings, while the Senate caucus has moved, in recent times, from being more liberal towards a more moderate stance.

But what does this tell us about whether the North Carolina legislative parties are more “hard right” or “hard left”?  One way to approach this is to compare the parties to the other Southern states.

When comparing each N.C. party in each chamber to other parties in their respective chambers, two interesting patterns emerge.

Among the lower chambers from 1996-2010, North Carolina’s GOP conference started out in a fairly “moderate” scoring, being grouped with such states as Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida. 

But like our neighboring state to the west, N.C.’s GOP conference has moved more conservative, almost landing in between the moderate states and the more conservative states of Texas and Alabama, for example. 

The second interesting pattern was among Democrats in the senate (upper) chambers. 

Three distinct groupings appear in over the 1996-2010 time period: a grouping of fairly moderate Democratic caucuses (Louisiana to Alabama, though most all have moved more liberal in the past few years); a second grouping of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia; and a third and distinctly more liberal grouping of Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina. 

For the year 2008 (the most recent with all the Southern states represented), North Carolina’s Democratic House delegation ranked as the fifth most liberal among the Southern states, behind Florida, Texas, Virginia and Georgia, while the Republican House conference was eighth most conservative in the region.

In the upper chambers, North Carolina’s Democratic Senate caucus tied for the second most liberal group, with Florida being the most liberal for its respective Democratic senators.  Conversely, the North Carolina Republican senate caucus was the fifth most conservative, being bested by the GOP senate conferences in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas. 

Many political pundits have also questioned the relative “conservatism” of the GOP in both the House and Senate, usually by making the guess (based on ancedotal evidence and “gut-sense”) that the upper chamber is more conservative than their counterparts in the lower chamber. 

It would appear, at least from the historic trend lines before the GOP took over both chambers in 2011, that this analysis would be accurate, but only time will truly tell when it comes analyzing this year’s legislative votes. 

While the political scientists are still working to incorporate the 2011-2012 legislative voting records into their dataset, it will be important to watch what happens when the new scores reflect the GOP take-over from the 2010 elections. 

Is the United States Becoming More Parliamentarian In Congressional Elections?

A re-posting from WFAE's The Party Line with the graphics included:

As many of the post-election commentaries pronounce a host of reasons (the better candidate in political workmanship, the novice challenger, a localized race that went national) why the once disgraced, now redemptive, Sanford won, we might want to view a more important component of his victory: the voters of the first congressional district.

If it wasn’t for Sanford and his baggage, most all analysts would have written off the Lowcountry contest as a “safe Republican” seat, due to the fact that Mitt Romney carried the district by 18 percent in the 2012 presidential election.

In fact, this kind of “landslide” district has become the national norm in U.S. House contests.

In Nate Silver’s analysis of the 2012 U.S. House races, he found that in 2012, only 35 districts—less than ten percent of the 435 contests—were “swing” districts, meaning that the district results were within five percentage points of the national popular vote margin.

More importantly, it appears that House elections are showing a closer alignment with the overall electoral patterns of voters, especially using the presidential returns.

In the 1^st Congressional District election, I took the precinct returns from the 2012 presidential election and asked, would those presidential results have any possible predictive power to an election six months later? 

Meaning, would Romney performance in each precinct give an indicator of Sanford’s performance as well?  Conversely, would Obama’s performance indicate how Colbert Busch would perform as well? 

Using Romney’s performance on the horizontal axis and the preliminary numbers for Sanford on the vertical axis for the largest county (Charleston) in the 1^st District, here’s the result:

Romney’s Vote Share in 2012 Presidential Election and Sanford’s Vote Share in 2013 Special Election in Charleston County

With a few exceptions (most notably a precinct where Romney got only 8% of the vote, but Sanford got 34% of the vote), the vote share alignment between Romney and Sanford is pretty striking. 

And even though Obama won Charleston County in 2012, the relationship between his vote share and Colbert Busch’s vote share in that county is also striking.

Obama’s Vote Share in 2012 Presidential Election and Colbert Busch’s Vote Share in 2013 Special Election in Charleston County

So what might this mean?  One explanation might be that the United States is becoming more “parliamentary” in its national legislative elections: it doesn’t matter who the candidate is (hiking boots and all the relevant baggage), but what does matter is the voters’ party allegiance. 

This would tend to make us more along the lines of British elections, where the voters cast their ballots for the party; the “candidate” standing as that party’s choice to be the member of Parliament really doesn’t matter, because that candidate was picked by the party without any voter input. 

Granted, U.S. primary elections have become “the” election, rather than the general election, because, as Silver pointed out, more and more districts are “landslide” in their behavior (117 Democratic and 125 GOP districts in 2012’s House elections were 20 points or more above the national popular vote). 

So, it appears that even in a contest, headed by candidate who suffered from both self-inflicted wounds and a deep drive to win, the district behaved as it should—and gave the landslide win that most of us should have expected, but didn’t.  

The Need for Independent Redistricting in North Carolina

This post appeared on WFAE's The Party Line. 

A bi-partisan bill has been introduced into the N.C. House of Representatives to hand over the redistricting process in the state to an independent commission, and thus give up one of the most important powers that any majority party has: pre-determining which party will win each district through political gerrymandering.

The legislation would charge the Legislative Services Office with drawing congressional and legislative districts without the use of “political affiliations of registered voters, previous election returns, [or] demographic information, other than population head counts.” 

In addition, the bill states that no district “shall be drawn for the purpose of favoring a political party, incumbent legislator, or member of Congress, or other person or group, or for the purpose of augmenting or diluting the voting strength of a language or racial minority group,” along with barring the use “of any of the addresses or geographic locations of incumbents.”

In the game of politics, this would be a radical departure for the next round of redistricting in the state in 2021—but one that would probably earn the legislators some form of public admiration, because the parties would be giving up their power over the voters.

In looking at the consequences of the most recent redistricting done by Republicans in 2011, we can see what the “victors” do with their spoils in winning control of the redrawing process. 

In the 2012 election under the new legislative maps, Republicans created safe districts for both themselves and for Democrats—but created disportionately more districts for the GOP than the opposition.

In the state senate, six contests out of fifty could be considered “competitive” (meaning that the winner received less than 55% of the vote).  In fact, three times as many seats (18) had no opposition contesting the election.

If all of the state senate votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were added up respectively across the state, Democratics garnered 47% to Republican’s 53%.  But Republicans ended up with 66% of the seats to Democrats’ 34%, creating a disproportionate advantage for the Republican party.

In the state house, a similar pattern emerged: Republican candidates garnered 51% of the total state-wide vote, but won 64% of the seats in the chamber.

In fact, nearly half of the 120 seats in the house went uncontested (27 automatically went to Republicans, while 28 went to Democrats).  A little over ten percent (14 seats) could be considered “competitive” in terms of the winner securing less than 55% of the vote.

So it appears that political gerrymandering seems to exist in the North Carolina General Assembly districts.

Another way to look at this gerrymandering is to explore the relationship between presidential voting in the district and the voting for the district’s legislative candidates. If the district was “competitive,” then there could be districts that, for example, voted for Obama while, at the same time, voted for a Republican for the state house.

In only ten percent of the 120 state house seats did the presidential candidate of one party win in the same district as the opposition party’s legislative candidate.  For example, in District 92, Obama carried the district with 54% of the vote while the Republican state house candidate won with 51% of the vote. 

In District 119, Mitt Romney won the district with 51% of the presidential vote while the Democratic legislative candidate won the same district with 52% of the vote. 

With so few districts having ‘split-ticket voting’ patterns, it is notable that the Romney vote in a district has a strong correlation to the vote cast for the Republican House candidate. 

Correlation between a District Voting for Mitt Romney

and the Republican State House and Senate Candidates

In the upper chamber, only two districts out of 50 saw the two parties split the contests at the presidential and state senate. 

In District 19, Obama won by a little over 500 votes, but the Republican won the state senate seat with 54% of the vote.  In District 25, Romney won with 58% while the Democrat claimed the senate seat with 53% of the vote.

One could attribute the strong correlation in both chambers between the presidential and state legislative races to the drawing of district lines that favor one party over another from the top of the ballot down. 

But if the districts were drawn without regards to party affiliation, past election results, and ignorance of an incumbent’s address, the legislative races in North Carolina might reflect a long-held belief of American democracy: that the voters should pick the candidates, rather than the candidates picking the voters.

Welcome a new addition to NC Politics blogs

Welcome to Thomas Mills' new blog about North Carolina politics: http://www.politicsnc.com/

So Now What Happens Inside SCOTUS?

This entry appears at WFAE's The Party Line: 

So now the briefs and oral arguments are filed in the same-sex marriage cases with the U.S. Supreme Court—now what?

As probably one of the least transparent institutions of our government, the court’s decision-making process is left up solely to the nine members of the high court.  But we do know, from the research on judicial politics in political science, that this period between the court’s public arguments and the release of a decision (expected in late June) can be just as crucial as any public discussion.

Typically at the end of a week of oral arguments, the justices will gather in the court’s conference room to deliberate on the cases heard that week.

The Chief Justice leads the discussion and moves the deliberation along from justice to justice.  Each associate justice has the opportunity to present their perspective to the other justices.  No other official, be it a clerk or staff member of the court, is allowed in the room during their deliberations. 

Following their discussions, the justices take their votes (if not already determined by their discussions).  This is just the opening stage of the process, though, in that whichever side gains the critical number of votes early on (5 in the case of 9 justices), the real process of voting comes with the opinion writing.

This process of opinion writing turns into a critical component of negotiations and deliberations on paper between the various justices.  Based on some “tea-leave readings” by some commentators, the DOMA case appears to have at least 5 members of the court (the four more liberal justices—Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan—joined by the “swing” justice, Kennedy) on striking down the federal law. 

California’s Proposition 8 case appears to be truly up in the air as to how the court will decide it.

One other critical facet is the role of the Chief Justice in the opinion writing stage. If Chief Justice Roberts is in the majority, the chief has the option of assigning a justice to write an opinion for the majority, or could assign the opinion to himself. 

This could mean that if the Chief Justice wants to control who writes the opinion, he would vote with the liberals and could assign it to Kennedy, thereby getting potentially a more moderate decision that the four liberals would want.  If Roberts isn’t in the majority, then the senior associate justice in the majority would control the opinion assignment, and that’s Anthony Kennedy. 

During the opinion writing stage, justices send their drafts back and forth, seeking comments and suggestions.  Sometimes justices can change their votes during this stage, moving from the minority to the majority if there are accommodations made to include their viewpoints.

Othertimes, the “majority” opinion can be badly splintered across the justices, with some justices supporting different sections of the opinion (what some law students call an “Excel” opinion, because you need a spreadsheet to keep up with who is in the majority at what point in the opinion). 

This can create a coalition of justices supporting different parts under different judicial reasonings.

But pointing back to the oral arguments discussion and the eventual opinion released, things can change dramatically, as in the case of Chief Justice Roberts—usually associated with the more conservative justices—who spared Obamacare from an unconstitutional ruling. 

The Affordable Care Act decision, in which it appeared to be a 4-1-4 ruling, aparently came about due to Chief Justice Roberts apparently switching his vote during the opinion crafting stage. 

This process of negotating and bargaining during the opinion writing stage can be one of the most influential components to the eventual decision by the Supreme Court, but one that is often hidden from public view.

And now the country waits to hear the high court’s ruling and reasoning. 

Can The GOP Appeal to Voters Who Roll Their Eyes?

This blog post appears at WFAE's The Party Line and includes the graphics for the 2012 general election that was not included there.

In their rather blunt assessment of the debacle that was the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee came to a simple conclusion: we can’t continue down the path we’re currently on and remain political relevant.

In particular, the report acknowledged that “[y]oung voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us” (page 4).

With North Carolina being the closest state that the GOP presidential candidate won in 2012 and that continues to be a battleground presidential state, the Republicans should also look more in-depth at these two voting blocs to see what specifically they are up against in future electoral contests.

In the 2012 general election, voters who were 18-25 years old made up 10% of the ballots cast, while those 26-40 were 22%, those 41-65 were 48%, and those 66 and older were 20% of the ballots cast.

Granted, 10% of the total electorate isn’t that much, but considering that Romney won this state by only 2% out of 4.6 million votes cast, GOP and Democratic strategists should investigate their perspectives. 

If you look at the party registration figures within these various age groups, you will find the reason why GOP is bringing new resolve to attracting younger voters.

For those voters who entered the political realm in 2012, barely a quarter of them were registered Republicans.  Among the next age group, registered Republicans were tied with registered unaffiliated voters, which should be a worrisome sign for the Grand Old Party. 

Within the youngest voter bracket, the party registration figures between white votes and non-white voters show a devastating difference between the two groups.

Only 4% of non-white voters were registered Republicans, in comparison to non-Hispanic/Latino white voters, a plurality (42%) a plurality of whom were registered Republicans.

Granted, we would expect Southern white voters to lean Republican, but the groups that are experiencing the largest growth in population, and soon to be electoral strength, are non-white voters. 

In breaking down non-white voters casting ballots, we would expect black voters to be overwhelmingly registered Democrats, and the numbers from last year’s general election show that 81% of 18-25 year old black voters were registered Democrats, with 17% being registered unaffiliated. Only 2% of young black voters were registered Republicans.

Among the other key demographic group, Hispanic/Latino voters, registered Democrats made up nearly half of each age group, but as you go from older to younger Hispanic/Latino voters, the percentage of registered Republicans drops from 25% to 13%. 

If your party can’t even get a growing population to register with your party, how do you expect them to vote for your part?  The only saving grace for the GOP among NC Hispanic/Latino voters is the fact that 38% of young voters are registered unaffiliated, and so they may be open to future persuasion.

But if the national party choose to continue its current trajectory, that of being overwhelmingly white and older, it will work its way into minority status at the national level.

Andrew Kohut, former president of the Pew Research Center, has written that the Republican Party has found itself “estranged from America.”

According to the Pew Research Center, a plurality of GOP (45%) identify themselves as “staunch conservatives,” and of these Republicans, 92% are white.  This group is also male, Protestant, and at least 50 years old. 

And among this significant group within the GOP, the animosity to President Obama and the view that the growing number of Latinos in America is a “change for the worst” may not allow the party move its message into one that is more welcoming to minorities and young voters. 

As I’ve noted before, North Carolina’s new status of presidential battleground state may offer the national GOP a chance to roadtest a new message to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.  But if the members behind the party refuse to accept the “new message,” it doesn’t matter how many Facebook pages, tweets, or other social media initiatives the party develops.

Nationally, the Grand Old Party could continue to find itself the “not-so-Grand and very Old white Party.”