Thread by @paulgraveswa

Yesterday the four voting commissioners on the Washington redistricting commission released proposed legislative maps. Here's a little thread on something I really care about--competitive elections. #waleg #waelex

Each map has pros and cons, and each commissioner focused on different goods. My top focus was drawing as many competitive districts as possible. One salve for hyper-partisanship and division is more competitive elections.

Competitive districts are so important. Get rid of them and you have elections without choices. Increase their number and you encourage parties to recruit outstanding candidates who must appeal to voters across the spectrum.

Legislators from swing districts tend toward reasonableness thoughtfulness, and responsiveness; those from uncompetitive districts tend toward extremism, and often outright ignore the views of substantial minorities of their constituents.

But what's a good way to measure competitiveness? It's tough to use legislative or congressional results, because those races often have no or poor candidates and not much of what you would call actual races.

That's why political scientists (see James Fox) suggest using statewide results. Each vote counts the same across the state, so you get a good rough measure of representative partisan votes.

It's also tough to go back much farther than 2020. I considered including even 2016 results, but things have changed so much since then. E.g, in 2016, two big swing districts in Washington were 5 and 19. In 2020, incumbents there won by 20 points apiece.

So I landed on an average of 2020 statewide races, excluding the Lieutenant Governor's race because it pitted two democrats against one another. It might not be the perfect metric, and I'm open to others, but it also tracks with legislative races that were competitive.

If you overlay that 2020 statewide average over the current maps, you get six swing districts: 6, 10, 17. 25, 26, and 35. Those are swingy districts. Even 6, which has three R legislators but which Trump lost and where D candidates have had the lead on election nights.

If you overlay that 2020 statewide average over the proposed maps, here are the results. Red is R, Blue is D, Green is swing, which I define as +/- 3 points from 50/50.

Because I was focused on competitive districts, mine takes them from current 6 to 11. Among those, four (17, 18, 25, and 35) that are currently represented by all republicans get better for democrats.

@justjoefain's proposed map increases the number of swing districts to 8, while @aprilr_sims's and @BradyWalkinshaw's move them down to 3 apiece, out of 49. In other words, for the 93% of voters in 46 of 49 districts, the elections would be decided ahead of time.

I don't mean that to be harsh, and I respect April and Brady a great deal. They focused on other things. And I get it; the party currently in power will naturally try to reduce competitive districts to lock in majorities.

But I was especially disappointed to see this statement from @Tinapo, who chairs the state democratic party, which clams there is "nothing in the [Revised Code of Washington] about valuing competitiveness."

That's wrong on the law. RCW 44.05.090(5) requires the commission to "exercise its powers to provide fair and effective representation and to encourage electoral competition." I was grateful to see that statement corrected.

(And it's a good reminder that hyper-partisanship is poison. Among other things, it makes you overconfident and thus susceptible to basic mistakes, like misstating a simple law.)

That’s bad enough, but this was a misstatement in service of the argument that Washington needs *fewer* competitive elections. That’s so sad.

The people of Washington adopted the redistricting commission through the initiative, and they required us to work toward competitive districts precisely because they know that non-competitive districts lead directly to extremists.

We need reasonable, thoughtful, compassionate legislators. The surest way to get them is holding a lot of competitive elections.

When party bosses draw maps the way they do in some other states, things naturally tend toward ugly partisanship. Most party hacks are actually comfortable with extremes, as long as their extremes are in the majority. I think that's wrong.

That’s why I’m grateful we have an independent commission in Washington. I have every confidence that once we tune out the partisan nonsense and start negotiating in good faith, we can draw maps that fairly represent Washington.

#waleg #waelex