Democrats' "wasted votes" and "cheap seats": Where you live impacts how much your vote counts

Most of the attention paid to political geography this year has focused on the presidential race and the shrinking number of swing states that will decide the race. The impact of America’s geography and its effects on how Americans are represented, however, runs much deeper, impacting the balance of power in Congress and state legislatures.

The two top presidential candidates have spent the bulk of their time in seven states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — because other states are so skewed toward Democrats or Republicans that they are relatively uncompetitive.

This election marks a historic low point in the number of competitive states in a presidential election. In 2020, eight states were decided by fewer than five points, down from 11 in 2016. In 2004, there were also 11 competitive states, and in 1992, there were 17 states where the winner was decided by fewer than five points.

David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, told Salon that the “continued shrinking of the electoral battleground” in 2024 is one of the biggest stories he’s following in how geography affects Americans’ representation.

“The fact that we have an election that is so close nationally but we have only seven states that are in play is a historic low point,” Hopkins said. 

Hopkins explained that the shirking of the electoral battleground comes down to the shifting coalitions that make up the Democratic and Republican parties and how, in recent history, the driver behind electoral trends has mainly been shifting party identifications and voting patterns among white Americans. 

According to the American National Election Studies Cumulative File, Democrats have gone from having a net 11-point advantage over Republicans in terms of party affiliation among white voters in 1980 to a net 16-point deficit among white voters in 2020. Over the same period, net party affiliation among nonwhite voters has swung back and forth in some elections but has not significantly trended in either direction.

In Hopkins’ assessment, the most obvious way this has distorted representation in the United States is in the Senate, where Republicans have come to enjoy an advantage due to the “the fact that all the square states in the middle of the country get an equal number of senators” and white, non-college-educated voters decide elections in these states. In the presidential races, this has meant that states that were once competitive as recently as 2008, like Montana, Missouri and Indiana, have become uncompetitive. 

“What’s kept the Democrats in the game is that the candidates that Republicans have picked have been so weak that they’ve blown a lot of the winnable races,” Hopkins said. “That’s been the equalizer for Democrats.”

The flip side of this trend is that parts of the country that are ethnically diverse or have a higher proportion of more educated voters have been shifting towards Democrats. The problem for Democrats, however, is that cities are historically underrepresented in government at both the national level and the state level.

Jonathan Rodden, the author of “Why Cities Lose,” notes that in both state legislatures and the House of Representatives, Democrats tend to win a smaller proportion of seats compared to the total statewide or nationwide vote share they received while the opposite has been true for Republicans in recent decades.

The problem for Democrats is twofold. First, their supporters are concentrated in cities, where they tend to win by big margins, sometimes by 50 or 60 points. The other is that some of their voters are located in uncompetitive rural Republican-leaning districts. From Rodden’s perspective, this means that Democrats are casting “wasted votes” in both the districts where they win by big margins and where they lose by big margins.

From an electoral perspective, having a large concentration of support in a relatively small area, as Democrats have in cities, is an inefficient distribution of votes. Take the 2022 U.S. House results in Georgia for example. Democrats received 48% of the popular House vote to Republicans’ 51%. However, they only won five of the state’s 14 congressional seats. The Alabama 2022 House results are even more drastic, with Democrats winning 48% of the popular vote there but just one of the state’s seven congressional seats.

The issue is compounded because the same inefficient geographic distribution of votes makes it more difficult for Democrats to win control of state legislatures, the body that draws both the state legislative and congressional districts in most states. This means that Republicans, in turn, can keep drawing districts that ensure that many Democratic votes are wasted.

North Carolina provides a good example of this phenomenon. In statewide elections, Democrats are competitive and they have won the governorship in every election since 2016. At the same time, Democrats have not controlled either chamber of the state legislature since 2010.

Jonathan Cervas, a political scientist and expert on redistricting, told Salon that this isn’t the only dynamic that creates distortion in the House of Representatives. Democrats also dominate in seats known as “cheap seats” — seats that could be theoretically won with a smaller number of votes than most.

This is because all congressional seats represent a similar number of people — 761,000 on average. The number of voters in districts, however, varies. This is because both citizens and noncitizens are counted in the census and this data is then used to apportion seats. The urban areas where immigrants tend to be concentrated are also the seats where Democrats tend to win by large margins, meaning their electoral power is often concentrated in districts that could theoretically be won with fewer votes than the average district.

“When you start adding that up nationally, there’s a big distortion,” Cervas said. “We know that there’s a distortion but we don’t know what the number is.”

Cervas said that Democrats also face another geographic issue in House elections and other races run in drawn districts. Even in parts of the country where Democrats have controlled redistricting, it can be difficult to actually draw districts to maximize the efficiency of urban voters.

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Although New York now uses an independent redistricting commission, there is an upper limit to how much Democrats would be able to gerrymander seats in their favor even if they were in control of the process. This limit comes from the state’s geography. Because so many voters are packed into a small area on the coast with geographic bottlenecks connecting New York City to the rest of the state, it’s difficult to draw districts that maximize the efficiency of urban voters and meet the requirements for congressional districts.

Cervas noted that, while these effects have recently negatively affected Democrats’ electoral fortunes, the impact that the distortion has on partisan politics has shifted throughout history and alongside coalitional shifts in the parties. Gains made by Republicans among Latino and Hispanic Americans, for example, have failed to gain the party a proportional number of House seats because many of the populations they’ve made gains among are located in cities, where Democrats currently dominate.

In terms of what to watch in 2024, James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, told Salon that he is watching to see whether the concerted effort Democrats have made to appeal to rural and exurban voters this cycle will be able to stem the bleeding in those areas.

“It seems like there’s some kind of credibility issue that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has with reaching these rural voters,” Gimpel said. “We’ll see whether a Minnesota governor and a former prosecutor from San Francisco can make the sale.”

In his view, the rural drift away from Democrats over the past 40 years stems from a failure to deliver on economic promises over that period. In Gimpel’s assessment, voters in rural areas have seen one administration follow another with little impact on their economic conditions. So, Gimpel said, they’ve begun to prioritize cultural issues where they take a more "traditionalist" view over economic issues in voting, even though lower-income rural Americans and urban progressives might be natural allies on economic issues.

“They miss the boom periods, their communities are probably in slow decline due to population loss,” Gimpel said. “The bottom line is that nothing really changes in terms of economic status.”