Drawing Boundaries
Iowa’s four congressional districts are redrawn after the U.S. census each decade. The models are done by computers, making sure no counties are cut in half, and that the four districts have roughly equal population. The models are not supposed to take into account voter registration, because that can vary from election to election.
An interesting quirk from last week’s election in Iowa. Of the state’s 99 counties, only five showed a majority for Democrat Kamala Harris for president. You probably could have figured that out before the vote; the counties were Polk, Story, Linn, Johnson, and Black Hawk. Black Hawk was close, but the other counties were pretty bright blue.
And each of those four fell within a different congressional district—Johnson in district 1, Linn in district 2, Polk in district 3 and Story in district 4. That intuitively makes sense…Linn, Polk, and Johnson are three of the four most populous counties in the state, so spreading them out makes sense.
But for the sake of conversation, what if the computer had spit out a district with both Story and Polk in it? That could easily have changed the outcome in the third district, especially if some of the rural areas of the district were moved to make room for Story. Sliding Linn into the same district as Johnson similarly would have led to a different winner, given the close nature of that race.
None of that happened, of course…but it does make the point of our divided our electorate is and how close our elections are. When the winning candidate tallies only 50 or 51 percent of the vote…it would not take much to shift things.
Just a reminder to those who want to use the “m” word—mandate—to refer to state or national races. A win is a win, to be sure…but not all wins are mandates.
