Dig beneath the public rollout, and there’s a roster of scientific advisors that provides a clue as to where it’s headed. Listed are some of the best leaders and technology developers in understanding circuit-level brain function. It’s a promising start. I predict that next we’ll see new Requests for Applications (RFAs) issued by NIH and NSF. That would be a prosaic route, but without a single central goal…let a hundred flowers bloom!

Finally…here I am on Melissa Harris-Perry’s program to talk about the BRAIN Initiative. NBC has split it into Part 1 (BRAIN Initiative), Part 2 (implications for Alzheimer’s), and Part 3 (what brain scans do — and don’t — reveal in individuals). Watch me spar with the pundits.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

You can read the whole review here! (direct link to PDF)

Thanks to commenters on this topic. Your feedback has shaped my thinking on this subject. I recall being skeptical that redistricting could have a major effect. As it turns out, the effects of partisan redistricting helped Republicans far more than I expected.

One reason for my skepticism is that the the effect was clustered tightly in a handful of swing states. My pre-election calculations did not look for state-specific effects (though they were still fairly accurate); it was only after the election that I developed the right statistical tools. All extreme partisan gerrymanders were done in states with GOP-controlled redistricting. Furthermore, they are swing states, putting them on a knife edge and making them places where gerrymandering could help eke out extra wins.

First, some links to previous essays. Then some answers to your questions.

October 4, 2012, “The Very Hungry Gerrymander“: I showed how partisan redistricting tilted the overall playing field for House elections. At the time, I estimated that the effect was equivalent to 13 seats (not too far off) and less than 2% of the popular vote (this was a serious underestimate).

December 30, 2012, “Gerrymanders (Part 1): Busting the ‘both-sides-do-it’ myth“: Here I figured out a general approach to identify specific offending states. The result: seven Republican-controlled gerrymanders, one Democratic-controlled.

January 2, 2012, “Gerrymanders (Part 2): How many voters were disenfranchised?“ Here I estimated the effective disenfranchisement of millions of Democratic voters, hundreds of thousands of GOP voters. There are different ways to do it, but the ratio is always similar.

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Some questions with my replies:

It seems that an obvious solution is proportional representation: dividing up each state delegation by the percentage of the vote, and letting the political parties put up slates of candidates.

The multidistrict idea has logical appeal. However, it’s never been done in the US. People like being able to contact their own Congressman. In my view this proposal is a nonstarter. From the point of view of implementing actual change, it is impractical and a pipe dream to suggest it.

However, this does raise a logical issue, which is that clustering of voters is sometimes deemed to be good. The Voting Rights Act as implemented allows the implementation of things like “majority-minority” districts, where a small minority like blacks or Hispanics are packed together. In cases where a minority is far smaller than 50%, this is necessary.

The general principle is proportionality: If you’re 10-30% of the population (minority groups), packing is your only hope. If you’re 40-50% of the population, than packing can leave you out in the cold. I agree that an explicit proportional system addresses this problem. I just think it’s unavailable as a tool given our current legal framework. Of course, that framework could change someday.

Political scientists have claimed that the inherent clustering of Democrats in cities has led to a significant partisan imbalance that is structural (“districting”) rather than redistricting. Is that true?

This claim, made by political scientists, might have been true in past elections at a national level. But state-by-state, and this year nationwide thanks to partisan asymmetry, it is false. I note with emphasis that this essay by Stuart Rothenburg is incorrect.

(1) Here is another demonstration. This graph shows what fraction of the two-party vote would have been needed for Democrats to control the House of Representatives.

The procedure was:

1. Calculate the % two-party vote for all 435 districts.
2. Calculate the shift in vote needed to make an outcome of exactly 218 Democratic seats.
3. Add this shift to the national % Democratic vote.

The colored horizontal line segments indicate which party was in control. Generally, the out-party needs a bit more than 50% of the two-party vote to gain control. This extra barrier is an advantage for the incumbent party. The 2012 value is unusually high – though interestingly, it’s matched by 2004.

I note that dealing with uncontested races is a challenge. For instance, the 2006 data point is distorted by the fact that there were 47 uncontested races won by Democrats (versus only 10 won by Republicans). Forty-seven is an unusually high number. With other definitions, this data point is more comparable to 1996-2004.

(2) Here is another demonstration. This is an example of the resampling analysis I used for the NYT piece.

Green points indicate resampling from all districts (minus at-large and gerrymandered states). Black points indicate resampling from the same districts, but furthermore removing high-density and urbanized states. As you can see, the green and black clouds are basically in line. The red circle is a the actual seat breakdown of seven strong GOP gerrymanders: PA, OH, MI, NC, VA, FL, and IN.

Two conclusions here: (1) urbanized states and all states behave similarly when resampled, and (2) the effect of partisan gerrymandering dwarfs whatever variations are present at a national level.

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I’ll post a more questions as they arise.

Some of you thought that the effect I have detected – antidemocratic outcomes in PA, OH, MI, NC, VA, FL, and IN in 2012…

…was somehow peculiar to their population patterns. I’ve been doing analysis showing that the effect wasn’t there in 2010, just two years earlier. I could polish that up to show later.

However, now it’s unnecessary. Republicans have basically owned up in a strategy memo:

As the 2010 Census approached, the RSLC began planning for the subsequent election cycle, formulating a strategy to keep or win Republican control of state legislatures with the largest impact on congressional redistricting as a result of reapportionment. That effort, the REDistricting MAjority Project (REDMAP), focused critical resources on legislative chambers in states projected to gain or lose congressional seats in 2011 based on Census data.

Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.

To fund the initiative, the RSLC raised more than $30 million in 2009-2010, and invested $18 million after Labor Day 2010 alone. Specifically, the RSLC…

Spent nearly $1 million in Pennsylvania House races, targeting and winning three of the toughest races in the state.
Spent nearly $1 million in Ohio House races, targeting six seats, five of which were won by Republicans. Notably, President Obama carried five of these six legislative districts in 2008.
Spent $1 million in Michigan working with the Michigan House Republican Campaign Committee and Michigan Republican Party to pick up 20 seats.
Spent $1.1 million in Wisconsin to take control of the Senate and Assembly.

So there you have it. Read the whole thing – it’s illuminating.

This week there’s a new layer: Virgnia state Senator Charles Carrico is sponsoring a plan to allocate his state’s electoral votes by district. This would lead to a mismatch between the statewide popular vote and EV outcomes – just as it has for their Congressional delegation. For instance, the popular vote there was Obama 51%, Romney 48%. But under the new plan, the electoral outcome would be Romney 9 EV, Obama 4 EV.

What’s interesting about this scheme is that it basically pits the interests of the national Republican party against the interests of Virginia voters. Virginia is both a large state and a swing state, and was therefore of great interest to the Obama and Romney campaigns.

Last year, individual voters in Virginia had a lot of influence in the national election. Look in The Power Of Your Vote in the right sidebar. You will see that they were more influential than voters in all but a handful of states.

Such a mechanism is not inherently antidemocratic: in our current system, overall national opinion is measured by Electoral College rules that are largely uniform – and end up mostly in line with the popular vote.

However, Carrico’s rule change would have two effects. One is the outcome desired by RNC chair Reince Priebus: control over electoral vote allocation by the redistricting process. In this scenario, the flaws of the Electoral College are magnified, not reduced.

This leads to the second effect: only one or two districts in Virginia would be up for grabs. Virginia’s power would therefore be reduced to that of South Dakota. No offense to South Dakota, but I don’t think Virginia voters will like that. However annoying it is to live in a swing state in an election year, it’s better than being ignored.

One analysis of this type of rules change misses the point entirely, pointing out that changing all states to Nebraska/Maine allocation rules (1 EV for each district, plus 2 EV for the state’s vote winner) would have produced a Romney win in the last election, 273-265. However, note that the push for change is only occurring in swing states – the same ones where gerrymandering has succeeded to such new extremes. In this respect, a theme has emerged that dates back to Bush v. Gore in 2000, and has continued with voter-ID laws: the goal is to win near-tied situations. It’s an impressive long-term strategy.

Journalist Paul H.Rosenberg writes:

I still don’t grasp how your methodology is supposed to identify non-geographic partisan gerrymandering as a distinct phenomenon. If it did, that would be super. But I just don’t follow…..it doesn’t bother me — at this stage, anyway — to ignore other concerns, such as minority representation. I just want to understand the logic dividing geographic impacts on redisctricting from all the rest. Lumping all the rest under “potentially partisan” makes perfect sense to me.

Here’s my take. The general idea is that the US is diverse in many ways: population density, partisan preference, and ethnicity/interest groups. Given that diversity, we can get a sense for what these factors could do to the partisan makeup of a Congressional delegation, by sampling districts around the country to see how they would add up to State X’s vote totals.

My approach is built on the idea that one can account for the general relationship between all this diversity and seat counts. It includes all the factors above. What is left is factors that are peculiar to a state. Since all large states have cities within them, that is not a factor that can account for a particular state’s outcome being different.

Probably the right way to resolve this is to do the same calculation using 2002-2010 House election results. I will do that in the near future using the same approach. If there’s a big jump in the index I have designed from 2010 to 2012, that would indicate that something happened in 2011. Which brings us back to redistricting.

Paul also suggested separating states into three tiers of urbanization. That would certainly address the urbanization-traps-Democrats idea. I have found a certain lack of clarity as to the relative size of these effects. My current guess is that gerrymandering’s overall effect is about 2-3 times as large as that of urbanization. But that’s strictly a gut feeling.

Several people described some close-up views of redistricting. Brent Benson, who writes the blog Mass. Numbers, reports:

I had a first-hand look at the redistricting process in Massachusetts as my wife participated in the process as a State Representative. In my opinion, the Democratic supermajority in the Massachusetts state legislature bent over backwards to not gerrymander, going along with your proposition that U.S. gerrymandering is not symmetrical. I actually didn’t see much emphasis on incumbent protection in MA at the Congressional level, to the point that Barney Frank retired rather than face running in a district in which he didn’t feel comfortable and John Tierney came within a a few votes of losing his seat. That being said, all of the Congressional Dems won in MA.

Before anyone makes light of that last sentence…in six races where Massachusetts candidates had opponents, the vote share was 66% D, 34% R (and across all districts, it was 75% D, 25% R). Based on these numbers, a 9-0 split is well within expectations.

S.A. gave a view from Ohio:

Here in Ohio, they tried to institute an “anti-gerrymandering” issue using a citizen’s commission to replace the legislature-drawn districts. It failed miserably because it was unfunded and it was confusing.

As a numbers guy, I thought, “why not solve the gerrymandering problem numerically?” In other words, make some simple, numerical rules, easy-to-measure, easy enough to program, and let the legislature do its gerrymander thing with tight handcuffs on? No “split-line” confusion or anything, use existing precincts, etc.

Illinois State Representative Mike Fortner writes:

As a member of the minority in Illinois, I didn’t have much impact on the map here, but I am an avid supporter of redistricting reform and competed in and won the 2011 Ohio Redistricting Competition. Even though I am a Republican, the Democrats in Ohio used one of my entries as their proposal for Ohio congressional districts.

Since then, I have been developing a neutral redistricting model based on graph theory. It is based on geographic criteria, but some have claimed that any purely geographic model would be inherently biased in favor of Republicans. This is where your article peaked my interest, since it implies that any geographic bias is small compared to the effects of partisan gerrymandering. Your statistical model would seem to be one way to more thoroughly test that hypothesis.

I have started to apply my model to some of the states, but would like to confirm that it is sufficiently neutral. If you (or a colleague) are interested in testing the contention that there are sufficiently neutral criteria for creating districts, then I would offer a collaborative effort by supplying plans to test.

I heard from political scientists as well. Eric McGhee from PPIC and The Monkey Cage had useful comments, focusing in part on incumbency. An excerpt:

First, I think your analysis is more similar to Nicholas Goedert’s Monkey Cage post than you might think…both you and Nick get a total redistricting effect of about 12 seats for Republicans under a counterfactual where every state uses an independent commission. Second, I don’t think you can add this first effect to the 6 or 7 seats that you and I found for the 2011 redistricting. The 2011 effect is (presumably) due to increased Republican control….

[Finally], I hate to climb on my old hobbyhorse, but none of this analysis incorporates incumbency. It’s easy to discount the incumbency advantage because party is so important these days (indeed, the district presidential vote is a much, much better predictor than it used to be). Nonetheless, independent of district partisanship, there’s about a 10 point difference between a seat with a Democratic incumbent and one with a Republican incumbent….

One final thought: I’ve never argued that partisan gerrymanders don’t exist. Certainly, parties often *try* to gerrymander. Instead, I’ve argued (based on a lot of good poli sci evidence) that the intended results often don’t materialize, that there are many constraints that frustrate a party’s attempts at rigging the lines in the first place, that incumbency is often a big part of the story and further complicates efforts at lasting effects, and that any sort of national impact is usually difficult to find.

The first two points are good. Incumbency…this is connected to the question of building competitive districts, which is a priority for many redistricters.

But “Many constraints that frustrate a party’s attempts” to gerrymander? The evidence I’ve been laying out plainly contradicts this. Looking at Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, where a 50.6D-49.4R %vote split led to a 43R-18D seat split, clever people can find a way around those constraints.

Rob Richie from FairVote wants to find a way to toss the whole system nationally.

[Regarding nonpartisan redistricting commissions], progress has been slow and erratic – with the latest example being a massive rejection of reform in a statewide ballot measure in Ohio last year and a landslide vote to uphold Maryland’s gerrymandered congressional map. It’s hard to build a reform movement around independent redistricting…the message really is that one set of elites can do a better job structuring your representation than another group of elites….

So then the question becomes what might happen that could get us to a point where a national law could be imposed? What has a better chance of mobilizing people to fight for it — to have a coalition of key constituency groups that get something directly out of it? Although obviously a heavy lift, I think a statute to do fair voting has a much better chance of doing that, as it really empowers both individual voters and constituency groups in a way that is quite different than any single member district process. And it sure gets you to a whole different place if you win it.

Finally, I thank Corey Kane (soon to be Washington correspondent for the Houston Chronicle) for conversations on this subject some time back. He has a recent piece on gerrymandering here.

Support for the environmental-lead/crime association has been building for some time, as described for example in these articles by Rick Nevin and David Carpenter. Two key elements are there: (1) historical epidemiological data from many countries, and (2) a plausible biological mechanism (PDF): effects of lead on the developing brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, and on IQ.

This two-pronged argument is reminiscent of the linkage between smoking with cancer. I find it considerably more persuasive than the speculation by Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) that legal abortion was responsible for decreases in crime. That idea is based on just one study, lacks a convincing mechanism, and does not account for earlier increases in crime, which the lead hypothesis does.

After Kevin left, Jay and I continued our discussion, branching off into child development, individuality, and many other topics from my book Welcome To Your Brain (currently on sale!). It was fun – check it out here.

Update, Saturday: here’s just the part of the program on lead and crime.

Redistricting is a large and sometimes arcane subject. Take a look at the comments section for the last post. Some of you are quite knowledgeable on the subject. Others are new to it. Before I continue, I’ll lay out some basics, and explain what it is about this problem that interests me.

In the US system, the House of Representatives is elected on the basis of districts. State boundaries are fixed, and the number of Representatives in each state is determined after the Census, which occurs every 10 years. It is left to each state how to elect its Representatives. The current standard practice is that somebody draws up districts, each of which then elects one Representative. A similar procedure is used to determine state-legislature districts.

In such a system, one issue is how to represent the interests of subgroups such as political parties and ethnic minorities. If a minority is small, they can end up on the losing side of every election. Indeed, a general principle of the current district system is that a given fraction of the vote below 50% will usually lead to a fraction of the seats much smaller than 50%. One solution is to craft districts that cluster groups with shared interests, as was recently done in New York state. Another solution advocated by several commenters was that of multi-member districts. Overall, the topic is one of  ”good government,” which is worthwhile…but not my focus. I do not think it is the central crisis. For purposes of the analysis I have been doing, then, I am using the current standard district system, as practiced across the nation, as a reference for “fairness.”

I also won’t delve too far into structural challenges that arise from the fact that dense populations tilt Democratic, while sparse populations tilt Republican. It is worth understanding what is baked into the system, and has been analyzed by John Sides and others. To the extent that there is an action item, it is in the “good government” category: redistricters of good will could address it wisely if they chose to.

Which brings us to the topic I do care about: “bad government.” My goal is to identify actions that purposely separate the legislative process from overall popular will. It can also happen when redistricting is under the control of partisan legislators, who can (and do) protect incumbents or an entire political party. In the extreme, fewer than 50% of voters can elect more than 50% of the Representatives. In addition, the construction of polarized districts can leave policy positions at the mercy of primary voters.

In Part 1, I laid out a state-level measure of partisan gerrymandering: the number of seats by which a delegation differs from a “typical” national outcome. Here it is, applied to all 50 states.

This is calculated using the vote outcomes of non-extreme states (shaded in gray) to feed the simulations. Red shading indicates Republican Party control over redistricting, blue indicates Democratic Party control, and black indicates nonpartisan commission (AZ) or a court-ordered map (TX).

(I should say that using nongerrymandered districts for the simulations only increases the importance of the “what-if” scenario. Repairing the red-state gerrymandering would lead to a swing of 30-34 seats toward Democrats; repairing the blue state of Illinois would lead to a swing of 2-4 seats toward Republicans.

Finally, applying the gray-states rules to all states would give a mean outcome of 215 D, 220 R, with some variability. That’s compared with the House margin of control starting Thursday, a 33-seat margin of 234 R, 201 D. So if the outlier states had been districted according to prevailing standards, a switch in control this year would have been within reach. At a minimum, power would be more evenly balanced and the possibility of paralysis reduced.

It is safe to say that these outcomes did not arise by chance. Out of 10 states with extreme outcomes, 8 favored the party that controlled the process, and two were under the control of a nonpartisan commission. Indeed, the extreme cases closely match a redistricting watchlist published by the Washington Post in March 2011. From that list, only Nevada and New York have escaped this Hall of Shame.

In the case of the commission-drawn and court-ordered maps, it is possible to see why the Arizona GOP would be displeased. They also didn’t like the fact that there were too many competitive districts, which is usually a good-government goal. Texas is interesting because the redistricting was court-ordered, post-Tom DeLay. 60% of Texas voters voted for Republicans to elect 24 out of 36 seats, which sounds like a lot but is a substantial underperformance.

Now let’s estimate how many voters were disenfranchised by looking at the simulation results:

In the seven Republican-controlled states, the total votes cast were 16.22 million (50.8%) for Republicans, 15.68 million (49.2%) for Democrats for a 74 R, 32 D outcome. The simulations indicate that this seat split would normally only require 11.7 million Democratic votes. In other words, 4 million Democratic voters in seven states were disenfranchised.

In Illinois, the total votes cast were 2.74 million (55.4%) for Democrats, 2.21 million (44.6%) for Republicans for a 12 D, 6 R outcome. In this case, 1.8 million Republican votes would have been “enough” to elect this delegation, so that about 400,000 Illinois Republican voters were disenfranchised.

Therefore the disenfranchisement due to partisan-controlled redistricting was a total of 4.4 million voters from both parties. Democrats  were disenfranchised more than Republicans, at a ratio of 10:1.

I will conclude by saying that the problem of partisan gerrymandering has been identified as a major problem, both by nonpartisan Congressional scholars Mann and Ornstein (in book and column), and recently by partisan commenter David Atkins. The problem is finding a remedy. Republicans had an extremely lucky year in 2010, when they assumed control of a record number of legislatures – and therefore control over redistricting.

At this point, remedies would fall in the following general categories:

1. Persuading courts of the degree of disenfranchisement;
2. Resolving issues at the ballot box; and
3. Improvements in the future redistricting process.

This all gets into the question of how to fix “bad government.” That’s a big topic. One starting point would be the California example.

(Mental note: If I ever meet the Worst Modeler recipient, Dick Morris, remember to avoid shaking hands. The whole particle-antiparticle thing. We’d annihilate or get stuck together. Either outcome is bad.)

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As current negotiations over the [fiscal cliff] / [austerity bomb] make clear, rank-and-file Republicans in the House of Representatives are not receptive to the policy implications  of November’s election. As correctly pointed out by Nate Silver,  members of Congress are increasingly insulated by the increasing polarization of their districts. Ever-larger victory margins reflect ever-safer re-election races.

However, Silver has also restated a common belief. He states that partisan gerrymandering is a symmetric problem, i.e. both Democrats and Republicans do it. Although both sides are potentially motivated, only one side has taken redistricting to extremes. Recent changes in partisan gerrymandering constitute one of the major crises facing our system of government (link to Mann/Ornstein book, a fellow Wonky winner).

Today I give an analysis that pinpoints some exceptional – and asymmetric – aspects of this year’s Congressional redistricting. I base this on criteria I have developed for identifying when a political party has been disenfranchised in a particular state. I conclude that the antidemocratic balance of power in the incoming Congress is driven by just a handful of states.

In this and coming posts I will address the following topics:

• Part 1: Developing a “tell” for partisan gerrymandering, and evidence for partisan asymmetry.
• Part 2: An estimate of how many people have been disenfranchised.
• Part 2/3: Steps that would re-enfranchise voters by 2020 or sooner.

Let’s start with some simple but telling examples. A minimum condition for a “representative” outcome is that within a Congressional delegation, the party receiving more votes should end up with more Congressional seats.

As an example, consider Colorado. There, 51.4% of the two-party vote went to Republican candidates, and 4 out of 7 representatives will be Republicans. Colorado’s delegation therefore represents its partisans fairly. (As an aside, it is not required that vote-share and seat-share follow the same proportions. Typically, popular margins translate to proportionally larger seat margins. It’s like the Electoral College.)

In the November election, the following groups failed to meet this minimum representativeness criterion:

In these five states – and in the nation as a whole – the partisan interests of voters are not being represented fairly. Details can be found in a piece by Griff Palmer and Michael Cooper in the New York Times.

Now I will show a way to generalize this point to all states, even in cases when the seat majority and popular-vote majority are out of whack even though they belong to the same party.

Among political scientists, it is often suggested that imbalances like this are not caused by partisan redistricting, but by other “structural” factors such as concentration of Democrats in urban areas. (This is not true. Let’s come back to that later.)

Instead, let’s ask a simple question. If a given state’s popular House vote were split into differently selected districts, what would its Congressional delegation look like?

We can do this by using all 435 House race outcomes. For a state X with N districts, calculate the total popular vote across all N districts. Now pick N races from around the country at random and add up their vote totals. If their vote total matches X’s actual popular vote within 0.5%, score it as a comparable simulation. Because this approach uses existing districts, it uses as a baseline the “structural” advantages that are present nationwide*. In other words, it’s a measure for distortions in representativeness that are specific to state X.

As an aside, note that my approach does not require the drawing of actual districts. Doing that properly requires professional redistricting software and much time. (Update: One disadvantage of my approach is that it includes in its baseline the shift in district partisan bias that happened in 2011 as a consequence of redistricting. So what I am calculating here does not include the across-the-board difference I showed in my pre-election analysis*.)

Here are 1000 “simulated delegations” for Pennsylvania, along with the actual outcome in red.

It is apparent that most possible redistrictings would have resulted in a more equitable Congressional delegation. For outcomes with the same popular-vote split (50.7% D, 49.3% R), 1000 simulations give a median result of 8 Democratic, 10 Republican seats (average, 8.3 D). The actual outcome was 5 Democratic, 13 Republican. In fact, only 1 of the 1000 simulations led to such a lopsided split. And indeed, Pennsylvania legislators are known to have gone to extremes to favor Republicans during redistricting.

How much structural imabalance is there here? In this case, the structural imbalance is 9-8.3=0.7 seats. Partisan gerrymandering added a further imbalance of 8.3-5=3.3 seats. In other words, gerrymandering’s contribution to Pennsylvania’s partisan outcome was about five times as large as the effect of overall structural advantages.

Here is a listing of top offenders for whom the partisan discrepancy was 1.0 seat or greater.

The left column is coded by which party controlled redistricting. In black are a court-ordered redistricting (TX) and a nonpartisan commission (AZ). Note that California did not make this list, despite the fact that their redistricting was the focus of a loosely-argued ProPublica article. Basically, California votes Democratic and has a Congressional delegation whose party composition reflects the fact accurately and fairly.

There are some simple lessons to take away from this.

• Republican-controlled redistricting led to a swing in margin of at least* 26 seats, almost as large as the 31-seat majority of the new Congress. Those actions created a new power reality in the House – or more accurately, retained the old power reality.
• In the states listed above, the net effect of both parties’ redistricting combined was R+11.5 seats. Putting all of this redistricting into nonpartisan commissions would lead to a swing of at least 23 seats. The resulting seat count would be 213 D, 222 R or even closer. It is possible that in the absence of partisan gerrymandering, control would have been within reach for the Democrats.

I will end today with a graph showing the total effect of Republican-controlled redistricting in six states: PA, OH, NC, MI, VA, and IN.

In the next post I’ll show how to convert these results to an estimate of disenfranchisement, and suggest possibilities for future elections and activism.

Postscript to political scientists: If this topic interests you, by all means be in touch. This is original research. I would welcome collaboration (and priority).

*Update, 7:57pm: By using this year’s vote totals, I am also counting in the baseline the overall shift in partisan voting index (PVI) that took place in this year’s redistricting. In other words, the baseline itself tilts Republican because gerrymandering is still in it – it’s just “scrambled” all over the country. This baseline corresponds to the calculations I did in October and November – that’s why the black points intersect the green line at >50%. The upshot is that the total effects of partisan redistricting are, overall, even larger than what I have highlighted today.

The concept of a “physics gene” or “poetry gene” might not be a joke. Intellectual predispositions are likely to be driven in part by genes – including those that drive autism, mood disorders, and substance abuse.

My students and I are building a tool to measure intellectual phenotypes. To participate, take our brief survey. Continue here…

First, I am required to get your informed consent, which is required by Princeton University for any person involved in a research study conducted by investigators at the University. Our study has been approved by the University’s Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects.

I understand that I will be asked to complete a questionnaire about my intellectual interests and family history of neuropsychiatric disorders. The researchers will use this information in the development of a standardized inventory of intellectual interests. I understand that I will not be directly compensated for this study, and that my answers will be made anonymous.

If you acknowledge the above, then please proceed to take the survey here.

Now that you’re back…are you curious about the rationale? Basically, it’s this. Many neuropsychiatric disorders are caused in part by combinations of genes. We suspect that diversity of normal minds is also genetically driven – that the blank slate we are ostensibly born with is not actually blank.

Once we have a tool to classify people’s interests, we can do a lot with genetic information (not yours!). Believe it or not, such a survey-based tool does not exist, as far as we know.

I’ll gladly discuss it further in comments. If you are impatient… To learn more, read this, this, and this.

For the new breed of quants:

For the old-school:

Travel safely. Watch out for enormous poodles.