Locating the representational baseline: Republicans in Massachusetts

TL;DR

This paper investigates why Republicans in Massachusetts consistently underperform in House elections despite significant statewide support, attributing it to the structural distribution of votes rather than gerrymandering or candidate availability.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the voting distribution inherently favors Democratic delegation, showing that all valid districting plans lead to a Democratic majority regardless of district boundaries.

Findings

Republicans receive 30-40% of votes but rarely win seats.

The distribution of votes mathematically favors Democrats in districting.

Structural vote distribution explains the lack of Republican wins.

Abstract

Republican candidates often receive between 30 and 40 percent of the two-way vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census cycles, MA has held 9-10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means that a district can be won with as little as 6 percent of the statewide vote. Putting these two facts together, one may be surprised to learn that a Massachusetts Republican has not won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1994. We argue that the underperformance of Republicans in Massachusetts is not attributable to gerrymandering, nor to the failure of Republicans to field House candidates, but is a structural mathematical feature of the distribution of votes. For several of the elections studied here, there are more ways of building a valid districting plan than there are particles in the galaxy, and every one of them will produce a 9-0 Democratic delegation.