All the NJ Republican operatives I have spoken to in the last year, up to and including Gov. Chris Christie himself, were cautiously optimistic that this year the state’s legislative maps would be redrawn in a way that helped Republicans — that is, in a way that reflected reality.
But Christie said of the new map approved yesterday that it is “only slightly better” than the previous one, which he called “unfair and unconstitutional.” The new map was drawn by Democrats, and approved by an 11-person redistricting commission after Rutgers public policy professor Alan Rosenthal cast a tie-breaking vote in its favor.
How bad was the old map? From Jack Collins, a former NJ state assembly speaker and one-time member of the state’s apportionment committee:
The repeated failures to reflect the will of the voters can be easily illustrated — by totaling the votes in all legislative races statewide and comparing each party’s overall share of the vote with the percentage of seats each held in the Assembly and Senate for the decade’s three Senate elections and five Assembly elections.
In three instances, the party that received a majority of the votes cast statewide did not win a majority of the seats: in the Senate for 2003, the Republicans received 53 percent of the vote but won only 45 percent of the seats. In the Assembly for 2003, the Republicans received 51 percent of the vote but won only 41 percent of the seats. And in the Assembly for 2009, the Republicans received 52 percent of the vote but won only 41 percent of the seats.
But most striking is the 2009 elections where the Democratic share of the two-party vote for governor fell to the lowest point in three decades, but Republicans were able to win only one additional Assembly seat even as Chris Christie convincingly beat Gov. Jon Corzine. Democrats still won 59 percent of the Assembly seats.
New Jersey is often thought of as a deep-blue state, and at the national level that’s certainly going to be true for a while. But thrice in the last decade the state has seen Republicans gain a majority of votes without gaining a majority of seats. If that’s not an unfair map, what is?