The Propublica Artlicle

The Propublica article has generated a lot of reaction all over the web. Basically Republicans are outraged that Democrats cheated and Democrats are saying they did none of the things in the article and that demographics and the Republican party "moving to the extreme right" in the last ten years. Dan Walters puts it best. The Democrats played politics. That's what they do. So did the Republicans. It wasn't as organized and there's no paper trail, but we didn't sit on our hands.

The idea that Republicans have been consistently losing popularity over the last decade is popular and incorrect. From 2000 to 2007 Republicans dropped 0.8% in registration, while Democrats dropped 2.9%. In raw numbers that was a 466,000 drop for Democrats and a 134,000 drop for Republicans. From 2009 to 2011 Democrats have dropped 0.5% and Republicans 0.2%. That's a Democratic drop of 152,000 and a Republican drop of 80,000.

Republicans have lost since 2000 and the Democrats haven't, but that was entirely based on the Obama registration drive in 2008. Democrats dropped more than Republicans during the first 7 years and the last 2. Democrats had an amazing one time blip. Anyone who actually does any research themselves can easily find this out. But they insist on repeating what's popular.

The low congressional seat total for Republicans isn't due to party unpopularity. It's due to the way congressional seats are allocated. Here's breaking down the seats by regions, with Democratic leaning, Republican leaning, and toss-ups.


In most of the state the congressional seat breakdown matches the Brown-Whitman percentages. The two areas that don't are the Bay Area and Los Angeles county. Let's look at the state as three regions: Bay Area, LA, and everywhere else.



In most of the state Republicans have an edge and do a bit better in the congressional seats. The GOP gets around 33% of the vote in the other two areas, and yet has 5% of the congressional seats. In other states Democrats yell that they get a greater percentage of the vote than the percent of districts Republicans have given them. In California? They don't bother to look at how a party that gets 43% of the vote statewide could end up with less than 30% of the assembly, senate, or congressional seats.

The Republicans can't fix this. They could increase their percentage of the vote by 10 points in LA county or the Bay area and pick up 0 seats. The Republican party has never been popular in these two areas and that's not going to change. The GOP is left to fight over the remaining 30 seats.