Monday, November 15, 2021

New Jersey and the Quasimander: Why We Need Proportional Representation

In the last twenty years the United States has seen its constitutional democratic deficits go from being latent problems that most Americans disregarded to being glaring crises that call into question America’s status as a democracy.

The electoral college, Senate malapportionment, judicial supremacy, gerrymandering, the Senate's monopoly on confirming judges, the routinization of the filibuster, and the extreme difficulty of amendment have all become more conspicuous, more consequential, and hence the subject of more criticism.  More thinkers about American politics see our structure of government as something that could only possibly work with heterogenous parties, not the polarized parties of today.

But What About the States?

I agree with criticisms of the national government and I am glad they are beginning to go mainstream. However, I’ve noticed that state governments are rarely criticized for their democratic deficits. I've also noticed that it’s far more common to give examples of how our democratic deficits hurt Democrats than it is to give examples of how they hurt Republicans.

This piece is an exposure of how New Jersey has a huge democratic deficit in its voting system, which consistently awards legislative Democrats a higher share of seats than they receive in the legislative popular vote. Also, in common with all other states and the federal government, New Jersey uses a voting system which makes it impossible for a non-Democrat or non-Republican to be elected.

This blog post is an argument that New Jersey’s voting system is guilty of creating unequal voting power and artificially limiting ideological, racial, age, gender, and professional diversity in the legislature.

New Jersey’s Quasimander

New Jersey’s legislative districts are drawn by a bipartisan commission, so technically we do not have a


gerrymander, but we have a disproportionate outcome that is tantamount to a gerrymander, a phenomenon I name a “Quasimander.”

The legislative popular vote for New Jersey is rarely reported, which is unfortunate because there is a repeated pattern of the Democrats gaining a seatcount in the legislature that is higher than their share of the legislative popular vote.

After the 2021 election, the Democrats will have 60% of the State Senate and 57.5% of the Assembly, but the popular vote for both chambers was 51.5% - 48.2%, Democrat to Republican, which approximately matches Phil Murphy’s 51% of the gubernatorial vote. The Republicans’ 48.2% comes despite not running candidates against Senators Joe Cryan and Teresa Ruiz, in Districts 20 and 29, respectively.  

The root cause of New Jersey’s power disparity is New Jersey’s use of single-winner districting.  Single-winner districting creates voting power disparities because a district's turnout or winning margin are irrelevant in who is elected, so that winning by a huge margin in a high-turnout district is electorally equal to winning by by a tiny margin in a low-turnout district.

To explain this more clearly, I’ll focus on the New Jersey Senate, but the same conclusions would apply to the Assembly as well.



* Update, Cryan got 26,603 votes. Ruiz got 20,706.  The claims I made remain correct.

Although the 2021 election saw a near parity of the two parties, the geographic distribution of voters was quite different. In contrast to most other states where Democrats are more tightly packed, in New Jersey, it is the Republicans who are the party more packed together. In 2021 half of the Republican vote came from only 12 districts, whereas half the Democratic vote came from 17 districts.





The 16 Republican Senate winners averaged 46,222 votes, but the 24 Democratic Senate winners averaged 33,152 votes.

The top Democratic vote getter was Jim Beach, who got 48,486 votes and thus barely beat the Republican average.

Beach’s 48,486 is pretty good, but five Republican Senators got more: Steve Oroho, Bob Singer, Declan O'Scanlan, Jim Holzapfel, and Chris Connors. Chris Connors’s 61,297 votes is #1 in the Senate.

The Republican Senator who had the smallest vote total was Vince Polistina in District 2, with 30,776 votes, but nine Democratic Senators won with fewer votes than Polistina: Nellie Pou, Nick Sacco, Paul Sarlo, Sandra Cunningham, Joseph Vitale, Nilsa Cruz-Perez, Bob Smith, Teresa Ruiz, and Joe Cryan.





If we analyze by winning margins, the skew against Republicans still exists, although it is not quite as strong. Even including Joe Cryan and Teresa Ruiz’s victories against no opposition, the average Democratic Senator won by 14,606 votes, versus a 16,923 victory margin for the average Republican Senator, a difference of 16%.





Most analysis of election results focuses on what percentage a candidate won by. I think that is a valid, but sometimes misleading, metric in evaluating fairness because it doesn’t take into account that turnout varies and voters could have more power in a lopsided district if that district also has low turnout.

In any case, the dynamic is different when you look at percentages and you can see that Democrats dominate urban districts to a higher degree than Republicans do any of their districts.

(You may also notice that NJ has only eight districts that were decided by fewer than 10 points, underscoring that most districts are non-competitive.  (Which underscores the error in blaming gerrymandering for non-competitiveness.))





This disproportionate result of 2021 is roughly similar to what happened in 2017, 2015, and 2011, but in 2013 and 2009 the Republicans actually WON the legislative popular vote, but were trapped as the  minority due to so many Republicans living in “vote sinks” where their legislative votes are wasted on blowout victories. In 2013, the average Republican victor won 44% more votes than the average Democratic Senator, and all but two Republican victors got more votes than any Democratic victor.




Some Republicans have spun the 2021 result as a “victory” because they did better than expected and gained seats in the legislature. They have said that Phil Murphy lacks a mandate, but it’s constitutionally irrelevant.

The governorship is unipersonal and even having a minuscule victory would not reduce a governor’s powers. As Craig Coughlin said “We retained a solid and comfortable majority in the Assembly and the Senate.” Loretta Weinberg agreed, “the fact remains that Phil Murphy is still the governor and we still have the majority in both houses.”

Phil Murphy has said that he is not going to tack to the center, “We’re not going to change now.”

Disproportionate Power, Inversions and The Two Party System

New Jersey is not alone in having large disproportionalities.

New Jersey has a ten point disparity, but several others states are worse.  West Virginia Republicans and Hawaii Democrats' representation in their legislatures are 20 points higher than vote share. The most extreme recent outcome is Hawaii’s 2016 Senate election, where the seatcount became 20-0 Democratic.

New Jersey’s legislative inversions of 2009 and 2013 are uncommon, but not unheard of.

Pennsylvania’s legislature is currently inverted. In 2018 the Democrats won the legislative popular vote 55%-44%, but the Republicans retained the majority with 54% of the seats.  Nevada has a large inversion favoring the Democrats, where the Democrats translated 47% of the popular vote into 62% of the seats.  North Carolina and Michigan have or recently had Republican inversions as well.

The Two Party System




Even talking about a state being “49%” Republican or “60%” Democratic is misleading because a plurality of Americans are independents who only reluctantly vote for one of the two major parties.

Single-winner districts that allow plurality victories, a system known as “first-past-the-post,” are the real cause of the two-party system too.

When a candidate can win an election by a plurality, voters must vote strategically since if they vote for the candidate they actually like the best they are not maximizing their opportunity to defeat the candidate that they hate the most. The tendency of first-past-the-post voting to produce a two-party system is called Duverger’s Law.

The countries who have multi-party systems vote by a system called “proportional representation.”

There are several different kinds of proportional representation, but the simplest explanation is that proportional representation has multiple winners per district and the winners are determined by their party’s share of a district’s overall vote. 20% of the vote = 20% of the seats. 33% of the vote = 33% of the seats.

In addition to creating a legislature with more than two parties, proportional representation results in legislatures with more racial, professional, gender, and age diversity too. Using proportional representation would result in racial minorities gaining representation without intentionally drawing majority-minority districts.

A public policy benefit of proportional representation which I think is underappreciated is that it would encourage Republicans to contest urban areas more than they currently do, since they would now have a chance to win urban seats.

(see note at the conclusion of this on the NJ Assembly’s use of two-winner districts and why it is not proportional representation)

In proportional representation gerrymandering is impossible because moving a party’s voters out of one district would give that party more representation in another district. A quasimander like New Jersey has could not occur either.

In my opinion, a two-party system is inherently less democratic than a multi-party system because a two-party system provides voters with a choice between only two party platforms, and each platform will contain some planks that many voters oppose. The reason proportional representation countries have higher turnout is that there is no such concept as a “safe seat,” so all votes matter, and more choices allow voters to vote for what they really want.

Our two-party system is also undemocratic because it makes it very easy for minoritarian views to be enacted by coalitioning with popular views.  

Since the US two-party system is also tied to a partisan primary process where primaries tend to be dominated by party “Bases” who are far left and far right of the median voter, the two-party system is highly polarizing.

Even if the two-party system didn’t produce disproportionalities, even if it didn’t force people to vote for parties they don’t like, states have the problem of nationalized elections, and New Jersey’s recent election was another round of Biden versus Trump as much as it was Murphy versus Ciattarelli.

The Nationalization of State Politics



In New Jersey’s 2021 election the Murphy campaign did what Republicans do in Red States to Democrats and frequently reminded voters that Jack Ciattarelli was a member of an unpopular political party and had indirect ties to a disliked president.

I’m not saying that associating Ciattarelli with Donald Trump was completely far-fetched. Aside from praising Trump and attending a Stop the Steal rally, Ciattarelli took several stances like opposition to mask and vaccine mandates that seem calculated to satisfy the Republican Base (or perhaps were Ciattarelli’s sincere views). He use the term “sodomy” in the context of sex education is awful.

Murphy also campaigned on his record, but the Murphy campaign leaned into Ciattarelli = Trump

hard.

So, what we had in New Jersey on November 2nd was a state election that was Biden versus Trump as much as it was Phil Murphy versus Jack Ciattarelli.

This nationalization effect hurt Steve Sweeney too.

Steve Sweeney explanation for his loss was "I'm in a conservative district. It's a tie. It's frustrating to watch what's happening in Washington. It has nothing to do with me."

Because of the nationalization of state politics, I believe many voters were not expressing themselves on state issues, so inferring a meaning from the 2021 result is impossible.

Proportional representation would reduce the nationalization of state politics because independent right-of-center and pure centrist parties would emerge that lack the Republican label. Although New Jersey would still have Trumpists, right-of-center parties would have an real independent character that the real-life NJ Republican Party lacks.

Two Little Reforms Aren’t Enough

The most common response to the existence of disproportionalities in representation is to stop partisan gerrymandering, but New Jersey already has a bipartisan commission to draw its district maps and 10 point disproportionalities still exist, ie, quasimanders. Again, 2009 and 2013 were inversions where the Republicans got more votes than the Democrats. Other states with bipartisan districting also have large disproportionalities, so do the United Kingdom and Canada. It is the nature of first-past-the-post to have disparities.

Maintaining single-winner districts and using plurality elections also makes it nearly impossible for anyone who is not a Republican or Democrat to be elected.

A more meaningful reform is Ranked Choice Voting, which would require a winner to actually have majority support. It would eliminate the “spoiler effect” and thereby make alternative parties more viable. Since a non-Republican or non-Democrat would have a chance in a general election, a candidate would no longer need to win a partisan primary to be a competitive general election candidate, although he or she would still have to have high name recognition to win.

Perhaps if New Jersey had used Ranked Choice Voting in 2009, Chris Dagget’s campaign would have gained traction, perhaps centrist independent campaigns would happen every cycle.

In my opinion, we should adopt Ranked Choice Voting for positions that are inherently single-winner, like governor and Senator, but use proportional representation for the NJ legislature to create a more robust multi-party system and ensure that all voters have equal power.

Two Cheers for Democracy!

My argument for proportional representation is way out of the mainstream. Nationally, even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is resistant to proportional representation. In New Jersey, no elected Republican supports proportional representation even though in this state Republicans would be the net beneficiary. In New Jersey, Phil Murphy does not even support Ranked Choice Voting.

Very few Americans, even among the educated, understand why the United States has a two-party system. Very few Americans think we have any electoral problem beyond gerrymandering or too much money in politics.

Yet, the desire for a multi-party democracy is strongly majoritarian and is overwhelmingly popular among young people.

Gallup has polled American support for a third party since 2003 and in 2021 support for a third party reached 62%.




Recent polling of young people shows that 71% want a third-party.

In international perspective, nearly all other democracies use some form of proportional representation, so in other countries people take multi-party politics for granted.

So my solution to our electoral problems is out of the Overton Window, the two-party and disproportionality problems I identify are problems which 60-70% of Americans recognize.

The United States isn’t authoritarian, but we aren’t at the same democratic level of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe either. New Jersey and other states aren’t as malapportioned, vetocratic, and judicially-dominated as the federal government, but we disproportionalities and huge democratic shortcomings of our own that we must fix.

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See Also:
(New Jersey Assembly elections have two winners per district, but it is only a system of simultaneous first-past-the-post elections. In a New Jersey Assembly district, if the vote outcome is 26% each for two candidates of the same party and 24% each for the two candidates of the other party, the party at 26% wins both seats.

This parity-of-outcome scenario happens every election.

In District 11, Marilyn Piperno (R) got 25.05% and her running mate Kimberly Eulner (R) got 24.94% versus Joann Downey (D) and Eric Houghtaling (D) getting 24.69% and 24.5%, respectively.

Despite how close the outcome was, the Republican Party is getting both seats.

I see this outcome as unfair, whichever party happens to win.


Proportional representation would have more than two representatives per district, but if the NJ Assembly used proportional representation, the two parties would each get one seat in a close where the winner has less than two-thirds support.

Some other states have more than one representative per district, but none use proportional representation.)

Saturday, October 23, 2021

2022 Equalized Valuations are Out


New Jersey's 2022-23 state aid numbers will not come out until the governor's FY2023 budget speech and state aid surpluses and deficits in 2022-23 will be strongly affected by the new Education Adequacy Report, but we can get a sneak peak at some changes in NJ State Aid by analyzing changes in Equalized Valuation.

Analyzing changes in Equalized Valuation also gives us a view into the state's ever swirling economic currents and what towns are thriving, holding their own, stagnating, and declining.  

Source for Data: NJ Table of Equalized Values.

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New Jersey's total Equalized Valuation increased from $1,353,490,784,661 to $1,430,600,617,782, a 5.7% increase.  5.7% is larger than most recent years, but it is not much larger than inflation, which was 5.4%.  (No, housing prices are NOT calculated as part of inflation.)

In contrast to previous years when Hudson County grew by more than 10% and had growth equal to 25% of the state's total, Hudson County was in last place for 2020-21.  In fact, South Jersey and the Jersey Shore led the state.


Ocean County had another good year at 9.3% growth (+$2.7 billion).  30% of that growth came from Lakewood, which grew from $12 billion to $12.8 billion.  (The Lakewood Public Schools continue to be ineligible for Equalization Aid, contrary to what some judges think.)


The trend could be a state manifestation of the nationwide boom in car-dependent places enabled by remote-working..




In NJ we hear constantly about an "urban renaissance," but NJ's big cities are wildly divergent in their
 economic fates and it's impossible to generalize about them.  Jersey City and Hoboken have boomed,  but the other cities have tended to lag state averages. Newark's renaissance is part reality, but also exaggeration.



Changes in Equalized Valuation also allow us to estimate changes to each district's Local Fair Share, although since Local Fair Share is based on Aggregate Income and depends on the statewide Adequacy Budget which will surely increase as a result of the Education Adequacy Report, I can only estimate what will happen.  

The 2021-22 Local Fair Share multipliers were:


Equalized Val.  x  0.013767998

District Income  x  0.051821204

Which is really 0.724% of Equalized Valuation plus 2.64% of Aggregate Income.

Hence, I get the following estimates for Local Fair Share changes for NJ's largest school districts.

FY2021 Equalized ValuationFY2022 Equalized ValuationGrowth or LossEstimate of LFS Change from 2021-22 LFS Real Estate Multiplier
NEWARK$14,982,559,801$14,465,468,748-$517,091,053-$3,559,654
JERSEY CITY$44,232,603,821$45,362,027,053$1,129,423,232$7,774,948
PATERSON$8,357,271,633$8,998,986,504$641,714,871$4,417,565
ELIZABETH$9,205,643,641$10,418,709,083$1,213,065,442$8,350,741
EDISON18,032,657,681$19,057,739,251$1,025,081,570$7,056,661
TRENTON$2,353,253,026$2,582,977,552$229,724,526$1,581,423
CAMDEN CITY$1,831,881,725$1,924,025,009$92,143,284$634,314
TOMS RIVER REGIONAL16,548,612,072$17,900,054,286$1,351,442,214$9,303,327
PASSAIC CITY4,112,963,610$4,293,101,153$180,137,543$1,240,067
WOODBRIDGE12,596,646,914$12,857,998,640$261,351,726$1,799,145
UNION CITY4,661,686,444$4,727,594,311$65,907,867$453,710
HAMILTON TWP9,262,658,564$9,530,775,475$268,116,911$1,845,717
CLIFTON CITY10,616,935,162$11,331,152,347$714,217,185$4,916,670
CHERRY HILL TWP9,092,288,643$9,553,839,001$461,550,358$3,177,312



Factoring in Jersey City's income growth and the increase in the LFS multipliers from the Education Adequacy Report, Jersey City's Local Fair Share will likely increase by a few tens of millions, but probably not enough to eliminate its Equalization Aid, which was $84 million in 2021-22.


(See Education Adequacy Report Drives Big Changes to State Aid)

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Tuesday, April 27, 2021

New Jersey's Population Growth in the 2010s

 

One theme of this blog is that New Jersey is overtaxed and that having high taxes induces low economic growth, net outmigration, and  low population growth.

In making that argument, I used authoritative data from the US Census, such as State Population Totals and State to State Migration Flows.  For job growth, I used authoritative Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

My analysis is only as good as my data.  Unfortunately for my analysis of population growth, the Census data I relied badly underestimated New Jersey's population growth by 412,000 people (4.58%).  

Although estimates are just estimates and it's understood they aren't exact, the Census's mistake for NJ is its largest for any state.  Instead of an estimated population growth for the 2010s of +80,000, our actual population growth is +497,000.

Instead of having a population growth that was expected to be the ninth slowest in the US, our population growth was actually the 26th slowest, meaning 25th highest.  New Jersey's growth of 5.65% is thus at the median of states, and only somewhat below the national weighted average of 7.4%.

The error in the Census estimate for NJ is huge and is outside the margin of error for their reports.  For instance, for 2018-19 State to State migration, the Census estimated that 229,484 people moved out of NJ, with a MOE of +/- 11,928 and 149,260 moved in with a MOE of +/- 9,572. Immigration into NJ was 60,826 with a MOE of +/- 7,820.

Even if the move-out number was 11,928 too high, the move-in was 9,572 people too low, and the immigration was 7,820 too low, that's only 29,320 additional people in NJ, which doesn't equal the 40,000 annual "hidden population increase."



In the 2010s, instead of New Jersey's growth coming in at 16% of the national average (which would have been our worst ever), it was 77% of the national average, which is the best we've done since the heyday of suburbanization of the 1950s-1960s.

YearNJ PopulationNJ Growth Over Previous DecadeUS PopulationUS Growth Over the Previous DecadeNJ's Increase as a Percentage of US Increase
19504,835,329-151,325,798--
19606,066,78225.5%179,323,17518.5%138%
19707,168,16418.2%203,211,92613.3%136%
19807,364,8232.7%226,545,80511.5%24%
19907,730,1885.0%248,709,8739.8%51%
20008,414,3508.9%281,421,90613.2%67%
20108,791,8944.5%308,745,5389.7%46%
2019 (est.)8,882,1901.0%328,239,5236.3%16%
2020 (official)9,288,9945.7%331,449,2817.4%77%


Faced with the reality that NJ had solid population growth in the 2010s, I have to admit that perhaps my thesis that high taxes are strangling New Jersey is exaggerated.  More people are either unaffected by NJ's high taxes, tolerant of the high taxes, angry about taxes but stuck in New Jersey, or supportive of New Jersey's taxes than I thought.  

Population change is determined by three things

  • natural increase (ie, births minus deaths).
  • immigration.
  • domestic migration.


We know New Jersey's births slowed down. There were only 1,027,274 babies born in NJ 2010-2019, versus 1,143,427 in the 2000s.

We know NJ's deathcount also rose slightly, from 719,513 in the 2000s to 724,387 in the 2010s.

Thus, natural increase contributed 121,027 fewer people to NJ's population increase in the 2010s than 2000s.  

Thus, the cause of the Census's discrepancy must be a large underestimate of immigration and/or an overestimate or net domestic outmigration.  It's entirely possible that thousands more people are living "in the shadows" in NJ than anyone realized and the Census's estimates missed them.  It's also possible that the 2010 Census count for NJ was an undercount.

Although those of us who warn about the negative effects of high taxes on population growth must be humble now and rethink our positions, in terms of economic growth, the 2010s were still a bad decade for New Jersey, with our 2007-2018 income growth coming in at the country's eighth lowest.   


And job growth was the 16th lowest.




New Jersey's growth in the 2010s isn't exactly vindication of the progressive case either, since a conservative named Chris Christie was governor for eight years of that period and New Jersey's property taxes increased more slowly than in previous decades.  

If someone argues that New Jersey's average population growth validates a highly-progressive tax structure, the population growth of high-earners in New Jersey, based on verified IRS data, is still among the country's lowest.

New Jersey's growth is also highly uneven, although that is probably unavoidable. Here's our growth in Murphy's first two pre-Covid years.




Anyway, it is a time to rethink demographic, population, and fiscal conditions in New Jersey.  Are taxes are damaging as I thought?  No.  But is New Jersey still overtaxed and is our budget out-of-whack with neglect of non-PreK-12 items?  I think so.

UPDATE:

EJ McMahon presents some interesting ideas about the Census's underestimate of NJ's population:

Where are all those people?

So what accounts for New York’s estimate-census gulf? Demographic data grinders suggest at least three possible factors:
    • Since 2010, the Census Bureau has changed its annual estimation methodology in a way that resulted in a lower count of foreign immigrants, which have accounted for an especially large share of New York’s population growth over the past 40 years.
    • New York State and New York City officials provided the Census Bureau with a large number of addresses that were not in the Bureau’s master file.
    • The Census Bureau had an expanded outreach program for 2020, which for the first time included the option of filling out census forms online. The federal outreach effort was heavily promoted and augmented by immigration activist groups, subsidized by the state and city, in the New York metropolitan area.

These factors don’t explain the trends in all immigrant-intensive states, however. For example, the difference between Census estimates and the 2020 official Census in California, Florida and Texas were tiny at 0.2 percent, 0.4 percent and 0.6 percent respectively. New Jersey, on the other hand, had the largest percentage difference between its 2019 estimate and 2020 census count: 4.6 percent.


The WSJ also documents that Covid produced a huge movement into NJ from NY, although that would have mostly taken effect after the Census's snapshot day.

 

The exodus from New York City has been a boon for New Jersey. The state more than doubled its new households from migration in 2020 from the prior year. In 12 suburban New Jersey counties, net growth from relocating New York City residents rose to more than 35,000 households in 2020, up 76% from the prior year.