Citation
Nicholas Stephanopoulos & Jowei Chen, Democracy’s Denominator, 109 Calif. L. Rev. 1011 (2021).
Abstract
What would happen if states stopped equalizing districts’ total populations and started equalizing their citizen voting age populations (CVAPs) instead? Conservative activists have long clamored for states to make this change, and the Trump administration took many steps to facilitate it. Yet the question of its representational effects had remained largely unanswered.
This Article harnesses the power of randomized redistricting to investigate those effects, creating two sets of simulated maps — one equalizing total populations, the other equalizing CVAPs — for ten states with particularly small CVAP shares. The authors find that minority representation would decline significantly under CVAP apportionment: across the ten states, the proportion of minority opportunity districts would fall by a median of three percentage points, and by six or more points in Arizona, Florida, New York, and Texas. The partisan impact, by contrast, would be more muted — the share of Republican districts would rise by a median of just one percentage point.