The Impact of Congressional Redistricting on New Jersey's 2012 Elections Chris Palmer Center for Public Policy and

Public Administration
Figure 1: Evolving District Borders

Methods:
After figuring out which districts had the closest races in 2012 by looking at election results (displayed in figure 2), I first needed to determine which municipalities switched congressional districts. To achieve this I acquired shapefiles of the congressional districts for 2002-2011 and 2012-2021 from the New Jersey GIS clearinghouse. I then converted them into rasters, and used raster calculator to display the areas which had different congressional districts in 2012 then they did previously (Figure 3). Overlaying a municipalities shapefile on the raster allowed me to know exactly which municipalities switched districts. The next key step was to gather the election results for the municipalities. Because it had only been a few weeks since the election, this step required me to contact the various county clerks in which the municipalities resided. One I acquired them, I entered the voting results by hand for each of the municipalities into an excel spreadsheet and then joined the spreadsheet (I had one for each district) to a shapefile I had constructed using the intersect tool of municipalities and the individual districts (see figure 4 for an example). I then used Field Calculator to calculate the difference between the number of Republican voters and Democratic voters for each municipality and district as a whole.
Figure 2: Election Results by Voter Difference. Figure 3 Raster Calculation of Municipalities Figure 4: Municipality- District Intersect

Results:

District 3 Results

Introduction
Every decade The Constitution requires that a census be taken from which the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned accordingly. As a result of the 2010 census, states were required to adjust their congressional boundaries in advance of the 2012 House elections to account for increases or decreases of their number of seats. In my home state of New Jersey, there was much contention during this redistricting process over the new boundaries (as New Jersey lost a congressional district) and the potential impact they could have on the various congressional elections (Figure 1). Thus, I decided to investigate the impact that redistricting had on the election results for the 2012 election. Did the shifted borders impact the elections in any meaningful way? Although the commission that drafted the new borders was supposedly nonpartisan, they had accepted a Republican backed plan which eliminated a Democratic district. Would further biases exist in the new boundaries? While there are only 12 Congressional Districts in New Jersey, there are 566 municipalities, and I simply lacked the time to examine the resources across all of the districts. As a result, I ended up limiting my study to the 4 districts that had the closest results during the 2012 election, figuring that any changes to already heavily partisan districts would have a minimal impact on the overall election outcome.

Figure 5: Map of Municipality Variation overlaying on District Outcomes. Tables 1-4: District by District Breakdowns Table 5, overall voting turnout v. 2010

CD 2010 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 2010 Sums Total Votes

R Votes 58562 109460 110215 129752 124030 65413 105084 51023 52082 14357 122149 93634 19538 1055299 20800029

D Votes Diff 106334 51690 104252 52118 62634 81933 71902 88478 83564 95299 55472 108214 62840 1024730

CD 2012 -47772 57770 5963 77634 61396 -16520 33182 -37455 -31482 -80942 66677 -14580 -43302 30569 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 2012 Sums Total Votes

Rep Votes Dem Votes Diff 92459 210470 166677 116462 174253 145506 195145 107991 167501 130100 84360 151782 175662 123057 31763 130853 55091 162822 24271 201435 182237 123897 80906 189926 1430325 2935612 1794301

-118021 50215 28747 87154 37401 -67422 52605 -99093 -107731 -177164 58337 -109020 -363992

Discussion:

It would seem for the most part, the shifted municipalities offered minimal impact in terms of influencing the elections. Their outcomes as a whole (for Districts 2,3, and 7) were consistent with the overall results in their districts. The one exception was District 5, where the municipalities had heavily Democratic leaning results, in a district that was ultimately moderately Republican, perhaps making the race closer than it otherwise would have been. One other thing of note is that turnout overall for the 2012 elections was much higher than that of 2010. However, even though the Democrats enjoyed a majority in the total popular vote, they only obtained an equal number of seats as the Republicans. It seems safe to say that the goals of the redistricting committee were to maintain favor for the incumbents in the districts, and they were certainly successful in that regard, as all of the incumbents were reelected by greater margins than 2010.