Author: Jonathan Tannen

US Congressman Bob Brady stunned Philadelphia yesterday when he announced that he would not run for reelection. This puts Congressional District 1, which he has held since 1998, up for grabs. Immediately, the scramble among Democrats to pursue the seat began.

In November, the seat will almost certainly be won by the Democrat. But who can win the Democratic Primary in May? Is the district ripe for pick-up by a progressive change candidate? Or will Brady, who is also president of the Democratic City Committee, be replaced by another Party stalwart?

What should we expect from the district? Where do its votes come from, and what do we know about those voters? Let’s look at some maps. (You can visit my interactive maps, too).

​EDIT: This may obviously all be moot if the district changes in response to the State Supreme Court’s map overturn…

District 1 stretches from Northeast Philadelphia, through South and Southwest Philly, and down into Media. The gerrymandering is obvious: the southeast stretch encompasses Chester and Swarthmore, which get grouped in with Philadelphia in hopes of concentrating Democratic votes and thus wasting them.

The district is a completely safe Democratic seat. Clinton won it in 2016 with 80% of the vote. Below, I’ve aggregated votes to State House districts. Interestingly, the River Wards and parts of South Philly that may be considered Brady’s base were the Trumpiest Democrats, swinging sharply for the Republican.

So the Democrat will almost certainly win in November. But what kind of Democrat will it be? Does the district seem to prefer establishment, Clinton types, or leftist, Sanders types? The voters are actually quite diverse in this regard, combining Black and Hispanic neighborhoods that voted entirely for Clinton in North and West Philly and Chester, with River Wards and South Philly neighborhoods that voted for Sanders. (I continue to find fascinating the overlap between Sanders and Trump voters, suggesting that voters may not have been Left or Right so much as Anti-Clinton. I leave it to you to speculate on the reasons.)

However, the neighborhoods that most strongly supported Clinton are also the neighborhoods that voted the most. A huge majority of the District’s votes come from Center South Philly, North Philly, and Southwest/West Philly. These overlap with some of Clinton’s strongest neighborhoods, especially in Southwest and West Philly.

Since most of the votes come from the city anyway, it’s useful to look at the other competitive Democratic Primary we recently had: the 2017 Philadelphia race for District Attorney. This will exclude the suburban voters in District 1, but they are unlikely to carry the District. Those Center City and South Philly neighborhoods that supported Clinton came out for Larry Krasner one year later, as did the Sanders supporters in the River Wards.

District 1 is racially diverse in a way little of America is. Of course, this top-line diversity does not actually represent neighborhood diversity, but is achieved by aggregating largely segregated neighborhoods. Below is a map of census tract race and ethnicity from the American Community Survey for 2012-16. Hispanic North Philly combines with White South Philly and River Wards and Black West Philly to create a patchwork representation. The map of race also lines up with the gerrymandered carve-outs of the district: District 1 hooks out to include predominately White Fairmount in Brady’s district, while it notably excludes predominately Black Point Breeze.

Brady’s district is predominately poor, typical of the City as a whole. Of course, while the population may be poor, the high-income tracts in Center City are also the places where most of the votes come from, so the average voter is wealthier than the district’s average resident.

What should we expect in May?
A ton of candidates are going to run for the House seat. Whoever wins the Democratic primary is going to win in November. Philadelphia voters constitute the vast majority of the district’s Primary turnout, and Philadelphians will decide the election. Given the neighborhoods that typically vote in primaries, the race will probably be decided by the White voters in Center City, South Philly and the River Wards along with the Black voters in West and Southwest Philly. Those voters split between Clinton and Sanders in 2016, but voted strongly for Krasner in 2017. If a candidate can manage to consolidate the left, especially in a likely high-candidate field, the race should be theirs.

The 2016 election was expected to split the Republican party. Donald Trump coalesced a base of voters fueled by cultural displacement and racial resentment, saying out loud what had only been hinted at. This seemed like it could threaten the alliance between cultural and fiscal conservatives that made up the Republican Party. Leading into November 2016, Democrats hoped that the fault line would turn off “establishment” conservatives and lead to a Hillary victory. Alas.

Ahead of the 2016 election, analysts predicted that Pennsylvania would come down to Philadelphia’s suburbs.  Voters there had traditionally voted Republican, but swung for Obama in 2012 and were the exact well-educated, wealthier Republicans expected to be turned off by Trump’s rhetoric. Many of these districts did, in fact, vote for Clinton, but not strongly enough to swing the state in her favor.

How did these districts split?

Where the districts split
Last week, I posted interactive maps aggregating Pennsylvania’s recent elections. I just added to them the ability to map “split districts”, in which Clinton won the presidential vote but the Republican won the local race, or vice versa.

Pennsylvania’s State House has 203 members, who are voted on every two years. In 2016, 113 Republicans and 77 Democrats won. The remaining candidates were listed on the ballot as a third party, often D/R; when they are added based on their caucus, the overall Republican House victory was 121 – 82. Republicans thus won 59.6% of the House seats; thanks to gerrymandering and asymmetric concentration of votes, they did this with only 52.7% of the total State House vote.

In the plot below, I compare each district’s vote for President with its vote for State House. Points on the diagonal line represent districts where Clinton received the same percentage of the vote as the Democratic Representative (and Trump the same as the Republican).  Points to the right of the plot voted for Clinton, to the left voted for Trump. Points to the top voted for the Democratic Representative, to the bottom the Republican.

Among the 190 districts that had at least one major party candidate, Clinton outperformed the Democratic Representative in 110, and Trump outperformed the Republican in 80. This suggests an anti-Trump sentiment, which was nonetheless overcome by the overall Republican vote.

Many of these districts still elected representatives of the same party. However, the points in the top left quadrant (above the x-axis and to the left of the y-axis) and the bottom right quadrant (belowthe x-axis and to the right of the y-axis) are districts that actually elected different parties in the topline results. Some 18 contested districts that Clinton won were won by the Republican Representative, compared to 10 districts that Trump won going to Democrats.

The districts at the very top and bottom of the plot are districts where the State House race was uncontested, and thus the gap was 100%. Amazingly, five districts with uncontested Democrats voted for Trump, and one district with an uncontested Republican voted for Clinton.

In the Philadelphia region, the only splits that occurred were voters selecting Clinton but a Republican representative. And there were a lot of them. Check out the interactive maps for more exploration.

What should we expect from the splits?
Democrats would need to win 20 seats to take control of the State House. What should we expect from these 18 that voted for Clinton but a Republican representative? That’s an open question.

One line of reasoning is that these districts will continue to support their local Republicans. They clearly dislike President Trump, but even in 2016 that wasn’t enough for Democratic representatives to win. In 2018, when Trump isn’t even on the ballot, surely voters will continue to support their local, traditional Republicans.

On the other hand, support for Trump has set record lows for Presidential approval (only 39.5% of Americans approve as of this writing), and it appears that voters’ distaste may be spilling over to the rest of his party. As Republican officials have fallen in line behind Trump during his first year, they’ve fallen decisively behind in generic ballots, with unnamed Democrat beating unnamed Republican by 8 points. Voters in the Philadelphia suburbs may have expected Hillary to win, and voted for the Republicans they were familiar with as the Republican Party would inevitably reject Trumpism. Instead, Trump won, and his takeover of the Party may sour these voters on their local Republicans, too.

There were 34 split districts in Pennsylvania in 2016, and even more that just barely missed the cut. Democrats need to gain 20 seats to take over the house. That gap, which once would have seemed insurmountable, may be in play.