Quantifying the Congressional Assault on Democracy
In a move that generated derision from legal experts across the political spectrum, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Supreme Court to throw out the votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election. Texas was joined by 17 Republican attorneys general. A majority of the Republican caucus in the US House of Representatives also submitted a brief supporting Texas’ assault on democracy. In a bitter opinion piece in the Washington Post, Deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus lists every A.G. and Representative who supported the Texas lawsuit. Here I have created an infographic to display the geographic extent of support for nullifying the election.
The figure represents all 435 seats in the House of Representatives. State delegations are grouped by solid black lines. Each box stands for a seat, colored to show Republicans who supported the Texas lawsuit, Republicans who did not, and non-Republican seats (overwhelmingly held by Democrats but with a handful of Independents and/or vacant seats). The names (postal codes) of states that brought the suits are shown in red.
The chart shows the wide extent of Republican support for the illegitimate legal maneuver. Republican Congress members from across the country, including swing states such as Florida and Georgia and largely Democratic states like Maryland and New Jersey, supported the suit. No geographic area was immune. Only a handful of states had their entire Republican delegation not support the suit.
The Supreme Court rejected the Texas lawsuit on Friday. However, just as failing to get votes did not stop Trump from creating controversy in the election, it is unclear what legal milestones can actually stop him from continuing to contest the election. Unfortunately, this issue is not yet moot.
Some Technical notes
This seems to me to be a logical and efficient way to show information about the House of Representatives. It gives a [very] rough picture of the geographic distributions of representatives. I’m not sure I’ve seen this format before. It could be used to compactly show many different kinds of Congressional data, including election results, House votes, and demographic information about Congress. Here just a few conditions are shown (Republican/Democratic and Supporting/Not), but color coding or shading could be used instead to show voting totals in elections.
This format maintains geographic information at the cost of making it harder to compare results among different states. I attempted to make the simplest shapes possible to represent individual states. Most of them are rectangles: rectangular blocks of the squares representing individual districts. Around a third of them are equivalent to two rectangular blocks, such as CA, TN, and NC. Two large-population states – IL and OH – took more complicated shapes. It just so happens that the total number of seats has a convenient factorization: 435 = 15 x 29, which gives a rectangle with a similar aspect ratio to that of the contiguous United States.
I also tried preserving proximity between states, with mixed results. New England was very well represented, but the large-area, small-population states were difficult to place in appropriate locations without creating holes in the grid.
The size and party affiliation of state delegations comes from 270towin.
I suggest experimenting with some other forms of graphic representation. In a future chart, I’d also like to see states’ populations represented by size.
Well, the state size in the chart is the number of Representatives for that state, which is loosely related to the population.
I must confess that I looked at your chart and didn’t know what I was looking at. Even with that lack of understanding, though, I do know that our Congress has its fair share of cowardly numbskulls.