The Chief Justice of the United States has no clue how elections work

The guy who said America isn't racist enough to keep the Voting Rights Act also believes some odd things about gerrymandering.

IAN MILLHISER
MAR 30, 2018, 8:00 AM

The Chief Justice of the United States is allergic to political science. He harbors numerous misconceptions about how voters behave and how they think. And these misconceptions often form the basis for his judicial decisions.

With Chief Justice John Roberts poised to become the Supreme Court’s crucial “swing vote” if any of the five justices to his left leave Court, these misconceptions could soon weave themselves into the way the court interprets the Constitution. The laws governing America’s elections — our right to choose our own leaders, rather than having them chosen for us — could soon bend to one man’s weak understanding of how elections work. To a large extent, they already have.

Roberts’ confusion was most recently on display during Wednesday’s oral argument in Benisek v. Lamone, a Supreme Court case challenging Maryland’s gerrymandered congressional maps. Early in the argument, Maryland Solicitor General Steven Sullivan claimed that his state was split about 60/40 between Democrats and Republicans. This troubled Roberts, who wondered aloud about the “percentage of independents in Maryland.”

CREDIT: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Supreme Court was itching to strike down a partisan gerrymander today, but has no idea how
The state, Roberts suggested, should offer him a “theory about how you’re supposed to take independent voters into account” in a partisan gerrymandering case. His implication seemed to be that a district that was drawn to favor one party or another may not be gerrymandered if it has a surfeit of “independent” voters, because those voters could swing the election either way.

As Justice Elena Kagan swiftly pointed out, this is a terrible misconception of what it means to be an “independent” voter. “Most people who are independents,” Kagan explained, “tend to lean pretty strongly one way or the other over many election cycles.”

She’s right. Though a significant minority of Americans self-identify as “independents,” the vast majority of these tend to reveal a preference for one party or the other. One analysis of independent voters found that “those who identify as independents today are more stable in their support for one or the other party than were ‘strong partisans’ back in the 1970s.” Other research suggests that self-described “independents” who lean towards the Democratic Party are less likely to vote for the GOP than some self-described “Democrats.”

Indeed, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten, “self-identified independents who consistently favor one party are often more ideologically extreme than those who identify with either party.” At least some voters identify as “independent” because they are hardline conservatives who don’t think of themselves as Republicans because they view the GOP as too liberal, or staunch leftists who refuse to label themselves as “Democrats” because they believe the Democratic Party isn’t far enough to the left — think of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who still positions himself an “independent” despite the fact that he sought the Democratic presidential nomination.

Altogether, only about 10 percent of the American electorate are “true independents.”

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https://thinkprogress.org/john-roberts-election-law-4757da7158cd/