Cresent Hardy, Republican candidate for Nevada's 4th Congressional District, was targeted by the state's Democratsthis week for saying that he, at first, didn't think the race was winnable because it was "a minority district."
Whether or not the attack hits very hard remains to be seen, but Hardy's candor, exposing the sort of calculus that goes into the decision of whether or not to run and for what office, is interesting. And it raises an interesting question: Can Republicans win in majority-minority districts? The answer, as you might expect, is yes. But it doesn't happen often.
Nevada's 4th District is a relatively new one. As America's population has shifted west, Nevada was the beneficiary of a new Congressional seat following the 2010 Census. The newly created district is, indeed, majority-minority, meaning that its population is more non-white than white. About 46 percent of the district's residents are white; nearly a third are Latino. Hardy is challenging incumbent Rep. Steven Horsford who is African-American, like about 13 percent of his consituents.
Since the 109th Congress, the earliest for which racial data is available by congressional district from the Census Bureau's online database, the number of majority-minority Republican House districts has stayed pretty flat, beneath 10 percent. There was a slight uptick in the 111th Congress -- the Congress following the dominant Democratic performance in 2008, when Democrats ate away at what normally would be Republican areas. That dropped the Democrats' percentage of majority-minority districts, and boosted the Republicans'.
But what's more insightful is how the makeup of each party's districts falls across the spectrum of diversity. Over at Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham looked closely at the racial composition of the 113th Congress, including how many of the Republican Party's seats fell into various densities of whiteness. We rewound that data back a decade to see how it has changed.
In the 109th Congress, the plurality of Republican seats were in districts that were 80 to 100 percent white. As time passed, and as the country got less white overall, the vast majority of Republican seats moved into the 60 to 100 percent white range. Very few districts are under 60 percent white; nearly none are less than a fifth white. For Democrats, the change has been more dramatic. The number of districts controlled by Democrats that are more than 80 percent white is the lowest of the five quintiles. But it's densely mixed; about as many Democratic seats are between 20 and 40 percent white as are between 60 and 80 percent.
What does this mean for Cresent Hardy? Well, not a lot. But of Nevada's now-four Congressional district, two are majority white and two are majority-minority. The two that are majority-minority are currently represented by Democrats. Republicans do win seats like that, but it doesn't happen often. And it didn't happen in 2012, when Horsford first won election.
Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He previously wrote for The Wire, the news blog of The Atlantic magazine. He has contributed to The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Daily, and the Huffington Post. Philip is based in New York City.
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The Fix: Republican House districts are not getting any less white