Regular readers of Wisconsin’s daily newspaper opinion pages know that those newspapers are on a crusade to replace partisan redistricting of the Legislature’s seats with nonpartisan, supposedly neutral redistricting.

It is a crusade that I’m at least sympathetic toward (in part because I hate politicians as a class), though it’s about at the three-digit level in ranking of importance in this state. Conservatives are unconvinced that the arguments of liberal newspaper opinion pages are intended for anything else but to get Democrats elected to the Legislature.

The writers of those editorials also fail to grasp the real cause of this state’s political ills — too much power in the hands of the Legislature, unelected state bureaucrats, and local governments — and that redistricting “reform” isn’t going to change that. The 132 members of the Legislature have too much power, are paid far too much, and get benefits far better than the people they are supposed to represent.

There is, however, one additional problem with the redistricting crusade, revealed in, of all places, the New York Times:

The presumption among many reformers is that the Democrats would control Congress today if the 2012 election had been contested in districts drawn by nonpartisan commissioners rather than politicians.

But is this true? Another possibility is that Democrats receive more votes than seats because so many of their voters reside in dense cities that Democratic candidates win with overwhelming majorities, while Republican voters are more evenly distributed across exurbs and the rural periphery. Perhaps even a nonpartisan redistricting process would still have delivered the House to the Republicans.

To examine this hypothesis, we adapted a computer algorithm that we recently introduced in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. It allows us to draw thousands of alternative, nonpartisan redistricting plans and assess the partisan advantage built into each plan. First we created a large number of districting plans (as many as 1,000) for each of 49 states. Then we predicted the probability that a Democrat or Republican would win each simulated district based on the results of the 2008 presidential election and tallied the expected Republican seats associated with each simulated plan.

The results were not encouraging for reform advocates. In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election. This was true even in some states, like Indiana and Missouri, with heavy Republican influence over redistricting. Both of these states were hotly contested and leaned only slightly Republican over all, but of the 17 seats between them, only four were won by Democrats (in St. Louis, Kansas City, Gary and Indianapolis). While some of our simulations generated an additional Democratic seat around St. Louis or Indianapolis, most of them did not, and in any case, a vanishingly small number of simulations gave Democrats a congressional seat share commensurate with their overall support in these states.

The problem for Democrats is that they have overwhelming majorities not only in the dense, poor urban centers, but also in isolated, far-flung college towns, historical mining areas and 19th-century manufacturing towns that are surrounded by and ultimately overwhelmed by rural Republicans.

A motivated Democratic cartographer could produce districts that accurately reflected overall partisanship in states like these by carefully crafting the metropolitan districts and snaking districts along the historical canals and rail lines that once connected the nonmetropolitan Democratic enclaves. But such districts are unlikely to emerge by chance from a nonpartisan process. On the other hand, a Republican cartographer in these and other Midwestern states, along with some Southern states like Georgia and Tennessee, could do little to improve on the advantage bestowed by the existing human geography. …

In short, the Democrats’ geography problem is bigger than their gerrymandering problem. We do not mean to imply that the absurd practice of allowing incumbents to draw electoral districts should continue. Rather, we suggest that unless they are prepared to take more radical steps that would require a party’s seat share to approximate its vote share, reformers in many states may not get the results they are expecting.

The last half of that last sentence applies not only to proponents of redistricting reform, but proponents of term limits as well. What the writers term “the advantage bestowed by the existing human geography” means that people of like political beliefs, as expressed by their votes, live together. Do you really think a Republican will represent any Madison Assembly district in your lifetime? Meanwhile, every time a Republican retires between Fond du Lac and Green Bay (with the exception of one Appleton Assembly district and one Green Bay Assembly district), he or she is replaced by someone with an R after that new politician’s last name too.