A Political-Science View of Trump’s Reported Census Pick

The news triggered immediate alarm. The Trump administration might appoint a political scientist who lacks government experience to a critical position managing the 2020 census, Politico reported. The scholar, Thomas L. Brunell, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, is a Republican who advocates the virtues of noncompetitive elections and testifies on behalf of GOP redistricting efforts.

Installing him as deputy director of the U.S. Census Bureau, a post typically held by a nonpolitical bureaucrat, would “harm perceptions of the bureau’s integrity,” The Washington Post editorialized. “Politicizing the Census like this would be a civic, social, and economic disaster,” tweeted Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who writes for The New York Times.

So who is Mr. Brunell, and what are his ideas?

Much attention has focused on a provocatively titled book that Mr. Brunell published in 2008, Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections are Bad for America (Routledge). The work challenged a widely held conviction within his field, that political competition is healthy for democracy. Mr. Brunell argued instead that voters would be more satisfied with Congress if they were lumped together in ideologically homogenous districts, which would allow more of them to vote for winning candidates.

Activists on the left are rallying opposition to Mr. Brunell’s appointment by circulating an online poster that features the subtitle of his book under a yellow warning in capital letters: “ALERT!”

A Serious, if Contrarian, Scholar

Within his discipline, though, the reaction to his scholarship has been warmer. Mr. Brunell earned his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of California at Irvine. He is viewed as a contrarian but a serious one, according to scholarly reviews of his book and conversations with political scientists. Their general consensus: Mr. Brunell’s Redistricting and Representation is useful to consider, even if few scholars will agree with its arguments.

Most political scientists believe competitive elections are good because they lead to better representation, says Seth C. McKee, an associate professor of political science at Texas Tech University, who reviewed Mr. Brunell’s book for The Journal of Politics. If lawmakers are on their toes, and it isn’t easy to lock down a district, then they’re going to be more responsive to voters, the thinking goes.

Mr. Brunell sought to upend that view with an argument that boiled down to math, Mr. McKee says. If a candidate wins with 51 percent of the vote, then the other 49 percent of voters get nothing. But if a candidate gets, say, 75 percent, then a larger share of voters would be satisfied. And a representative who isn’t constantly worried about holding his or her seat could focus more on serving constituents.

Many scholars criticize this approach. Some contend, for example, that it would increase polarization in Congress. Another problem: Packing districts with Democrats could run afoul of legal prohibitions against diluting minority voting power. Still, Mr. Brunell’s book is “firmly in the democratic tradition,” Mr. McKee says. “It’s not anything like, ‘Hey, we’re richer, so we should have more than one vote,’” Mr. McKee says. “He’s not talking about any sort of electoral reform that changes the way democracy works.”

In addition to making his argument about competitiveness, Mr. Brunell has spent much of his career trying to identify ways to measure partisan gerrymandering, the practice of drawing electoral maps to benefit one political party. This issue is before the U.S. Supreme Court now. The pending case, Gill v. Whitford, challenges a GOP redistricting plan in Wisconsin. Its arguments are informed by the work of scholars like Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee, who seek to quantify what counts as excessive gerrymandering.

Patterns of Gerrymandering

Mr. Brunell’s research is in a similar vein, says Mr. McGhee, a political scientist trained at the University of California at Berkeley who is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank. It deals with “trying to capture the idea of a partisan gerrymander, and to identify when you have one, and when you don’t, and then to try and understand the patterns of those things over time,” Mr. McGhee says. “So that, if you were to take a particular redistricting plan, you could say this plan is biased in favor of the Democrats. Or it’s biased in favor of the Republicans.”

Mr. Brunell’s research is well-respected, Mr. McGhee says. “I don’t think that anybody who works in this area would consider him a political hack or of questionable integrity in the context of his work on redistricting,” Mr. McGhee says. “From my interactions with him, I don’t think that he is any fan of partisan gerrymandering.”

According to Politico, Mr. Brunell is the Trump administration’s leading choice for the bureau’s deputy director, which would make him the agency’s top permanent official. The deputy director effectively serves as the bureau’s chief operating and financial officer. His appointment would be an important step as the administration prepares for the 2020 census. (Mr. Brunell did not respond to an interview request.)

In opposing his candidacy, critics have pointed to Mr. Brunell’s work outside of academe. Politico reported that he has often counseled states on revising congressional districts. The GOP uses his research in remapping districts, according to the Politico article. He has served as an expert witness supporting Republican-run states facing gerrymandering lawsuits.

“Perhaps the most problematic aspect of his potential appointment is Brunell’s deep involvement in partisan issues,” Leah Aden, senior counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., wrote. “Brunell, a registered Republican, has testified as an expert witness many times on behalf of Republican efforts to redraw districts to entrench that party in power, often by manipulating the power of communities of color.”

His potential pick for the census role has stoked concerns that the Trump administration might make changes in the census that could result in undercounting minorities. Another worry is that he lacks the government experience to manage an effort that has already suffered from underfunding and organizational problems.

Marc Parry is a senior reporter who writes about ideas, focusing on research in the humanities and social sciences. Email him at marc.parry@chronicle.com, or follow him on Twitter @marcparry.