  Republican candidates often receive between 30 and 40 percent of the two-way
vote share in statewide elections in Massachusetts. For the last three Census
cycles, MA has held 9-10 seats in the House of Representatives, which means
that a district can be won with as little as 6 percent of the statewide vote.
Putting these two facts together, one may be surprised to learn that a
Massachusetts Republican has not won a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives since 1994. We argue that the underperformance of Republicans
in Massachusetts is not attributable to gerrymandering, nor to the failure of
Republicans to field House candidates, but is a structural mathematical feature
of the distribution of votes. For several of the elections studied here, there
are more ways of building a valid districting plan than there are particles in
the galaxy, and every one of them will produce a 9-0 Democratic delegation.
