If you read about congressional gerrymanders these days, you might come away with the impression that it’s a Republican thing. Those who acknowledge that Democrats also gerrymander often try and cast this as a response to GOP gerrymandering.
That’s a tall tale, and it’s only one of the many misunderstandings resurfacing about gerrymandering as Texas Republicans consider a rare mid-decade redistricting to increase their majority in the state’s congressional delegation.
What is and what isn’t a gerrymander is sometimes obvious but sometimes less so. Also, unfair partisan advantage isn’t the only harm of gerrymanders.
The Texas Remap
Republicans currently hold 25 of Texas’s 38 congressional districts. President Trump has argued that Texas’s legislature could and should draw a new map that groups Democratic members into the same districts, and creates a handful of new Republican districts.
This would require creative gerrymandering — drawing winding, stretched out districts and carving up communities. A partisan gerrymander in the middle of a decade would also be an extraordinary power grab. In most states, the legislature and the governor could theoretically redraw a congressional map at any time, but they almost never do. Typically, a legislature redraws the congressional map after every Census, and that map remains in place for a decade.
Sometimes judges redraw maps or force the legislature to redraw a map because of supposed civil rights violations. In Texas ahead of the 2002 elections, the legislature deadlocked and so a state judge drew the map. When Republicans took control of the state government, the legislature then drew a new map.
In the past 150 years, there have basically been no cases where a legislature redrew the map mid-decade for simple partisan gain.
If Texas breaks precedent this summer, Democrats and the legacy media warn it will set off an arms race. California Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested he would retaliate against a Texas mid-decade gerrymander with one of his own. (One problem with this threat is that California is already much more gerrymandered than Texas, and there’s less juice left to squeeze.)
States might redistrict whenever a new party takes over the legislature or governorship. They might redistrict whenever an incumbent dies or retires. They could redistrict whenever the political winds change. This could create chaos, more gerrymandering, and more partisan rancor.
So Democrats have fair criticism of Trump’s plans for Texas. But when they claim innocence on the gerrymandering front, they lose all credibility.
Gerrymandering is not a GOP thing
Democrats have their share of absurd gerrymanders today. California and Illinois are prime examples. You can look at the shapes of the districts to see the gerrymander, and you can also compare the popular vote to the partisan balance of the congressional delegation.
In California, for instance, Democrats hold 43 of the 52 seats, which is 83%. In the November election, though, they won just 60% of the vote. Likewise, in Illinois, Democrats have a 14-to-3 majority in the congressional delegation (82%) after winning 53% of the popular vote.
Republicans’ gerrymanders just about counteract the Democratic gerrymanders, the 2024 numbers suggest: If you discard the votes for third parties, Republican congressional candidates won 51.4% of the vote on Election Day, and that translated into 50.1% of the House seats. If we used this measure, Republicans “should have” won 224 seats instead of 220.
But the above math is too simplistic. The skewed ratios in various states do not prove a gerrymander. There are many reasons why one party might win a far higher percentage of seats than its popular vote would suggest.
For instance, imagine a state with ten congressional seats where the Democrats make up two-thirds of the population. Now imagine that the Republicans are evenly distributed throughout the state. Every voting precinct would have about 67% Democrats, and so each of the nine congressional districts, however you drew the map, would be about 69% Democratic. The result would likely be a 9-0 Democratic delegation in a 2-to-1 Democratic state.
Massachusetts is pretty close to this: Democrats get about 60 to 65% of the vote and hold all nine seats.
More commonly, there are some states where Democrats are more consolidated into a few overwhelmingly urban pockets, while Republicans make up smaller majorities in the rest of the state. Wisconsin is a prime example of this.
Democrats and the news media complain endlessly about the Republicans’ 6-2 majority in Wisconsin’s congressional delegation while the GOP wins only about 51% of the votes.
But if you look at Wisconsin’s map, the districts are all fairly compact and sensible. The Democrats win the district centered Madison and the one centered on Milwaukee, and that’s where Democratic voters are clustered. More than 35% of Kamala Harris voters in Wisconsin, for instance, live in Milwaukee or Dane County, and this leaves the other 70 counties as majority Republican.
The result is Democrats winning two seats with about 70% of the vote in each of the districts, while Republicans carry six seats with 60% or less in each district, including two close races.
Who started it?
When the Texas mid-decade remap comes up, Democrats often warn — laughably — that it could cause them to start gerrymandering.
Indeed, if one mentions a Democratic gerrymander, such as Maryland, Illinois, or California, commentators will rush to cast them as Democratic responses to GOP gerrymanders.
Among online millennials, there is a belief that gerrymandering started last decade by the Tea Parties.
It is true that Republicans got a lasting advantage because their biggest wave year was at the turn of the decade, which gave them control of many legislatures just in time to draw new maps.
But partisan gerrymandering didn’t start with 2011 Republicans. It’s been a constant, bipartisan practice.
California Democrats, for instance, controlled more than 60% of the congressional delegation after the 2002 elections in which they won only 51% of the vote.
In Georgia, Democrats controlled the state legislature in 2001 and drew a blatant gerrymander intended to give them a majority in the Congressional delegation. Many districts included thin strands to connect distant parts of the state, hoping to pack the Republicans into 6 of the 13 districts. This proved an overreach, and Republicans in 2002 ended up winning two of the districts drawn for Democrats.
Maryland Democrats in 2002 won 6 of 8 (75%) U.S. House districts with 54% of the vote after redrawing the maps to break up counties and neighborhoods.
Then the next decade, Maryland Democrats drew an even more extreme gerrymander that boosted their advantage to 7-1. The details of Democrats’ Maryland gerrymanders reveal one of the ways that gerrymandering harms democracy.
No representation and no competition
In 2021, Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan rolled out a massive campaign to help deliver the COVID-19 vaccine to the people of his state. In the first few weeks, while demand still outstripped supply, the state prioritized vaccinating the older residents. As a result, the more rural counties got more vaccines than the suburban counties.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) used his perch as a congressman to complain about this. He argued that Montgomery County residents deserved priority over the residents of other counties — that his county should have a higher percentage of its population vaccinated than the counties with older populations.
That’s a pretty odd argument on its face, but his defenders said he was simply advocating for his constituents — and that’s the rub. Raskin never mentioned the more rural Carroll and Frederick Counties, which were also in his district.
Why did a Congressman from Takoma Park, which touches D.C., also represent rural towns on the Pennsylvania border? Because Democrats drew three districts that reached from the inner suburbs out to the rural parts in northern and western parts of the state so that there wouldn’t be a Western Maryland district (because that could be won by a Republican).
The current Maryland map, created after the 2020 Census, likewise denies Western Maryland its own district, roping it in with Montgomery County instead of with more similar Carroll County. As a result, Western Maryland has a Democratic Congresswoman from Potomac, a wealthy suburb of D.C.
That is, gerrymandering doesn’t merely give the party in charge an unfair advantage, it effectively leaves a portion of the state without representation.
Much gerrymandering is not aimed at maximizing partisan advantage but at protecting incumbents. This is just another instance of an iron rule of politics: People in power use their power to remain in power.
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One result: 95% of U.S. House seats are not competitive in the general election. If members are not afraid of losing in the general election, they are not responsive to the public. If the only time they could lose is in the primary election, they have more incentive to embrace extremism and suck up to party leaders.
There’s not likely any good solution to the problem of partisan gerrymandering. There really are harms. It’s just another example of the breakdown of norms in U.S. politics.
