U.S. Public Overwhelmingly Opposes Partisan Gerrymandering

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between April 24th and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,836 adults (including 1,647 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.

 

Voters Overwhelmingly Oppose Gerrymandering - Want Fairly Drawn Districts

 

The charts above are from the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between August 9th and 11th of a nationwide sample of 1,474 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

Democrats Must Give Up The High Road To Counter Republican Cheating

 

Gerrymandering is wrong. It is cheating. That's true no matter which party does it.

But Republicans want to do it anyway. They want red states, who already have gerrymandered districts to redistrict again - dividing Democratic voters into heavily Republican districts to make even more Republican districts. The Texas Republicans are currently trying to carve an additional five Republican districts at the request of Donald Trump.

Why? Because their policies, as evidenced by Trump agenda, is very unpopular - and it looks like they are very likely to lose the House of Representatives in the 2026 election. The reasonable action would be to alter their policies to appeal to voters. But Trump can't admit he might be wrong, and the Republicans would never go against him. So they have chosen a different route - cheating by further gerrymandering districts. And Texas might not be the only red state to do it.

This leaves Democrats between a rock and a hard place. Do they do nothing and let the GOP cheat their way into keeping the House? Or do they do some gerrymandering of their own? Neither is a great option, but in light of the GOP cheating, they may be forced into that second option (fighting fire with fire).

Here are Robert Reich's thoughts on the matter:

When Democrats gathered in Philadelphia eight years ago, Michelle Obama famously declared, “When they go low, we go high.”

But now that Texas’s Governor Greg Abbott — at the presumed direction of Trump, — has gone so low as to seek to super-gerrymander Texas’s congressional districts to come up with five additional Republican seats in order to maintain Republican control of Congress after the 2026 midterms, Democrats appear to be giving up the high road.

 

Good!

 

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is threatening to redistrict California. 

Some fear this tit-for-tat will turn into a race to the bottom that will further erode American democracy. With control of Congress hanging in the balance and the Supreme Court giving its blessing to partisan gerrymandering, they see California’s move as dangerous. 

Wrong. California’s threat is actually a means of saving our democracy — a way to keep Republicans from sinking it. As long as Democrats threaten to do exactly what Republicans do — and no more — they could prevent Republicans from utterly destroying democracy.

 

Call it a mutually assured counter-balance (roughly analogous to the so-called “mutually assured destruction” that’s kept Russia and the United States from launching nuclear war on each other). Blue states must credibly threaten to counter-balance any new gerrymandering by red states — thereby eliminating any new red-state advantage.

 

To avoid turning this into a destructive race to the bottom, blue-state governors must make clear they’ll do this only if red states do in fact pull the trigger on super-gerrymandering and that blue states will do no more of it than necessary to counter-balance what red states do.

 

Newsom has been clear about this strategy. He said Monday that California Democrats are pursuing a plan that would be “triggered” by what happens in Texas. California is preparing for potential redistricting ahead of the midterms: 

“In response to the existential realities that we’re now facing …. Whatever they are doing will be neutered here in the state of California. It’s cause and effect, triggered on the basis of what occurs or doesn’t occur in Texas.” 

Importantly, Newsom’s plan would maintain the framework of California’s independent redistricting commission but allow for this mid-census redistricting to occur just for congressional maps in 2026, 2028, and 2030, before reverting to the existing system.

The language is important — “triggered” by Texas, seeking to “neuter” what Texas might do, before “reverting” back to the reformed system.

 

Other blue states need to follow California’s lead and also threaten to do what’s necessary to counter-balance whatever super-gerrymandering red-state governors have in mind. 

Ohio is set to push forward with a plan to eliminate two House seats held by Democrats.

 

Florida Republicans have also floated plans to redraw their district lines Which is why it’s important that — besides California — New York, Maryland, New Jersey, and Illinois also let it be known that they’re ready to redistrict to counter-balance any potential red-state gains through super-gerrymandering.

 

This isn’t a race to the bottom. It’s the opposite. It’s a means of avoiding the bottom.

Texas Gerrymandered To Create 2 New White GOP Districts

When the 2020 census was released, it was announced that the Texas population had grown enough to give the state two new congressional districts.

About 95% of that population growth was among minority populations (Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, etc.). A reasonable person would assume that since the growth was among minorities, the two new districts would be minority districts.

But Texas Republicans are neither rational nor fair. They did some serious gerrymandering, and gave the state two new districts that are predominately white.

That means that of the 38 districts, about 62% are predominately white -- even though whites only make up about 40% of the state population.

This was nothing less than an attack on racial and ethnic voters -- trying to minimize their electoral power in the state.

Here is part of how Dean Obeidallah describes this racist gerrymandering at MSNBC.com:

Texas has seen first-hand the connection between the state’s changing demographics and voting results. In 2012, presidential nominee Mitt Romney won the Lone Star state by nearly 16 pointsover Barack Obama. In 2016, Donald Trump won, but only by 9 points. Come the 2020 election, Trump’s victory in Texas was barely over 5 percent. You don’t need to have a Ph.D. in mathematics to get that these numbers put Texas Democrats closer to winning statewide elections for the first time since 1994. (The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won Texas was Jimmy Carter in 1976.)

The brutal truth is that the reason Texas and other GOP statesenacted 33 laws in 19 states since January to make it harder to vote was never about Trump’s “big lie.” It was about Trump’s “big loss.” Republicans are freaking out that people who don’t look like most of them could soon be in charge. Consequently, they're apparently using any means to preserve that power. 

The Texas GOP drafted the new voting districts to “shrink the number of districts in which eligible Hispanic and Black voters can realistically sway election outcomes,” as The Texas Tribune noted. By way of “elaborately manipulated lines to create district boundaries,” they reduced from eight to seven the districts that are majority Latino and reduced the districts where Black residents make up the majority of voters from one to zero.

In a central Texas House district in Bell County that had been trending blue (Black and Hispanic populations were nearly equal to the white population there), the district was redesigned into a doughnut-like configuration that effectively “segregated” the Black and Hispanic communities to dilute their political strength.

In the suburbs of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which also has been trending blue in recent years, the party redesigned two congressional districts, creating two new majority white districts designed to more easily elect Republicans to both congressional seats. . . .

The reason the party can be so brazen in its efforts to suppress the vote of people of color is because this is the state's first redistricting since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013 by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court in the infamous Shelby County v. Holderdecision. Ten years ago, the Texas GOP would’ve needed “pre-clearance” before these new voting maps could go into effect — same for its voter suppression measures. But with that key part of the VRA gutted — and with a 6-to-3 Republican majority on the Supreme Court — the GOP is going full throttle in its efforts to maintain white supremacy.

Texas GOP Gerrymanders To Maintain Its Grip On Power

The chart above is from The Texas Tribune. 

Whites are no longer the majority in Texas. They make up only about 40% of the state's population. Add to this the fact that of the 4 million new citizens in Texas, 95% of them were minorities (mainly Hispanic).

Considering that, a reasonable person might think that minorities might deserve at least one of the two new congressional seats in Texas (if not both). But Republicans hold the power in the state legislature, and reason and fairness are not GOP values.

The Republicans did some fancy gerrymandering, and drew a congressional map they believe will keep them in power (ignoring racial/ethnic realities).

Even though Whites are only 40% of the state population, the GOP created a map that has 23 districts (out of 38) that has a predominately White populace. That's 60.5% of the districts.

Hispanics, who make up 39% of the state's population, only got 7 seats that are predominately Hispanic. That's only 18.4% of the districts.

Even though Blacks make up 12% of the population and Asians make up 5%, neither group got a district that is predominately made up of those groups. Instead, the remaining 8 districts have no majority population. That's about 21.1% of the districts.

A coalition of Hispanic voters and other grassroots organizations have filed suit against the new congressional map -- claiming that it was gerrymandered to deny political power to minorities. I think they have a very good case. But with the current right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, it is unlikely they will win their efforts to get fairer districts drawn.

Gerrymandering Is Unfair - Can Supreme Court Stop It ?

Gerrymandering is when the dominant political in a state draws district lines in such a way as to maximize the number of safe seats for them while minimizing the number of seats the other party can win. The image above (from act.represent.us) shows some of the extreme gerrymanders that currently exist. The Republicans have been particularly effective in gerrymandering, but it is a practice engaged in by both political parties. And it is unfair to the voters, regardless of which party does it. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case to determine the constitutionality of political gerrymandering.

The following is an editorial about gerrymandering by the editorial board of the traditionally conservative Dallas Morning News. I am far from being a conservative, but I agree with what they have written.

We are pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a partisan gerrymandering with the potential to reshape American politics. 

Courts have rejected district election maps on grounds they were drawn outlandishly to disadvantage minority voters. However, the court has never turned down a map drawn to give an advantage to a political party.  That's what makes this case so consequential. Political parties routinely draw maps that either concentrate or dilute the other party's  voters to create safe districts for their own incumbents. 

The case before the court is Gill v. Whitford,  which grew out of election results in 2010 that gave Republicans control of Wisconsin's government. GOP lawmakers immediately drew a map for the state assembly that helped Republicans turn razor-close statewide vote totals into lopsided legislative majorities.

Since then, a three-judge federal district court panel ruled that Republicans overstepped, concluding that the map "was designed to make it more difficult for Democrats, compared to Republicans, to translate their votes into seats." The district court agreed with the challengers that the map was drawn for partisan reasons and resulted in "wasted votes." 

After every U.S. census, district lines are redrawn to reflect changes in population. As districts gain or lose residents, new boundaries are supposed to make sure each district has about the same number of people, is compact, includes people with common interests and gives voters an equal say. 

Partisan-inspired redistricting violates most of these standards. Boundaries are overtly manipulated to maximize the number of districts favorable to one party while spreading as many of the voters that might back the other party into remaining districts where votes have minimal impact. 

The case before the Supreme Court has the potential for serious repercussions in Texas. We have long decried gerrymandering shenanigans here.  Few state legislative and congressional races are considered competitive, which is why many incumbents run unopposed election after election and challengers face a steep climb. As a result, voters often don't have meaningful choices. 

In addition, a trial is scheduled next month over accusations of racial gerrymandering in Texas House and congressional political maps. A federal court has already ruled that GOP lawmakers drew boundaries in 2011 to intentionally discriminate against minority voters.

We'd like to see Texas lawmakers establish an independent commission to reduce redistricting self-dealing on both racial and partisan grounds. They haven't.  

Racial gerrymandering has long been seen as unconstitutional. We welcome the Supreme Court's scrutiny on political gerrymandering, too. No one should be happy with a process that effectively allows elected representatives to pick their constituents and to be less responsive to the concerns of political minorities in their districts. 

Democracy fails when politicians rig the system before the first vote is cast. Democracy works when people have choices.

A New Method For Finding Gerrymandered Districts ?

(These images of gerrymandered districts ate from the National Journal.)

We have a serious problem with political parties gerrymandering congressional (and state legislative) districts in this country. Gerrymandering allows the party in power to make sure they maintain a majority regardless of how the public votes. Some examples of gerrymandered districts are shown above, but not all unfair districts are as obvious as those.

It is gerrymandering that allowed the Republicans in Congress to maintain their majority in 2012, even though they got over a million less votes than Democratic congressional candidates did. The Supreme Court has outlawed gerrymandering, but it continues because it is very hard to prove a district was drawn to be unfair to a particular party. There may now be a simple solution to this problem.

Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and political scientist Eric McGhee have come up with a fairly simple mathematical formula for determining if districts were gerrymandered. It is currently being used in court to attack some gerrymandering in Wisconsin, and it has already survived two court challenges. It will undoubtably wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here is how Think Progress describes the new formula. What do you think of it? Does it make sense? Should it be used in all states?

Stephanopoulos and McGhee’s central insight is that gerrymanders operate by forcing the disadvantaged party to “waste” votes. Some voters are shunted into districts where their party’s candidate has no chance of winning, a process known as “cracking.” Others are crammed into districts that so overwhelmingly favor their party’s candidate that casting an additional ballot for that candidate merely adds padding to a foregone conclusion, a process known as “packing.” “A gerrymander,” Stephanopoulos and McGhee write, “is simply a district plan that results in one party wasting many more votes than its adversary.”

To sniff out possibly gerrymanders, Stephanopoulos and McGhee begin by counting each party’s “wasted” votes. As the three-judge panel hearing the Whitford case explained in a recent opinion, a wasted vote occurs when a voter either casts a ballot “for a candidate who lost the election” (suggesting that the voter was targeted by cracking), or if they cast a ballot “for the winning candidate, but in excess of what the candidate needed to win” (suggesting that the voter was packed).

As Stephanopoulos and McGhee note, some number of wasted votes are inevitable in elections involving single-member districts. But a fair map should produce roughly equal numbers of wasted votes for both parties. To determine which maps diverge too far from the ideal, the two scholars offer a metric they call the “efficiency gap,” which is calculated by taking the difference of the two parties’ wasted votes and then dividing it by the total number of votes cast. The plaintiffs in Whitford (speaking through a team of lawyers that includes Stephanopoulos) offer an example of how to calculate this figure in their complaint:

Suppose, for example, that there are five districts in a plan with 100 voters each. Suppose also that Party A wins three of the districts by a margin of 60 votes to 40, and that Party B wins two of them by a margin of 80 votes to 20. Then Party A wastes 10 votes in each of the three districts it wins and 20 votes in each of the two districts it loses, adding up to 70 wasted votes. Likewise, Party B wastes 30 votes in each of the two districts it wins and 40 votes in each of the three districts it loses, adding up to 180 wasted votes. The difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes is 110, which, when divided by 500 total votes, yields an efficiency gap of 22% in favor of Party A.

An efficiency gap of more than 7 percent, these plaintiffs claim, is indicative of a partisan gerrymander. When combined with evidence that the state acted intentionally to give one party an advantage, they argue that courts should presume that a map that produces such a high efficiency gap is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Gerrymandered House Districts

The map above is from Christopher Ingraham in the Washington Post. It shows the most gerrymandered House Districts in the United States. The most obvious gerrymandered districts are those with the darkest color. The states with the most districts that are obviously gerrymandered are North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky -- but they are far from the only states with gerrymandered districts. Ingraham used a "compactness" test to determined the districts most likely to be gerrymandered. Here is what he said:

Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn't to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it's to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably. . .

The compactness of a district --  a measure of how irregular its shape is, as determined by the ratio of the area of the district to the area of a circle with the same perimeter --  can serve as a useful proxy for how gerrymandered the district is. Districts that follow a generally regular shape tend to be compact, while those that have a lot of squiggles and offshoots and tentacle-looking protuberances tend to score poorly on this measure.

Using district boundary files from the Census, I calculated compactness scores for each of the districts of the 113th Congress and mapped them so you can see where the least compact -- and likely most-gerrymandered --districts are.

Gerrymandering

These pie charts show the effectiveness of gerrymandering. The Democrats got the most votes in the House races in 2012 (combined vote), but the Republicans maintained a firm grip on control of the House of Representatives. This happened because the Republicans were able to control many state legislatures back in 2010, and were able to redistrict by drawing district lines that were very favorable to them.

Gerrymandering

The Republicans are a minority party, and there is a reason for that. Most people think their policies are bigoted and wrong. The GOP could have altered those policies to appeal to more people, but they didn't. They chose to gerrymander congressional districts instead. I wonder how long that will work for them?

Democratic House Vote Lead Has Grown

Americans know that the Democrats scored big victories in re-electing President Obama to another four years in the White House, and in increasing their majority in the Senate. What is less known is that Democrats also got more votes than Republicans in elections for the House of Representatives. Immediately after the election, it was reported that Democrats had gotten about half a million more votes than Republicans in House elections.

But now all the votes have been counted, and the Democratic lead has grown substantially. Democratic House candidates got 59,343,447 votes, while Republican candidates got 58,178,393 -- giving the House Democratic candidates an edge of 1,165,054 votes. That means Democrats got 50.5% of the total vote, and Republicans got 49.5%.

Looking at those percentages, one might think the House members would be pretty evenly divided between the two parties. But that is not the case. The Republicans have 234 House members, and the Democrats have 201 House members -- giving the Republicans 53.79% of House members, and the Democrats 46.21%.

This shows how valuable the Republican victory in 2010 was. They were able to gerrymander new House District lines in many states after the last census. This gave them the ability to hang on to a majority in the House, even though they didn't get as many votes as the Democrats did. It just proves that gerrymandering is a valuable tool when you can get away with it -- and it can allow a minority party to retain some power they probably shouldn't have.

Gerrymandering Works (For Party In Power)

We all know by now that President Obama defeated his GOP opponent rather easily in the 2012 election (both in the popular vote and the Electoral College). In addition, most of the contested senate seats were won by Democrats -- giving them a slightly bigger majority in the U.S. Senate than they had before. They now have 55 votes (counting the two Independents who caucus with them).

But what most Americans don't know is that the Democrats also got more votes for all House seats in the country than the Republicans got. The Democrats got 57,340,724 votes for House seats (50.23%), while the Republicans got 56,818,399 votes (49.77%). That's an advantage of about 522,325 votes for the Democrats (or slightly more than half a million).

Now a person might think that would mean the Democrats had a slight majority in the House, or at least the division between the two parties would be very close. But that wouldn't be true. Even though the GOP lost the total raw vote, they were still able to hold on to a significant majority of the House Seats. They won 234 seats and the Democrats won 201 seats, giving the Republicans a 33 vote advantage in the House. That's down from their 49 vote advantage after the 2010 election, but it still will allow them to easily control the House.

How does this happen? How can a party get fewer votes, but still win a significant majority of House seats. The answer is gerrymandering (the practice of establishing a political advantage for a particular party by manipulating geographic boundaries to create a partisan district). And 2010 the Republicans were able to seize control of many state governments, giving them the power to redraw congressional districts to benefit their own party. And from the House results in the 2012 election, it looks like they did a very good job of protecting their own party by gerrymandering districts.

The two pictures above show some districts in Tarrant County, Texas. The top picture shows the congressional districts as drawn by the Republican legislature (note the very oddly-shaped 12th and 26th districts). The federal court threw this out, saying it discriminated against minorities, and instituted the lower map instead, to be used only in the 2012 election (which means the legislature will have to try again to redistrict next January).

You might be wondering why this is allowed to happen. Isn't gerrymandering illegal? Well, yes and no. The 1965 Voting Rights Act made it illegal to gerrymander to deny representation to minorities. Then when the Texas districts were redrawn in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was legal -- as long as it did not deprive minorities of representation. So now the Republicans, especially in Texas and the South, stuff as many minorities as they can get into as few districts as possible, and then gerrymander the remaining districts to scatter Democratic votes and create safe Republican districts. By creating a few minority districts, they satisfy the law and are able to do what they want in the rest of the state (including dividing up an area with a strong Democratic vote and putting the pieces into several different Republican districts).

Is this dirty politics? Of course it is, and it's played by both political parties. The Republicans were just able to gain an advantage in the 2010 state legislatures -- and that allowed them to gerrymander the redistricting to protect their own. And we saw the results of that in the 2012 election (where Democrats got more votes, but Republicans got more seats).

This really needs to be changed. A few states are going to non-partisan committees for redistricting to prevent the party in power from gerrymandering to their own advantage. The idea is still too new to know if it works or not, but it certainly sounds like it would be better than how redistricting is currently done in most states.