Now that the election is over. its time to look at the impact gerrymandering.
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If you asked Americans to describe the ways that political power has become disconnected from public opinion, many would put the gerrymandering of congressional districts near the top of the list. State lawmakers from both parties have drawn the lines of House districts in ways meant to maximize the number that their own party will win, and Republicans in some states have been especially aggressive, going so far as to ignore court orders.
My colleague Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains this situation in the latest version of his newsletter. “In reality, Republicans do have a structural edge in the House, but it isn’t anything near insurmountable for the Democrats,” Nate writes. “By some measures, this is the fairest House map of the last 40 years.”
Of the House’s 435 districts, 220 now appear to have a natural Republican lean, compared with 215 with a Democratic lean. To be clear, that three-seat margin (because Democrats must flip three Republican-leaning seats to win control) is still meaningful, especially in an election shaping up to be as close as this one.
There are two apparent causes. First, Republicans really have been more aggressive than Democrats nationwide. As the political analyst David Wasserman recently wrote for NBC News:
Thanks to reforms passed by voters, many heavily blue states employed bipartisan redistricting commissions that produced neutral or only marginally Democratic-leaning political maps — including in California, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington. And state courts in Maryland and New York struck down Democratic legislatures’ attempted gerrymanders.
By contrast, Republicans were able to manipulate congressional maps in their favor in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, among others, and the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court blocked lower court orders to draw new Black majority districts in Alabama and Louisiana. In Florida alone, Gov. Ron DeSantis overpowered his own Legislature to pass a map that adds an additional four G.O.P. seats.
The second cause is one that Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford University, has explained in his book, “Why Cities Lose.” Many Democratic voters live packed tightly together in cities. As a result, even Democratic state officials often struggle to avoid drawing districts where Democratic House candidates win landslide victories, effectively wasting votes.
