It’s no coincidence that the overheated Democratic rhetoric about gerrymandering is cooling off.
It’s no coincidence that the overheated Democratic rhetoric about gerrymandering is cooling off.
D emocrats are mostly winning the redistricting wars, as they have historically done more often than not. Predictably, too, the chorus of horror, alarm, and panic over gerrymandering has begun to quiet, now that Democrats have reverted to their ancestral pattern of playing more hardball than Republicans do.
This will be the first of three installments on gerrymandering. In today’s column, I take a look at why the gerrymandering of House districts is neither an enormous problem demanding an urgent federal remedy, nor one that inherently or historically favors Republicans. In the second installment, I will look at the Democrats’ legislative proposals and why they are not actually aimed at doing away with gerrymanders. In the third, I will look at how many breaks Democrats are catching as the 2022 maps take shape.
The Panic
There is little question that things are now going fairly well for Democrats. Politico Playbook recently captured the conventional wisdom:
Catastrophic losses from partisan gerrymandering that many Democrats feared have not materialized. Despite decrying the process and pushing reform in Congress, Democrats did not unilaterally disarm. The hyper-aggressive map recently released by New York Democrats made it clear that the party may come out ahead in the process nationally. “There aren’t many breaks Dems haven’t caught in redistricting so far,” Dave Wasserman recently noted.
The growing calm comes after years of hyperventilating rhetoric about gerrymandering, all of it driven by Democratic partisans’ bemoaning Republican advantages. The moralistic and doomsaying tone used against Republican gerrymanders somehow never surfaces when discussing Democratic gerrymanders in states such as Maryland, Illinois, and New York.
A January 2021 New York Times report quoted Rick Kennedy, a two-time failed Democratic congressional candidate in Texas: “I believe that gerrymandering is an existential threat to the nation.” Princeton’s Sam Wang added darkly that “redistricting by itself would easily be enough to alter who controls the chamber.” In November 2021, Ari Berman of Mother Jones wrote that Republicans “are rigging the next decade of elections. Election results are basically going to be predetermined for many races at the state and federal level in places like Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, because of the maps that are being passed right now. That’s how serious of a crisis for democracy this is.”
In February 2021, Ronald Brownstein in the Atlantic wrote a piece titled “The GOP Cheat Code to Winning Back the House,” in which he argued that a federal gerrymandering ban was needed because
Democrats face a daunting future of severe Republican gerrymandering that could flip control of the House in 2022 and suppress diverse younger generations’ political influence for years to come. . . . Republican states could impose gerrymanders that prevent the nation’s growing nonwhite population from building political power commensurate with its numbers.
Brownstein quoted Michael Li of the left-wing Brennan Center for Justice:
“These gerrymanders could delay the American future,” he told me. “Our future is coalitional, our future is multiracial, and these gerrymanders could mean that Congress and state Houses continue to look much whiter than states as a whole — and older. It will be older voters who determine the future.”
In an August 2021 piece for the Washington Post, Greg Sargent warned that the “GOP’s strategy for retaking power is about to take an ugly new turn.” Sargent would have us believe that only gerrymandering keeps socialistic economics and perpetual mask mandates from being overwhelmingly enacted:
It is a brutal reality about this political moment that Republicans can capture the House while dwelling almost exclusively in the safe confines of their alternate information environment. In this hermetically sealed-off place, Republicans . . . can dismiss broadly popular economic policies as “socialism” while withdrawing from the conversation entirely about how they would address our deepest challenges. They can actively campaign against mask mandates despite their overwhelming public support, while boasting straight-facedly that this is good strategy.
Sargent emphasized, at the time, that this was not a legitimate thing for political parties to do:
All this isn’t just about partisan advantage. It’s also about the counter-majoritarian fate that Democrats will consign the country to if they refuse to end the filibuster to pass their package of democracy protections, including an end to extreme gerrymanders via independent redistricting commissions.
Former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer echoed the theme:
Republicans — who represent a shrinking minority of Americans — will likely return to power and control politics for the next decade or more. . . . Our political system is rigged in favor of the Republicans.
Note the common narrative here: not merely that gerrymandering is distasteful political hardball, but that it is a rigging of the system that can be motivated only by a shrinking minority party fearful of the popular will. Yet Sargent spun Democratic gerrymanders as a reluctant, defensive move:
A few Democratic states can fight the tide by gerrymandering themselves. But that will force a tough choice between honoring the party’s committed opposition to anti-majoritarian tactics and avoiding unilateral disarmament against the enthusiastic GOP embrace of such tactics in a fundamentally national war.
The wilder rhetoric has cooled as Democrats have gained the edge. None of these people are arguing that New York’s Democrats are fearfully holding back the demographic tide or rigging democracy.
Looking back at all this, New York Times elections analyst Nate Cohn recently acknowledged on Twitter: “There is something to the GOP complaint of hypocrisy: the D claim is that gerrymandering isn’t merely bad, but unconstitutional/anti-democratic/violation of the right to vote. typically, we don’t think of that as something that can ever be justified by the other side . . . to take a different ex., I don’t think we would say, for ex, Dems could justify disenfranchising Evangelicals bc the GOP disenfranchised Black voters.”
But of course, the Democrats’ pundit class has never yet met anything it couldn’t justify.
The Reality
The hysteria was always overblown, and the framing of the gerrymandering issue as one of Republican aggression and Democratic reluctance was always dishonest and inaccurate. Gerrymandering is bad, but it is also a feature of our system that has existed since the Founding. There are realistic limits to extreme gerrymandering, and while you would never learn this from reading progressive commentators, recent Republican advantages are the exception rather than the rule in modern American politics.
Begin with the share of House seats that correspond to the national popular vote. This is necessarily a rough measure, because House races are not run nationally or even statewide. States with a single district will necessarily represent only one party. Moreover, the elections themselves are the product of the drawing of districts.
Further complicating things, some House races are uncontested, and some (in states such as California) are contested only between two Democrats, in which case the Democrats may be credited with 100 percent of the vote. Still, voters do not come out only for House races. The degree of mismatch between the national popular vote and the national share of seats gives us some sense of whether the House is enormously out of whack. To make the measurement slightly less rough, we can use the two-party vote, which excludes mostly irrelevant third-party votes.
Take a look at the divergence between the popular vote and the share of House seats since 1954, when Democrats began the historic 40-year House majority that passed so much of the legislation that now governs the nation:
Historically, the Democrats had a double-digit seat advantage in every election from 1956 through 1992, with multiple Congresses in which they had between 32 and 45 more seats than their share of the national popular vote. The Congresses that passed Medicare and created the current budgeting system were hugely tilted in the Democrats’ favor. That advantage resurfaced in 2008, with Democrats holding 15 more seats than their share of the popular vote — the margin of seats they needed to pass Obamacare. Pundits and politicians who rend their garments over the evils of gerrymandering never propose to give back their policy winnings from this period.
By contrast, since 1994, only five of the 14 House elections have produced a double-digit variance in seats from the national two-party vote, while seven of the 14 have come within five seats of exactly proportional representation. We live in an age in which the House is far less gerrymandered than it once was, and some of the Republican advantage today is the result of natural patterns of voter distribution that would persist if maps were drawn with superhuman impartiality. Republican voters tend to be spread out, while Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in Republican-free urban enclaves.
Of course, there are factors besides gerrymandering that cause divergences between the national popular vote and the share of seats. In a system of winner-take-all elections, the majority party will gain an increasing advantage the further it gets above 50 percent, just as is true in the Electoral College. As a result, other than the Republican landslide in 1994, the 2018 and 2020 elections are the only post-1954 elections in which the House majority got fewer seats than its share of the popular vote.
We can mostly see the same trend if we go back further to the 1896–1952 period, although there were still some Republican majorities in the 1920s that had to overcome a Democratic edge. (Granted, that edge before the mid 1960s was likely due not only to gerrymandering but also to the suppression of black votes in the Democratic Solid South, which as a result had fewer voters per district.) Again, we see large Democratic advantages in the New Deal coalition — as much as an 81-seat advantage in 1936 — that dwarf those of Republican majorities. Again, Democrats to this day defend the permanence of liberal and progressive federal legislation passed by those Democratic majorities:
(Two notes on this latter chart. One, I have not endeavored to track which caucus the independents voted with, as I did in the first chart. Two, the 1916 election was very unusual: Republicans won more votes and more seats than Democrats, but the third-party candidates caucused with the Democrats to keep them in control of the House.)
When you drill down to the state-by-state level, as I did after the 2018 election, you have to adjust for the uncontested seats, or seats contested between candidates of the same party; methodologically, the only reasonable way to do this is simply to score them as one-party seats representing 100 percent of their district’s voters and exclude their votes from state totals. (I did, however, include Jamaal Bowman’s race in New York’s 16th district as contested between the two parties, as he faced a Conservative Party candidate, which New Yorkers would recognize as a substitute for a Republican opponent.)
You can see that there are more states that have a modest Republican advantage in contested races, but only a few of them are that many seats off a proportional outcome:
By contrast, no Republican state has the enormous advantage for one party that Democrats enjoy in California, where 5.6 million people voted Republican but the party won only eleven out of 46 contested two-party races, seven fewer than the proportional share of Republican voters in those districts:
Thirteen states sent the same number of representatives in each party that you would predict from their share of the popular vote:
Run on a state-by-state level, the Republican advantage is three seats nationally rather than two. That is hardly a huge advantage crying out for the federal government to pass legislation dramatically altering two centuries of the primacy of states in drawing House districts.
Unless you’re a Democrat.