David Wasserman writes at the Cook Political Report: “Democrats won 14 [U.S. House] seats they might not have won had the lines not changed, one more than the 13 Republican redistricting-attributable flips or holds. Throw in reapportioned seats, and Democrats may have gained four seats from redistricting overall.”
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In December, FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejia wrote an excellent piece hypothesizing how the House outcome might have been different had redistricting not occurred, concluding that the decennial process likely didn’t cost Democrats the House.
Our analysis, using an approach similar to the Cook PVI, arrives at a similar conclusion: Republicans wouldn’t have won the House without gerrymanders in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas. But overall, Democrats fared slightly better than they would have under old maps thanks to their own gerrymanders in Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon and a temporary court-drawn map in North Carolina.
Whereas Republicans focused on locking in as many safe GOP seats as possible (some of which have produced McCarthy detractors), Democrats embarked on a riskier strategy of drawing as many Democratic-leaning seats as possible — and it paid off. Democrats won 24 of the 25 seats they set out to draw for themselves in Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon — including five seats by less than five points.