Our editorial on the stand-off in Texas, and a lot of other commentary, may understate how much Democrats rely on gerrymandering.
Consider this passage:
Entering the 2024 election, Republicans controlled the governorship and the state legislature in 23 states. Across those states, they won 59.3 percent of the popular House vote and 132 of the 176 House seats — 75 percent of the seats, or a 16-point advantage over purely proportional representation. (In our first-past-the-post, single-member-district system, representation is rarely precisely proportional.) In the ten states with divided government, Republicans won 52.3 percent of the popular House vote and 47 of the 75 House seats — 62.7 percent of the seats, or a 10.4-point advantage. In the 17 states run entirely by Democrats, the Dems won 56.7 percent of the popular House vote but 143 of the 185 House seats — 77.7 percent of the seats, or a 21-point advantage.
All of that is true. But when we compare the percentage of votes cast for each party to the percentage of seats won by each party, we stack the deck in the Democrats’ favor. Their voters tend to be geographically concentrated and Republicans’ dispersed. That means that if you have geographically based single-member districts — as has been the longstanding U.S. arrangement — Republicans will almost always have a natural advantage. They will overperform in seats won.
If you want the percentage of seats to approximate the percentage of votes, you have to fight this geographic tendency. You have to draw the lines to give the Democrats some help. You will have to slice up cities so that multiple districts reaching out from them have areas rich in Democratic voters that overwhelm the more politically mixed, or Republican, suburbs. The result will be a lot of oddly shaped districts that don’t follow the lines of neighborhoods or natural features.
Gerrymandering has always been considered an unsavory practice. And hostility to it has been tied up with its frequent use of strange-looking district lines disconnected from communal ones at least as much as with its departure from proportionality. The name comes from Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry’s signing of a state-senate map including a district that looked like a mythological salamander. If you want Democrats (given their current pattern of support) to get seats proportional to their votes, in our system, you’re going to have to draw a lot of such creatures.