A buddy sent me this piece from yesterday, by the New York Times’ election analytics guru, Nate Cohn. In a nutshell, Cohn shows that, with all redistricting for 2022 complete (and, theoretically for the remainder of the decade), the Republicans have a real, but actually quite small advantage in House districts across the country. Cohn writes: “Let’s start with a simple fact: On the new House map, 226 districts would have voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, compared with 209 for Donald J. Trump.” As Cohn points out, in the aggregate, Democrats are likely to fare worse in 2022 than they did in 2020, when Biden beat Trump by 4.5 points, which is why that 226-209 Biden advantage in 2020 does not translate into a likely Democratic House win this year. But Cohn’s point is that, for all the reporting on the aggressive gerrymandering by Republicans this year (as in recent cycles), the baseline map is not that disadvantageous to Democrats overall. And one might add that, insofar as the House maps tilt Republican relative to the GOP’s vote share, that has as much to do with natural residential patterns as map-rigging. Democrats, for example, tend to be packed into densely populated urban areas. Therefore, there are more lopsided Democratic congressional districts than Republican ones, but smaller advantages for Republicans in a greater number of districts. The net result is an edge in seats for Republicans relative to vote share. As Cohn points out, this skew is no worse a problem in the House than it is in the Senate or the Electoral College.
In his newsletter summarizing Cohn’s finding, David Leonhardt appropriately noted that, in addition to some of these natural advantages, Republicans and Democrats have not been playing by the same set of rules when it comes to redistricting A number of Democratic-dominant states approved ballot measures that empowered nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional and state legislative maps. The result is that states like New Jersey and California produced fewer Democratic seats than aggressive partisan gerrymandering might have. Not shockingly, no Republican states have followed suit. Leonhardt also points out that gerrymandering at the state legislative level has been very consequential in places like Ohio (as well as North Carolina and Wisconsin). But all in all, Leonhardt concludes, compared to other threats to American democracy, gerrymandering is relatively low on the list.
About that conclusion, I do have a quibble. Or maybe a septible (slightly bigger than a quibble. See what I did there).
The relevance of gerrymandering to the larger threats facing our democracy isn’t just in the numbers themselves.It's about the context in which our political battles are playing out. New York and Ohio courts both ruled that their state legislatures engaged in unconstitutional gerrymanders. The former responded by changing its maps. The latter responded by telling the courts to go fuck themselves. Those two responses to court decisions may, all by themselves, result in the flipping of four seats, enough to determine control of the House of Representatives.
And if that's not bad enough, it's what that disparate response to court orders reflects that makes Leonhardt’s conclusion dubious. The GOP is hunting for every conceivable advantage it can, legal or otherwise, not only to seize power in the upcoming election, but to rig the system to make it harder and harder to dislodge them at all. This is where the Orban precedent in Hungary matters - translating initial electoral victories into increasingly insurmountable obstacles to challenging his rule, including by the rigging of parliamentary maps. It’s no wonder that so many Republican elites have become such devotees of Orban.
So, in the narrow sense, it's fine to talk about how many seats gerrymandering does or does not impact in a given election. But gerrymandering is, itself, now part of a larger anti-democratic arsenal, which also includes relentless harassment of election workers, more brazen attempts to engage in election fraud and running candidates for high office who vow to overturn election results unfavorable to Republicans, to name a few. That arsenal is being deployed to wage a war whose premise is that we are "a Republic, not a democracy,”1 by which the right means some people's votes *should* count more than others and that it’s somehow “unconstitutional” to claim otherwise. All of which is to say that the meaning and threat of gerrymandering itself has changed in recent years. It’s no longer just the usual partisan back and forth of American politics. Instead, gerrymandering is one more weapon in the GOP’s increasingly brazen assault on our elections, whose ultimate aim is to bar Democrats from office, and Democratic voters from representation.
So, when Leonhardt says gerrymandering is not among the bigger problems facing our democracy, he's right in a narrow sense, but wrong in context.
When I have the energy, I’ll try to delve further into this insidious and now utterly commonplace claim on the right.
I'm not sure if you've discussed gerrymandering before, but there is one particularly insidious aspect of it you left out in your otherwise cogent analysis: it encourages extremism. Once a district is safely Red, it is easier for a Trumpist to win. The same could be said for Blue districts and radical progressives, but clearly the biggest threat to American democracy at this point is Trumpism. Somehow, Democrats have to reach out to the remaining sane Republicans to agree together to reverse this trend. But it may be too late.
I also think Democrats didn't lose out as much this cycle because the GOP had such a head start on gerrymandering that it was hard for them to carve out a significantly greater advantage. In NC, for example, the GOP could gerrymander in 2010 to turn a 6-7 deficit to a 10-3 advantage for most of the decade. They can't engineer a 14-0 sweep this time.
Spot-on.