Why Redistricting May Lead to a More Balanced U.S. Congress – The New York Times
At its peak in 2016, the Republican structural advantage was daunting. Just 195 districts tilted toward Hillary Clinton in that years presidential election, compared to 240 that tilted toward Mr. Trump. The median congressional district voted for Mr. Trump by nearly four percentage points, six points more favorable to the Republicans than Mr. Trumps two-point deficit in the national popular vote. The outcome raised the possibility that Democrats could only win the House in a national landslide.
But the Republican advantage crumbled, even before this cycles redistricting began. A string of court rulings in North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia eroded or eliminated some of the partys most valuable gerrymanders, cutting the chambers Republican edge down by one-third before the 2020 election.
What is redistricting? Its the redrawing of the boundariesof congressional and state legislative districts. It happens every 10 years, after the census, to reflect changes in population.
How does it work? The census dictates how many seats in Congress each state will get. Mapmakers then work to ensure that a states districts all have roughly the same number of residents, to ensure equal representation in the House.
Who draws the new maps? Each state has its own process. Eleven states leave the mapmaking to an outside panel. But most 39 states have state lawmakers draw the new maps for Congress.
If state legislators can draw their own districts, wont they be biased? Yes. Partisan mapmakers often move district lines subtly or egregiously to cluster voters ina way that advances a political goal. This is called gerrymandering.
Is gerrymandering legal? Yes and no. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts have no role to play in blocking partisan gerrymanders. However, the court left intact parts of the Voting Rights Act that prohibit racial or ethnic gerrymandering.
At the same time, unfavorable electoral trends eroded the Republican Partys longstanding geographic advantage: the tendency for the party to more efficiently translate its votes into seats than the Democrats, who win lopsided margins in urban areas but tend to lag in less populous areas. Mr. Trumps weakness in traditionally competitive suburbs along with his relative strengths in less competitive rural and urban areas made his coalition somewhat less effective at winning House seats than for prior Republicans. It cut the Republican advantage down by half.
Together, the diminishing Republican geographic advantage and weakened gerrymanders were just enough for Democrats to narrowly win the House with a modest win in the popular vote in 2020.
Republicans were expected to reclaim their advantage again this cycle, as the party would draw more seats than the Democrats. But Republicans had fewer opportunities to improve over their prior maps. In some states, new court rulings and constitutional amendments limited what Republicans could do with their powers. In others, Republicans had already drawn the lines so overwhelmingly to their advantage a decade earlier that there were few opportunities for them to go much further. They chose to reinforce more vulnerable incumbents as often as they eliminated additional Democratic seats.
Democrats, on the other hand, had more opportunities to be more aggressive than they had been a decade ago. Their victories in the 2018 midterm elections gave them more influence in the redistricting process in many states, and Democrats had not adopted especially effective or extreme gerrymanders a decade earlier. Overall, Democrats eliminated 12 seats that leaned Republican in the last presidential election in New York, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada and Oregon. No state courts have acted to weaken Democratic gerrymanders in those states.
Republicans, on the other hand, have faced a string of adverse court rulings.
In Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the courts either limited Republican gerrymanders or selected surprisingly Democratic-leaning maps. In the end, Republicans may only eliminate a handful of Democratic districts, like those in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Nashville and, perhaps soon, eastern New Hampshire.
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Why Redistricting May Lead to a More Balanced U.S. Congress - The New York Times