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gerrymandering
How Did the GOP Win the House? Gerrymandering
According to a new analysis, Republicans won a net 16-seat advantage due to manipulated maps drawn for party advantage.
Dec 19, 2024
Many things propelled Donald Trump’s election victory. Inflation. A worldwide anti-incumbent backlash. Anger at institutions. A swing to the right among working-class voters of all racial backgrounds. And more. Analysts are still chewing on all the data (and Democrats are chewing on each other).
As we sift through the results and look forward, Republican control of the House of Representatives will matter greatly. That control is very, very narrow. And it turns out to rest on a shaky foundation of gerrymandering and manipulated maps, all encouraged by the Supreme Court.
The last time a new president took office without a “trifecta” of House and Senate control was 35 years ago. But this will be the slimmest House majority on record. With yesterday’s announcement by Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz that she will not participate in the Republican caucus, control may effectively come down to one vote.
Voters are mad as hell about a government they feel does not deliver for them. Rigged rules are a big part of why Washington too frequently does not work.
And according to my colleague Michael Li in a new analysis, Republicans won a net 16-seat advantage due to manipulated maps drawn for party advantage. (Democrats garnered an edge in 7 seats through gerrymandering, but the GOP gained a total of 23 seats that way—hence, 16 seats.)
How did this skew happen? Simply, Republican legislators control the drawing of many more districts than Democrats do. In some states, nonpartisan commissions or state courts have actually produced fairer maps. But in most places, politicians are free to press for partisan advantage.
North Carolina is split relatively evenly between Republican and Democratic voters. This year, Trump won the state even as Democrat Josh Stein swept into the governor’s mansion. However, the heavily gerrymandered legislature drew congressional maps that produced 10 seats for Republicans and only 4 for Democrats. The state high court had blocked the gerrymander, a move upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Moore v. Harper. But then a judicial election shifted partisan control of the North Carolina court, which abruptly blessed the gerrymander it had previously banned. That judicial reversal alone gave the GOP an extra 3 seats in Washington—enough to control the House.
Today Republicans are strutting, but that swagger may not last long. Speaker Mike Johnson will have to manage a fractious majority that could be defeated by one or two defections. Individual members will be empowered to extort policy concessions, no matter how extreme.
In fact, what may matter even more than the gerrymandered seats is the collapse of electoral competition. Only 27 districts nationwide saw margins of less than 5%. Lawmakers will look more nervously at the prospect of primary challenges than at the risk of alienating the broad mass of persuadable voters.
It did not have to be this way. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had prevented the most egregious gerrymanders along racial lines. Then in 2019, John Roberts led the justices to rule that federal courts could not police partisan gerrymandering at all.
Congress has the power to act, and in 2022 it tried—coming within two Senate votes of passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which together would have barred gerrymandering for congressional seats nationwide. Both parties would have been forced to compete on a level field. (This legislation would also have undone other damage wrought by rulings such as Citizens United, which legalized the campaign system that saw Elon Musk spend a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump.)
All this is a reminder that the rules of American politics, often arcane, often hidden, bear tremendous weight. It should caution us from drawing too many conclusions about any recent victor’s supposed “mandate.”
Voters are mad as hell about a government they feel does not deliver for them. Rigged rules are a big part of why Washington too frequently does not work. Partisans must do more than battle for inches of advantage. To truly reconnect the seats of power to a sullen electorate, real reform and real competition must be part of the answer.
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North Carolina Woman Running 'Can't Win' State Senate Campaign Against Gerrymandering
"In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives."
Oct 17, 2024
A North Carolina woman is running a self-described "built to lose" campaign for a state senate seat in a bid to draw attention to anti-democratic partisan gerrymandering.
Kate Barr, a 42-year-old mother of two, is a Democrat running for North Carolina's 37th Senate District, a seat she says she cannot win because it "is so gerrymandered that I don't stand a chance."
"But we deserve to have two names on the ballot," Barr
says on her campaign website. "If I'm going to lose, we might as well have a little fun, raise a little hell, and shine a light on the impacts of gerrymandering along the way."
Barr's
platform includes protecting abortion rights, fully funding public schools, and "common sense gun laws."
"All of those would be achievable in our purple state if we had a representative democracy instead of this gerrymandered nonsense," she asserted.
"Why am I losing?" Barr asked during a recent campaign speech covered by The Washington Post. "In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives."
As the Post reported last month:
Barr centers her pitch on the principle of giving voters an option, even in deep-red districts where the outcome is all but predetermined. Having Democrats campaign in those conservative areas also gives a political boost to [U.S. vice president and Democratic presidential candidate] Kamala Harris in a state where the presidential race is seen as a toss-up and could prove nationally decisive if Democrats can peel off enough voters to secure North Carolina's 16 electoral votes...
Gerrymandering arrived in Barr's backyard last year when the state legislature redrew Davidson—the liberal, picturesque college town where she lives—into a state Senate district with conservative Iredell County for the 2024 election. Davidson went from being part of a district centered in Mecklenburg County—where Donald Trump lost by 35 percentage points in 2020—to being part of Iredell, which he won by about the same amount.
Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of partisan gerrymandering in what voting rights advocates called a "blatant attack on democracy."
Barr said in an opinion piece published Tuesday by the Courier that the court decided that "basically, we, the voters in North Carolina, have a right to free elections but not to fair ones."
"That's some real bullshit," she wrote.
Anderson Clayton, who chairs the North Carolina Democratic Party, told the Post that "gerrymandering is a form of voter suppression in every single way, shape, and form."
Clayton added that many North Carolina voters "go into a voting booth every November and they're like, 'Damn, I don't have a Democrat to vote for. You know that means that somebody didn't care, that my vote wasn't worth fighting for.'"
Barr said the fact that she has little chance of winning isn't the point.
"We know we can't win it, because they've made sure we can't," she told one voter, according to the Post. "But that doesn't mean we go down without a fight."
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The GOP Has Already Cheated in the 2024 House Race
A Brennan Center analysis found that gerrymandering in 2024 will give Republicans approximately 16 additional seats in the House of Representatives compared to fairly drawn maps.
Oct 03, 2024
Gerrymandering is as old as the republic. In the very first congressional election, Patrick Henry drew a map to try to keep James Madison from being elected to Congress. (That was before the word “gerrymandering” was even coined.) Today, both parties do it with gusto when they can.
And now gerrymandering may decide control of the House of Representatives.
Once, gerrymandering was an art. Phillip Burton, the legendary Democratic House member from San Francisco who served from the 1960s to the 1980s, used to draw the state’s maps on a tablecloth at a Sacramento restaurant. He proudly called one misshapen district “my contribution to modern art.” Now, however, it’s a science. Digital technology has reshaped the drawing of maps. Partisans can craft districts to quash competition in a way that lasts throughout a decade.
Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps.
Once, there was hope the courts would step in. In 2019, however, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges were barred from policing partisan gerrymandering. And while it is still illegal to draw district lines to discriminate based on race, judges have often winked and allowed politicians to racially gerrymander so long as they shrug and say, “It’s not about race, it’s just politics.”
Rampant district rigging has blocked fair representation in many states, especially in the South. Nearly all the population growth in the United States over the past decade took place in the South and Southwest, and most of that came from communities of color—the very voters who should be represented and who are being shut out of power.
Now, we know that there are direct partisan consequences too. All the map drawing, all the lawsuits, are done for 2024. The dust has settled. And the Brennan Center’s experts have analyzed the effects of gerrymandering. Attorney Michael Li and political scientist Peter Miller have checked and rechecked the data.
Here’s what they found: Gerrymandering in 2024 will give Republicans approximately 16 additional seats in the House of Representatives compared to fairly drawn maps. That is well more than the margin of control in this Congress or in the one before it. There can be no question that this was done deliberately and with scientific precision—and comes especially at the expense of communities of color. In most of the gerrymandered states, there were hundreds or thousands of fair maps that could have been drawn.
What can be done about it?
One answer comes from Ohio. Seven times, the state supreme court there struck down unfair maps drawn by the Republicans. (The Brennan Center represented a broad coalition of Ohio voters.) Each time, partisan map drawers simply ignored the court. Then the state’s esteemed Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a prominent Republican, retired due to term limits. Now she leads a statewide drive for a ballot measure to create a strong, independent, citizen-led redistricting commission. This conservative stalwart teamed up with the progressive grassroots Ohio Organizing Collaborative. It’s a buddy movie for the ages.
Republicans tried to change the number of votes needed to pass a measure like this, but citizens rejected that sneaky move. Then state officials rewrote the language to say that the initiative was designed to support gerrymandering. No matter. Polls look strong, and there is a good chance that in Ohio, voters will untilt the legislature and congressional maps. Ohio would join Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan with their independent commissions. It is a prime exhibit of why voters should be able to overrule politicians.
There’s a national solution too. The Freedom to Vote Act would ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional redistricting. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would strengthen that vital law against racially discriminatory rules. Both bills came achingly close to passing in the last Congress.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), at a Brennan Center event with Democracy SENTRY in Chicago this summer, announced that Democrats would make these voting rights bills the first order of business—and that they would change the filibuster rules so they could pass. The next night, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged to sign them (the only bills mentioned by name in her convention speech).
Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, James Madison insisted on the provision used to give Congress the power to override local politicians. It used “words of great latitude,” he explained, because “it was impossible to foresee all the abuses” that might come. “Whenever the State Legislatures had a favorite measure to carry, they would take care so to mould their regulations as to favor the candidates they wished to succeed.”
Meanwhile, voters will go to the polls to choose their representatives—but too often, the representatives will choose the voters. And the Congress that would consider reform will be one disfigured by biased rules and manipulative maps.
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