Gerrymandering: Why Both Sides are Not Equal

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)

Mid-decade redistricting is such a touchstone right now that you'd think we just had a census, but in fact that happened almost four years ago.  Just this week, conversations in Indiana, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, and New Hampshire have come out, with new maps now certain in Ohio, joining Texas, Missouri, and (after next week) likely California with increasingly gerrymandered maps.  This has brought out the worst in people, both in terms of "what-aboutism" and a further decline in the state of modern politics.  I'm going to say a few very simple facts before we get to the purpose of this article.

First, there was gerrymandering prior to 2024, and it was done by both sides of the aisle-this is an undisputed fact, and it is going to be the central tenet of this article as a result.  Gerrymandering has existed for decades, centuries even but with more consistent down-ballot voting and better technology, even laymen can draw shockingly effective gerrymanders that a few decades ago would've been impossible to keep intact.

Second, the current round of mid-decade redistricting is 100% the fault of Donald Trump, and more specifically the Texas state legislature's acquiescing to a request from President Trump to redraw the maps.  Had Trump not done this, Gavin Newsom would not have pushed to redraw the lines in California, and the over a dozen or more states that are currently frantically stretching their power to the limit would not have done so.  Any Republican who says this is in retaliation for, say, Illinois's very clear Democratic-favored gerrymander in 2024 is gaslighting you-this specific bout of redistricting is entirely the fault of the Republicans (that Illinois line is not even remotely the silliest thing I've heard about redistricting, by the way-Sen. Jim Banks said "they killed Charlie Kirk, the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine-to-zero map" which, and I don't say this lightly, may be the most mind-numbingly stupid sentence I've ever heard an American politician utter in my ENTIRE life...even typing it made me lose IQ points).  The reason that they are thrown off by it is that I think neither the Republicans nor the media (nor, to be fair, many Democrats) thought that the left had the guts to retaliate against the Texas Republicans, and there's a reason for that...

...the third thing, that only one party is trying to stop this gerrymandering on a national level.  Anti-gerrymandering laws on a national level are not new, and Democrats have tried to pass them to some degree for decades.  While there have been Republicans have cosigned (usually those impacted by Democratic attempts at gerrymandering, like Rep. Kevin Kiley), this is a one-sided affair, and one Republicans have taken advantage of.  While Democrats have implemented bipartisan redistricting commissions in states like Virginia & Colorado, Republicans have oftentimes tried to supplant the ability of similar commissions or advisory councils in places like Ohio, Utah, & Iowa to get maps that favor them.  This is important to note because none of what is happening here is good or healthy for the country-these gerrymanders are anti-ethical to democracy, and we need a nationwide ban on gerrymandering.  So it must be noted (as fact), the Democrats are on stronger moral ground here in my opinion, because they'd be willing to end all of this federally today if the Republicans were willing...the GOP is mad because they used to have their cake and eat it too, and now their cake is gone.

Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-IL), one of the biggest
beneficiaries of Democratic gerrymandering

Which brings us to the goal of this article-what side of the aisle genuinely should be maddest about redistricting right now?  While we are still waiting for the chips to fall where they may, it's a good question to know if, for example, states like Illinois are enough that they are costing Republicans a stronger majority & they should rebalance in retaliation.  Looking at the House popular vote (which is not as strong of a metric as the presidential election given some seats are uncontested, which is why in this article we'll use the 2024 presidential race so it's fairer), the House popular vote generally predicts who gets the House majority.  In the past fifty years, only twice (in 1996 & 2012) has the House popular majority vote not match the eventual winners of the House; it's worth noting (because it's going to be a theme) that in both cases the Democrats ended up on the short end of the stick, though I will also state that in both cases the Democrats did gain seats in the US House those cycles.

So what I will do here is break down, looking at both the House maps in 2024 and the presidential election in 2024, which states should qualify as an outright partisan gerrymander, and which party (overall) gains the most from it.  What you'll find is that while both sides are correct in the sense that partisan gerrymanders existed in 2024 & before that favored either party, there's a pretty indisputable party that is gaining a disproportionately large advantage over the maps compared to the other if you used fair maps...and that party is the one that is actively trying to stop any efforts to ban gerrymandering nationally.

Let's start with ruling out the at-large states.  There are six states that don't have more than one congressional district (Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, & Wyoming)-it is impossible to gerrymander these states.  I have consistently seen Republicans post about how Vermont & Delaware are gerrymandered because they have no Republicans in Congress, and, well, this is basically just proclaiming at the top of your lungs that you're an idiot because without a change to the Constitution (or Congress passing the Wyoming Rule, which I think they should do), there's no possible way to gerrymander an at-large state.

For the 44 remaining states (where gerrymandering is possible), it's worth looking at whether the percentage of the state's congressional districts is significantly different than their share of the party's share of the popular vote in the 2024 presidential election.  You're never going to match exactly (the Wyoming Rule would help this, but it's impossible to do it exactly), but in my opinion it would qualify as a potential gerrymander if the party's share of the House seats won by the presidential party divided by the party's share of the presidential vote statewide is either greater than 1 or less than -1.  Anything in-between that would indicate that the House makeup is roughly matching the presidential race, and this isn't really a mathematical gerrymander.

This gets rid of 18 additional states (Alabama, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, & West Virginia).  I will note two issues with this.  First, states that only have two seats using this process it is impossible to mathematically gerrymander.  In New Hampshire, specifically, it does feel on-paper that the Republicans are probably short a seat, but given the map was literally passed by Republicans...it's hard to say "this is a gerrymander" enough to change my logic.  This means that there are a few states (not just New Hampshire, but states like Hawaii, Idaho, & West Virginia) where I think it makes total mathematical sense that one party gets all of the House seats since they are so overwhelmingly favored on a presidential level.

Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV), an over-performer helping
Nevada look bluer than it is

Second, this is based off of seats won in a presidential election, not seats won in a House election.  This is critical because if you look at this list, there are some seats that are pretty universally agreed upon to be gerrymanders, specifically Nevada & New Mexico, and objectively, I agree with that assessment-both of these maps are drawn to clearly favor the Democrats, and in both states the Republicans should have one more seat.  But, the reason they don't qualify as gerrymanders under this project is because in both states, Donald Trump won a district that the Democrats (Gabe Vasquez & Susie Lee in this case) over-performed the top-of-the-ticket enough by to win a crossover seat.  Had Republicans matched Trump, these would have the allotted the number they need...that the seats are not redder definitely makes these gerrymanders, but my focus here is more on mathematically-significant gerrymanders, which to me these are not because Trump was able to win.  This cuts both ways, too, by the way-Kamala Harris got the numbers in Nebraska to win that seat, but the House Dem didn't, so it's not a gerrymander in my book that matters enough to be angry about.  If you want to be angry in these states...blame candidate recruitment.

This leaves us with 26 states that are mathematical gerrymanders, but that does not mean that there are 26 states drawn with the clear indication of favoring one party over another.  Two other things should be taken into account.  First, which states have independent commissions to prevent gerrymandering.  No state is going to be perfect unless we move to an entirely parliamentary system, and five states (Arizona, California, Michigan, New York, & Washington) all have independent redistricting commissions, and in the case of all but New York, those commissions drew the current lines, so it feels unfair to include the four of them.  This takes away the single state with the biggest discrepancy in favor of the Democrats (California), but there's a reason for that-we are not considering the maps involved here.

In order to gerrymander, you need to be able to draw communities with a strong partisan makeup together to take advantage.  However, if you have densely populated communities with a large number of one party but an even larger portion of the other party, it's hard to draw maps that reflect the state's partisan makeup (i.e. it feels like a mathematical, but it's not a geographic one).  On paper, I agree-California should have more Republicans.  But California has SO MANY Democratic voters, many of them who live alongside Republicans, it's hard to draw the latter enough seats.  Los Angeles County, the largest county in the nation, had 1.2 million Trump voters in 2024, and yet no Republicans in the House because there are 2.4 million Harris voters sitting alongside them, and they live too spread out to help.  So I think, to a degree, California isn't so much a gerrymander as it's hard to draw fair lines that don't favor the Democrats.

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), who would not have a seat
under a fair map

This is true in reverse, btw.  Of the 22 remaining states, there are a few states that stand out to me as states where it is very hard to draw more blue or red districts.  In Oklahoma, for example, drawing a map where Democrats get a House seat consistently (which based on their popular vote they should) is darn near impossible without drawing a very bizarre district from Oklahoma City to Tulsa, which makes little sense.  Conversely, it is almost impossible to draw a Republican seat in Massachusetts without it looking like spaghetti, much less the three seats that the GOP deserves if you look solely at the Trump vote.

Before I parcel through which to throw out, though, I'll give you the raw data of where these 22 states sit.  7 states favor the Democrats: Connecticut (by 2), Illinois (4), Maryland (1), Massachusetts (3), New Jersey (1), New York (4), and Oregon (1), for a total of 16 seats.  On the flip, 15 states favor the Republicans: Arkansas (by 1), Florida (4), Georgia (1), Indiana (1), Iowa (1), Kentucky (1), Missouri (1), North Carolina (3), Ohio (2), Oklahoma (1), South Carolina (1), Tennessee (2), Texas (5), Utah (1), and Wisconsin (1), for a total of 26.  Similar to the New Hampshire example above, there are some states that are really close to deserving another additional seat for the other party (in particular Maryland, South Carolina, & Wisconsin), but this is where it lands.

So if you look at the math, on net, the Republicans in 2024 had ten more seats than they deserved.  It's worth noting that this would run a-front of the national popular vote, as Trump won the national popular vote, and yet by this math Democrats arguably deserved the House majority (this is in part because Trump was much more popular than House Republicans were on a whole, but that's not the whole story as you'll see below), something that the Wyoming Rule (or proportional representation at the state level) almost certainly would've helped.  

Ten is an average though.  Like I said, there are states in that bunch that are very hard to draw proper representation like Massachusetts, and so it's worth looking further.  I would break it out in the following ways:

• States Where It's Nearly Impossible to Hit These Proportional Numbers Without Reverse Gerrymandering (in parentheses is the number that's relatively logical to add if you draw common sense maps): Massachusetts (0), Connecticut (1), New York (2 is easy, getting 3 more is doable...to get 4 you basically have to screw over upstate Democrats with a hard reverse gerrymander to make up for the Manhattan & Bronx Republicans, and even that's with essentially drawing a reverse gerrymander across Brooklyn), Kentucky (0-you could easily draw a pink district, but a second blue district is going to take gerrymandering), Oklahoma (0-same story-a pink district is achievable, a blue district is not without reverse gerrymandering), Tennessee (1-drawing a sapphire blue district in Nashville is a piece of cake, but a second one is next to impossible), Texas (similar to New York, I think you could easily get 3 more seats, probably should be able to get 4...to get to 5 you're going to need to reverse gerrymander, but similar to New York getting a pink district for the last one is an option)
• States Where It's Super Easy to Hit these Targets (i.e. there's no excuse for the gerrymandering other than partisan greed): Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Arkansas, Florida (this might change as Miami gets redder, but you could do it currently), Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin

It's worth noting that some of the states in the second bullet (specifically Arkansas) are like New Mexico & Nebraska (i.e. a redraw would create swingy seats that I could see ticket-splitting), but this would be fairer.  If you take this into account, it's a net of about 11 seats to the GOP rather than 10.  Part of the reason I'm harsher on Republicans in this regard as their gerrymanders are achieved by smashing metro areas like Nashville, Salt Lake City, & Jacksonville (i.e. there's a built-in district in the way there just isn't in New England and Mid-Atlantic states where the state's overall density makes it more challenging).

In conclusion, while Trump is the reason that we're doing this round of mid-decade redistricting, the reality is that the Republicans should already be happy.  Even without this 2026 election rigging, they are arguably benefiting by 10-11 seats over the Democrats, more than enough of a majority to have won them the left the House in both 2022 and 2024.  Quite frankly, a truly fair House would be the opposite of the Senate-it would structurally lean to the left in most cycles.