Upshot of the Gerrymander Wars

Your head might be spinning with all the action from states and courts over redrawing Congressional districts — frantically in order to get them in place for November’s elections.

Here from a story in the New York Times on Saturday is the best bottom line analysis I’ve seen :

At the end of April, the Cook Political Report, which handicaps political races, listed 217 House seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would have needed to win just a single “tossup” race to seize the majority. As of Friday, Cook rated 208 seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would need to win 10 of the 18 “tossup” races.

So, in other words, in the last couple of weeks it appears that the Republicans have created another nine seats or so that look to fall their way. The advantage is still with the Democrats and, of course, the Democrats’ odds of taking back the Senate don’t change as redistricting doesn’t matter for statewide races.

But one thing that might get lost in all this is that, in order to create more districts favoring their party, both Republicans and Democrats have had to narrow their advantages in what had been deep red or deep blue districts. They needed to lop off parts of districts that had surplus voters favoring them and append those wards to districts that favored the other side. The bottom line is that, at least in theory, there should be more districts out there that have narrower partisan margins.

So, the upshot of all this could be unexpected: it might move our politics toward the center. It’s possible — and I’m only working off 30,000 foot theory here; I don’t have specific numbers — that we’ll have a lot more, say, 55% – 45% districts, where in a good year the 45% party could make up the difference and pull off a mild upset. That would suggest more candidates like Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State and Republican Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

Gluesenkamp Perez wins in a district that Trump won three times and Fitzpatrick won in a district taken by Kamala Harris in 2024. Both vote for the Trump agenda almost exactly half the time — which makes sense.

My point here, of course, is not that I want more Democrats to vote with Trump half the time — or even any of the time. Rather, my point is that, if there will now be more districts like these two, it’s possible that we will have more moderate members of Congress who need to work with the other side. And my obvious hope is that in two years there will be another side that isn’t bat-shit crazy and obsessed with painting everything in Washington DC white with lots of gold accents.

I had hoped that this would be accomplished in the opposite way: that nonpartisan redistricting would produce more competitive districts. But now that whole movement has been shredded, first by the Supreme Court with an assist from the Virginia state Supreme Court, and then by Donald Trump who started the wars by demanding that Texas redraw its map to his liking. Democrats, unfortunately, had no choice but to follow him down that hole.

But it’s possible that hyper-partisan redistricting, where legislatures want to squeeze every possible Congressional seat for their party out of their maps, will result in ever more “cracking” of partisan areas to produce more red or blue districts, but with necessarily thinner margins. And that could foster more moderate candidates. Moreover, that need to win at the margins might put pressure on both parties to moderate their overall images so as not to hurt their candidates with toxic party labels in competitive districts.

Maybe. One can only hope.