Partisan Gerrymandering Is Bad and Still Going Well for Democrats
By Joel Wertheimer
A few weeks ago, we released a piece analyzing how redistricting was going for Democrats. It was called, among other things, premature. Some said it did not take into account the harms of partisan and racial gerrymandering sufficiently. To address the latter claim: Yes, there are many facets of partisan and racial gerrymandering that the piece did not address. Lack of competitive seats, unfair representational distribution, and degradation of trust in the political system are all harmful impacts of partisan gerrymandering. And yes, a map can be unfair in ways not reflected by a simple comparison of each district to President Biden’s national margin in 2020, as discussed here. This is why Democrats have rightly supported setting national standards to stop partisan gerrymandering and brought lawsuits to the Supreme Court to end it.
But a direct, simple PVI measure remains extremely useful for exploring the overall fairness of the map, and we do not think it is premature. As we will discuss here, the number of outstanding questions regarding the shape of the national map is dwindling. In the end, perhaps Republicans (or their Supreme Court allies) will wish they took Democrats up on the offer of a draw.
In an effort to keep ourselves honest, we are going to update our projections with a regular change log, to see if any news has changed our prediction of what will happen. As a reminder, here was our original analysis of states in question, with 212 seats projected to be to the left of President Biden’s 4.5-point national margin.
Since the piece, Arizona, California, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, and Virginia’s maps have all become official and match our projections. New Hampshire’s Republican-proposed map is almost certain to become law, and we will take it off the board. New Jersey’s official map faces ongoing litigation, but that litigation seems unlikely to change the outcome, just as litigation over Texas and Nevada’s maps seems unlikely to change outcomes for now. Finally, while Wisconsin’s court-approved maps saw some minor unexpected drama this week, we think the “least change” order from the Wisconsin Supreme Court leaves 6-2 as a highly likely outcome and we will leave it off the board of uncertainty.
That takes us down to the following list of states with undecided maps, and as we can see, the funnel continues to narrow:
Let’s look at the change log.
Florida. This week Florida Senate Republicans released two proposed congressional maps that would have been quite neutral overall, with a small mean-median gap and a moderate efficiency gap leaving 11 seats to the left of Biden’s margin. Florida House Republicans’ maps have a stronger Republican bias but still leave at least 10 seats to the left of Biden’s 4.5-point margin. Our previous projection of 19-9, quite frankly, reflected disbelief that Florida Republicans wouldn’t push their gerrymander further. But they seem to believe they are constrained by Florida’s gerrymandering law and perhaps would prefer to do some incumbent protection, and so we have changed our projection to 17R-11D.
Missouri. We had previously projected Missouri to be a 7-1 split, with Missouri Republicans splitting Kansas City in two. While the map itself might not pass as drawn, there does not seem to be much appetite for splitting Kansas City. As such, we’ve moved Missouri to a projection of 6-2.
New York. There is no news in New York, but we’ve elected to move New York down to 21-5 from 23-3. A 23-3 map is achievable while leaving currently safe Democrats safe, but doubt is creeping in as to whether state legislators will be that aggressive. Call this regressing our projections toward the mean on nothing more than gut feeling.
North Carolina and Ohio. On January 11, a North Carolina trial court found that the current map is legal. The case will now be immediately appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court. In our initial projection we left the map as is, but research into what the North Carolina Supreme Court will do leads us to think they will at least move one district from Republicans to Democrats for illegal racial gerrymandering under the guise of partisan gerrymandering.
Today, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the congressional maps passed by the Ohio legislature. While the precise outcome is unclear, a 10R-5D map seems to be a reasonable expectation for a map that does not "unduly favor" one party over the other when the map is redrawn.
Between the two states, we were underprojecting Democrats substantially, and have moved a number of seats to the left of Biden’s 4.5-point margin.
Current projection: 217 Dem +4.5 Biden seats.