Gerrymandering is an abomination of US democracy and there are common sense solutions for it (I think a long ago thread may have discussed this in some detail).
But it’s a problem down on the list of priorities for the average voter, most of whom probably couldn’t even articulate how or why it’s a problem. Add to that obstacle the fact that the people who can solve the problem are the same people who are mostly benefiting from it.
It’s really frustrating to we Better Democracy folks.
It’s absurd to make any general statement about anything by discounting half of that thing. It’s like saying “Outside of Republicans, Harris beat Trump in the biggest landslide in history”.
Well, that was as clear as used motor oil.
Let’s get back to the question at hand re: gerrymandering and whether it is advisablein the context of representative democracy to draw the electoral district map in such a way as to disproportionately marginalize the more conservative minority. Do you believe that the more than half of people who live outside of the state of California’s three largest metropolitan areas do not deserve proportionate representation because they are in the political minority?
Stranger
I do believe that everyone in the country deserves representation. I’ll leave off the word “proportional” until you or anyone else can precisely pin down what “proportional representation” means, and proposes a way in which it can be possible.
Of course they don’t deserve it.
The democrats needcto realize they’re not in a fair fight and act accordingly. Being a minority because your opposition is willing to deny people representation they deserve and you aren’t leaves you with people being denied representation anyway while your opponent steamrolls you and makes you politically irrelevant.
Democrats engage in gerrymandering too. They’re just not quite as good at it as Republicans.
Dems’ problems with voters are far more about policies and messages than they are about gerrymandering unfairness.
Fighting for nonpartisan drawing up of districts is hard work, but ultimately more effective than trying to use sleazy tactics your opponents are better at.
I’m aware that blue states do it - I live in one.
Since 2024 (after your article) Texas and Ohio have proposed more slanted maps. Which is completely legal for them to do. The dems in California need to so the same, rather than give up the potential slant from the biggest blue state.
And for everything you can say about dems poor performance reaching actual human beings, the house is still razor thin. These margins absolutely matter and will continue to matter.
Way to duck and weave the question.
“Proportional” means representation that is at least a reasonable approximation of the distribution of views on policy and political stances. To the extent that political views can be discretized into the two party dichotomy, a 43:9 ratio of representation is (probably) a reasonable division for a state like California with both multiple dense urban centers and wide swaths of agricultural and rural areas, while a 50:2 for a state that routinely elects a Republican governor (historically, at least) and has a vast diversity of people clearly is not. There is not a simple equation by which one can assure some kind of ‘true’ proportionality or avoid any gerrymandering because in drawing districts there is always a tension between making them representative (not only of broad political views but also locally-specific issues) and making them competitive, and so there is always some subjectivity in the process but intentionally denying any kind of proportionality in order to let one party totally control the narrative is the definition of political suppression.
If we are at a point that it is necessary to reject the basic principles of representative democracy in order to ‘win’, we’ve already lost what little remains of democratic institutions. Manipulating the ‘voting map’ to squeeze out opposition ensures both resentment, and that people in power will perpetuate that structure in order to retain power. Our fundamental problem today is that there are too many voters already disillusioned with democracy as a means of governance and are backing an openly self-proclaimed autocrat, and this would just provide evidence to substantiate the belief. Or, in more straightforward terms, you either live by the principles you claim to hold, or you don’t really hold them at all.
Stranger
The current split of D vs R among California Representatives is 43-9. This is about as good as we could hope for.
Could the districts be squiggled to get a few more D’s into Congress? Yes. BUT that would require making districts with only very thin Democratic majorities. A small change in sentiment could lead to R’s winning elections in many of these thinly held districts. It’s better to have “only” 40 D districts or so but to be confident of those districts.
There were only eight elections of U.S. Representatives from California which were close in the 2024 general election.
Districts 9, 13, 21, 27, 45, 47, 49 were close elections won by the Ds. District 13 was won by the razor-thin margin of 105,554 to 105,367.
District 41 was the only close election won by the Rs.
Let’s not push our luck.
Way to duck the definition of “proportional”. If there’s a polity where 51% of the population favors Whig policies, and 49% favor Tory policies, and they have a 100-seat legislature where Whigs hold 51 of the seats and Tories hold 49 seats, is that proportional representation? Is it still proportional representation if the 51 Whigs all vote in perfect lockstep, so the policies that are implemented are 100% Whig? Maybe actual proportional representation would require implementing the Whig policy on 51% of issues and the Tory position on 49% of them… Which party gets which issues? Or maybe that means that the policy on every issue should be almost exactly between the Whig and Tory positions, biased only ever so slightly in the Whig direction… How do you find that middle point?
In terms of voting people in to office, if you can turn a 51/49 populace into a 51/49 set of representatives, reliably, then you’ve succeeded.
Pulling in the question of “how to ensure that the policy they accomplish is likewise 51/49?” Is an interesting question but, fundamentally, a question that’s not needed in a discussion of districting.
Perfectionism is often used as a way to block incremental steps towards the right answer. E.g., “It doesn’t solve all of the problem, so it’s wrong.” And then you don’t even get the incremental improvement, and stay stuck at baseline.
“Perfect” is an illusion. Do your best during the first phase, don’t let things get worse, and iteratively improve as ideas come in. That’s the true path.
I’d argue the 22 where R David Valadao held on was also a potential swing district - his margin wasn’t massive. That would give the Republicans two out of nine “competitive” seats.
But I think you make an excellent point. As currently configured it looks like ~36 safe D districts, 7 R, and let’s say 9 swing. That means a D delegation of 36-45 (currently 43) vs 7-16 R. That’s pretty fucking solid. Try and gerrymander hard in places like the contested suburban seats might lead to a shakier range of 32-49 or 31-50 D vs 3-20 or 2-21 R. The short-term average might be higher for the Dems, but the realpolitik trade-off (i.e. ignoring the moral argument) might not be worth it in a disastrous year.
But we shouldn’t just be looking at who gets into office. We should be looking at the outcomes of the entire process. If we have a population that’s consistently overall 51/49, and the system is set up to ensure perfect proportionality, then we’ll always get 51 officeholders from the majority party, and hence pure-majoritarian policies. But if we have that same population, and a system of choosing officeholders that has some noise in it, then sometimes, the minority party will have power, and we’ll end up with at least some sort of mix of majority and minority policies. I would maintain that the first of those two systems, despite being perfectly proportional, isn’t actually representative of the minority at all, but that the second one, by virtue of not being perfectly proportional, is at least somewhat representative.
I agree that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and we shouldn’t stand in the way of improvements just because they’re not perfect. But you do still have to make the argument that a particular change is, in fact, an improvement.
If the goal is achieve policy results that feel reasonable and could even be measured as reasonably matching an attempt to balance the interests of everyone, while respecting the views of minority groups, then the question - for districting - is whether a) a system that works to actively empower one widely popular sub-ideology and minimize another widely popular sub-ideology, or b) a system that aims to match the balance of sub-ideologies is more or less likely to achieve the target?
The second option is almost certainly better.
Now, yes, you could continue on to say, “Well, what if the proportional system just grabbed the most crazy and staunch version of those people?” But does it? That doesn’t feel like the likely outcome of districting that was undertaken by an apolitical entity with a mission to split things to achieve something that would represent the beliefs of a random selection of ordinary folk.
Sure, we could envision a system under which your scary result might occur, but the precise districting method that’s in place doesn’t appear to be that. Your scare story appears to just be a non-sequitor.
Also, party preference isn’t carved in stone, and voter turnout can vary from election to election. It’s not remotely realistic to think that a party which wins 49% of the vote in one election has no chance of winning the next one.
I remember a Nate Silver article from years ago claiming that the maximum theoretical benefit from gerrymandering is about 7%; once the Tories have 58% of the voters, it’s mathematically impossible to draw districts which will produce a Whig-majority legislature. (assuming the districts have to be roughly equal in population, of course). So, I too am skeptical of this claim that a 50-2 map could exist. And as others have pointed out, extensive gerrymandering means creating a lot of somewhat competitive districts, where the Whigs might have an advantage in normal times, but an unusually strong showing by the Tories in a particular election could result in the Tories winning many more seats than a neutral map would have given them.
A 51-49 split is fantastic if it’s been achieved in a representative manner. It means that the 51% party has little room for error and the 49% party will have a fair crack at winning enough hearts and minds to get a chance to govern. And voters will feel like their votes count. That’s good for democracy.
Single member districts with first past the post voting is an invitation to manipulate and demoralize the electorate.
It depends on the number of seats, but for a sufficiently-large number of seats, the maximum bias you can gerrymander-flip approaches 75%. For the minority party to rule, they have to have just a hair over 50% of the population, in each of a hair more than 50% of the districts.
Of course, that would be a ridiculous degree of gerrymandering even by American standards: You’d need tendrils of districts fine enough to include and exclude individual houses. And it’d be extremely fragile: Any defections at all would flip control back. But it’s theoretically possible.
OK, then, repeat the exercise for a 55-45 split. That’s enough to get called “reliably safe” by most pundits, but it still leaves close to half with almost no say on policies.
Then the 45% needs to devise more attractive policies. In democracies, someone has to govern and it should never be the party which manipulates the districting to give (and retain) power to the minority.
There are enough swing voters nationally to decide national elections – if voters are given a fair bite at the apple. Gerrymandered districts fuel extremist two-party politics and voter apathy. Why should a Maryland Republican-leaning voter bother? Or a Dem-leaning North Carolinian?
“Gerrymandering” is very much in the eye of the beholder. Do we want districts that have simple geometric shapes? Or districts that generally follow established town and county borders? Or districts where both parties have a fair chance of winning? Or districts that are designed to ensure that minorities will be represented? If so, who counts as a “minority”? All of these interests have to be balanced against each other.
In general, we have a great deal of geographic polarization in this country. Chicago has enough people to account for six Congressional seats, and we will always elect six Democrats. Drawing districts that break Chicago up and combine the pieces of it with redder areas in southern Illinois will produce more swing districts, but it will also produce extremely weird-looking, long, narrow districts whose voters may live hundreds of miles apart. Moreover, it means that there will be no Congresspeople who are solely motivated to look out for the interests of Chicago.
If you draw districts with nice compact borders, the vast majority of them aren’t going to be particularly competitive. Trying too hard to get around that requires ignoring the fact that most Americans have freely chosen to live in places where one party or the other holds a large majority.