Gerrymandering giving the GOP control of the House is almost entirely a myth, and the basis for it is weak. Even the article I just linked to misses the mark in a key area (which I’ll touch on this later.)
But to start with, the assumption all the liberal pundits have made is that if the Democrats won a majority of the “aggregate popular vote” in House elections, then the default assumption is they should have won a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives. Additionally, the assumption is that if they didn’t, the reason must be the 2010 gerrymander.
The many liberal articles that address this claim simply show lots and lots of statistics about the “perverse result” but few actually dig into the details of the actual districts and how they are drawn. This means that all they’re really showing is that there is a deviation from the expected result, and then saying “it must be gerrymandering” without ever bothering to actually demonstrate whether gerrymandering is happening or not. As I said, the article I linked to has a problem–and that is it. It correctly shows that if you factor in issues like incumbency, if you run the results with previous district maps, if you look back to the 1990s–the statistical “proof” that the 2010 redistricting is why the Republicans control the House vanishes. That in fact if you followed norms of geographical compactness, it will always hurt the Democrats.
This is an old thread, but earlier in it I mentioned that because Democrats are a more “naturally” compact electorate it means that districts that follow geographic compactness norms will harm the Democrats and help Republicans. That means the only “fair” districting (rather, districting that would produce the result Democrats demand) would basically be districts designed specifically to benefit the Democratic party. That’s gerrymandering at its essence. In a single member district, first past the post electoral system your party is simply disadvantaged by being disproportionately and homogeneously geographically concentrated.
You can propose alternative election schemes (and that was done earlier in this thread), but that doesn’t mean you can just blame it all on gerrymandering.
As the Washington Post article I linked to shows, even if you accept the gerrymandering argument on its face, it accounted for a 7 seat swing in the Republican favor in 2012–far short of the total margin of control of the House.
I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve seen titled “most gerrymandered States” and then it just lists the % of the popular vote won by Democrats and Republicans and the number of seats won. Where the Republicans win more seats than their vote share would suggest, the articles just conclude those districts have been gerrymandered.
In truth, if you filter out the mandatory gerrymandering, that is, gerrymandering required primarily in the South to create “majority-minority districts” gerrymandering isn’t nearly as common as you would suspect.
Actually do the exercise, do you know how many statehouses the GOP actually controlled in 2010? The answer is 25, that is 25 where they controlled both houses of the legislature in a given state.
Now, some of these I’m going to toss right away because you can’t gerrymander these states at all:
Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming.
Why? Because those states all have 2 or fewer districts, period. Idaho and New Hampshire have two each and the rest have only one–and you can’t conceive of gerrymandering a single district State. You can make an argument about 2 district states but would still have to concede you’re very limited in how you can gerrymander those. So that leaves 18 States the GOP controlled where gerrymandering could happen. Of those the ones I’d say have some level of gerrymandering problems:
Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.
Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina have been fairly open in that their Republican leadership has tried to draw districts to benefit the party. In Texas they’ve succeeded in several districts. Same for Ohio and Pennsylvania, although much of both of those States actually fairly closely follows geographic compactness norms. North Carolina has some bad intent, but it also has some districts drawn to appease the “majority-minority” concept, which is something liberals are also majorly in favor of and in essence force gerrymandering.
Florida actually passed an anti-gerrymandering law in 2010. It has some districts that make sense and some don’t. But the most nonsensical district in Florida is District 5 (covering an area similar to that which District 3 used to cover.) This district was drawn to get a black congress person elected, and by and large that’s what has happened there.
So in the grand scheme of things you’re talking about a few districts in five states where crass political motives have drawn the districts. And in some cases the districts in those states would not be that different anyway.