Gerrymandering is self-limiting. You can gerrymander to increase your party's number of House seats from your state, or you can gerrymander to make your seats more secure, but you can't do both! You can make some seats more secure while others weaker so as to strike a balance between these two goals, but you won't get as many seats as if you optimized for seat count and you won't get as many safe seats as if you optimized for seat safety.
If you optimize for seat count then a wave election can easily turn many of those seats over to the other party, and with them control of the House.
If you optimize for seat safety then a wave election need only turn over a few of your seats to switch control of the House.
We have had lots of wave elections in the past 100 years: 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010. Three of those are in the past 20 years. Four in the past 30 years.
Gerrymandering isn't all it's cracked up to be. It cannot make any party impervious to wave elections.
This, anyways, only as long as all House districts in each state have roughly the same population.
> Gerrymandering isn't all it's cracked up to be. It cannot make any party impervious to wave elections.
I think the last 15 years of elections would seem to contradict you.
My guess is that if gerrymandering were completely outlawed, Democrats would easily maintain control of the House, with a healthy margin, more or less permanently.
Wave elections are a thing, but as we've seen, they don't give a the waved party a massive margin.
> We have had lots of wave elections in the past 100 years: 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010
2010 is a bit of a magic number, because that was the point when Republicans started their concerted, coordinated, country-wide gerrymandering campaign. So I don't think elections prior to then can support or refute any points about gerrymandering.
> My guess is that if gerrymandering were completely outlawed, Democrats would easily maintain control of the House, with a healthy margin, more or less permanently.
The republicans would then find it necessary to change the constituencies to which they appeal. Anyhow, a few states are horribly gerrymandered by the democrats. The problem is that democrats did so horribly during the Obama years midterms that most states ended up in control of republicans for the 2010 and 2020 census.
> My guess is that if gerrymandering were completely outlawed, Democrats would easily maintain control of the House, with a healthy margin, more or less permanently.
You do know that, in the seven House elections since 2010, republicans won the congressional popular vote four times: https://ballotpedia.org/Proportion_of_each_party%27s_nationa.... They won 1-6 million more total votes. Republicans will almost certainly win the House popular vote this year too.
I’m deeply curious how you formed the belief that democrats would consistently win without gerrymandering. That’s obviously not true even if you look at polling, which obviously isn’t affected by gerrymandering. Democrats are 0.5 points ahead on the generic congressional polls, but republicans were 2.5 points ahead last fall. RCP clocked them 2.5 points ahead in 2022 (actual was 2.8).
> 2010 is a bit of a magic number, because that was the point when Republicans started their concerted, coordinated, country-wide gerrymandering campaign. So I don't think elections prior to then can support or refute any points about gerrymandering.
They already had done that, and they lost two big wave elections. (E.g., Texas redistricted in 2004.)
They really started gerrymandering hard in 2010 with REDMAP. There's really an extreme delineation in technology used to abuse the system at this point.
> My guess is that if gerrymandering were completely outlawed, Democrats would easily maintain control of the House, with a healthy margin, more or less permanently.
It'd be better if the electoral boundaries were drawn with a polling-naive algorithm, but that isn't how it works in practice - you've probably noticed that every election is knife edge and there are regular upsets. This is because if one party is guaranteed to lose it will change its policies just enough to attract marginal voters from the other party.
For example, there were confident predictions of a similar nature that the Republicans would be unable to win elections because of the shrinking white demographic. We can see in the polling that what actually starts to happen is Trump still on the ballot but they've been in a long strategic process of picking voters from non-white demographics. The elections themselves are still knife-edge.
There'd be a different policy mix, but one thing we can predict about the future anyway is that there will be different policy mixes. Gerrymandering just privileges minority incumbent policies.
It really isn't. It's self-perpetuating. A gerrymandered state might _eventually_ switch sides, but far more likely it'll become more red (and yes, gerrymandering is predominantly a Republican tactic).
Between 1933 and 1995 we had sixty two years of Democrat party majorities in the U.S. Congress. That was before the Internet and back when the U.S. was less polarized than today. And the Great Depression and the New Deal left the Democrats very popular for decades. Today I don't see how gerrymandering could defeat wave elections. Democrat gerrymandering did not prevent 1994, and Republican gerrymandering did not prevent 2006 and 2008.
That's because historical gerrymandering was not as severe as now. Modern gerrymandering uses computer modeling to slice minorities as thinly as possible, creating insurmountable barriers.
Sure it's something that's been happening for a long time. But it's like comparing hand painting a picture to a modern graphics card rendering a scene 240 times a second and suggesting it's the same thing.
The hell it wasn’t. The year Joe Biden took office in the Senate, Democrats won 10% more House seats than their share of the Congressional popular vote.
You need to realize that the 1967 democratic national convention completely changed the parties. This is important because you’re citing ‘33 Dems as if they’re remotely at all like ‘95 dems.
Democrats before ‘67 were racist as hell. Their southern strategy in ‘67 destroyed the party. Non racist republicans merged with the non racist democrats into the DNC. Racist democrats, pushing the southern strategy, left the DNC and joined the Republican party.
maybe that was true a while ago, but no, it is vigorously practiced by both US Democrats and Republicans in the modern age .. source: quantitative Census demography for urban planning
It's true that both parties take part in it, however Democrats feel forced into it and would rather not. Democrats have repeatedly put forth efforts to end the practice. They have little choice but to play by the rules as they are until they manage to finally put a stop to it.
It’s partly (1) due to the structure (or rather, flaws) of the US constitution, (2) a ridiculous senate rule, and (3) gerrymandering as others have mentioned.
On (1): needing the approval of the senate, house, and president makes it very hard to pass laws.
On (2): the senate rule requiring 60% approval has already been repealed for appointments and for budgetary legislation, but it really needs to thrown out. The first two years of Biden’s presidency were mostly lost to obstructionism because of this rule.
On (3): this will most likely be banned if democrats get a trifecta federal control, and repeal (2), since gerrymandering primarily just benefits republicans.
