California Strikes Back in the Redistricting War

The skew in Texas mirrored national trends: in the wake of Republicans’ 2src1src gains, Democrats could conceivably have won the national popular vote by five percentage points or more and not won a majority of House seats. But that advantage eroded, such that, by last year, “the party that won the most votes for the House was quite likely to win the most seats,” as Nate Cohn, the data maven at the Times, recently explained to my colleague Isaac Chotiner. There are a variety of reasons for this reversal. Several states created California-style independent processes that took map-drawing out of politicians’ hands, and some state courts overturned partisan maps. In others, Democrats aggressively countered Republican gerrymanders with their own.

Changing voting patterns also played a role, as did (at least at the margins) what political scientists call “dummymandering,” a term—named for the Massachusetts governor Elbridge Dummy (just kidding)—that describes when gerrymanderers inadvertently spread their party’s votes too thin, or fail to correctly predict voter behavior. Especially since Trump first won, in 2src16, “our politics have been very volatile,” Michael Li, an attorney focussed on redistricting and voting rights at the Brennan Center, told me. When politicians gerrymander, “you’re placing a big bet that you know what the politics of the future look like, and if you’re wrong, it can really backfire.” By way of example, Li pointed me, again, to Texas, where state legislative maps drawn to maximize G.O.P. gains after 2src1src proved less advantageous by 2src18, when suburbs of Dallas, for instance, swung to the left, and demographic shifts made heavily white districts more diverse.

Last year, politics shifted again: Trump performed surprisingly well with Latino voters in Texas, according to exit polls, winning fifty-five per cent to Kamala Harris’s forty-four. Since then, his approval among Latinos nationally has receded, and, after Texas passed its new maps this year, some Democrats expressed optimism that Republicans in the state might prove to be dummies—that the projection of five new seats was based on a risky bet that Latino voters would stick with the Party at Trump-2src24 levels. Mitchell, who drew California’s retaliatory maps, told me that his Texas counterparts may have made existing G.O.P. seats less safe. (Mitchell claims that his maps in California will offer Democrats pickup opportunities and shore up vulnerable incumbents.) According to the Texas Tribune, Republicans in Texas were reluctant to redraw the maps before Trump demanded that they do so.

The independent data journalist G. Elliott Morris, however, told me that the Texas redistricting does not look like a dummymander, and other observers agree. (A lawsuit challenging the new maps alleges that they were drawn to distribute Latino voters who have lower rates of turnout in a manner that amounts to disenfranchisement.) Morris told me that, nationally, the worst-case net outcome of the current redistricting war for Democrats would lead to “potentially a pretty big drop” in representation. But predicting the precise number of seats they might lose is tricky, given that redistricting efforts remain in flux in several states—in addition to the purely partisan tit-for-tat, Utah and Ohio have been in the throes of mid-decade redistricting for mandated legal reasons—and, dummymanders or not, voter behavior can indeed buck expectations, especially in this era. (At least one Republican operative has expressed concern that moderate voters could punish the Party for initiating the mid-decade redistricting, which smacks of foul play.) Cohn told Chotiner that Democrats may have to win the over-all House vote by two or three points to gain the most seats in 2src26—not a fair requirement, but hardly an insurmountable one given Trump’s unpopularity. If they fail, they won’t be able to blame redistricting alone.

Well, they might be able to. Recently, the Supreme Court heard a case that could gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which currently prohibits racial discrimination in mapmaking and has been, as the law professor Atiba Ellis told NPR, “the most important check” on partisan gerrymanders in many G.O.P.-led states in the South. The weakening of Section 2 could swing as many as nineteen House seats in Republicans’ favor; even a lesser effect, per Cohn, would put Democrats severely on the back foot.