Following the return this week of Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to deny their legislature a quorum, the Texas House of Representatives began its work in the second special session to pass a congressional district map that’s poised to add five Republican seats to the U.S. House.
Texas’ actions appear to be the opening salvo in nationwide redistricting wars. As Republicans claim that they are seeking to amend an already flawed distribution of favorable congressional districts, Democrats insist that a reaction on their part would be to undo unfair partisan redistricting by the GOP. Both parties have been guilty of gerrymandering, but determining which party does it more—and how much of an advantage it gives their candidates on Election Day—can be difficult, with different metrics producing different results.
At the moment, it appears that Republicans have the districting edge, Sam Wang, a professor who heads Princeton University’s Gerrymandering Project, told The Dispatch. But not by much. According to Wang’s estimates based on data from past elections, there are six more gerrymandered Republican-leaning seats than Democratic-leaning ones. “That’s the net advantage, so it’s canceling out Democratic versus Republican,” he said. “If nothing were to happen and everyone were to go home [from the current redistricting battle], it would be a six-seat advantage, which is pretty balanced by current standards.”
Currently, Republicans have both a 219-212 majority (220-215 with no vacancies) in the House and a six-seat advantage in the partisan makeup of districts. While it is tempting to look at those two datapoints and ascribe the GOP’s slim majority to gerrymandering, whether redistricting efforts swayed the election is far from clear. “It’s hard to say for sure because, when districting is done fairly, it’s done based on a lot of factors: keeping cities whole, counties whole,” Wang said.
Nor does the present Republican advantage make it impossible for Democrats to take the House. The party won in 2008 and 2020, when the GOP held a 13-seat and 11-seat edge, respectively, according to the New York Times’ Nate Cohn.
And in many instances, those disparities can’t be attributed to partisan redistricting alone. Kosuke Imai, a professor of government and statistics at Harvard University who heads the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology Project, pointed to geographic changes—with Republicans gaining in rural areas and Democrats gaining in cities—as a factor in declining electoral competition for House seats. “What we find is that the trend in political geography is much … stronger than the effect of gerrymandering,” he told The Dispatch.
There are also instances of partisan redistricting on the part of Democrats, the prime example being Illinois. That state has two more Democratic seats than it would have had it used fair maps, according to Wang’s measure at Princeton. When challenged about his state’s map on NBC’s Meet the Press, Gov. J.B. Pritzker noted that his state held public hearings on its maps, which it passed into law after the 10-year census, contrasting that timing with Texas’ decision to do redistricting mid-decade.
Democrats have also tried unsuccessfully to gerrymander other states. A 2022 proposed map in Maryland would have made Rep. Andy Harris’ deep-red district—currently the only Republican seat in the state’s delegation—hypercompetitive, but it was rejected by a state court. The same year, New York’s Court of Appeals struck down a Democrat-proposed map that would have given the party a majority of registered voters in 22 of 26 seats in a state that ended up sending seven Republicans to Congress this cycle.
To determine whether a state has gerrymandered its congressional districts, scholars use a variety of sophisticated research methods, such as running computer simulations to make fair maps and determining how much of an outlier a state’s actual map is.
But the methods that have been used by pundits and politicians to prove charges of gerrymandering have been more rudimentary—and insufficient, according to experts. Elected officials have noted the disparity between the percentage of congressional or presidential votes a party received in an election cycle compared to the percentage of seats it won in a congressional delegation. Usually, these metrics don’t match.
“The gerrymander in California is outrageous,” Vice President J.D. Vance tweeted last month. “Of their 52 congressional districts, 9 of them are Republican. That means 17 percent of their delegation is Republican when Republicans regularly win 40 percent of the vote in that state. How can this possibly be allowed?”
Newsom, meanwhile, tweeted out a list of 17 red states with “ZERO Dem house seats” or “just one Dem house seat” in response to a right-wing influencer who made a similar list of blue states with few or no GOP seats. The California governor’s list included the sparsely populated states of Wyoming, Alaska, and the Dakotas, which have only one House seat each and determine their representative through a statewide vote, making gerrymandering impossible.
The proportion of congressional or presidential votes to congressional seats is often out of whack in gerrymandered states, such as Florida and Illinois, but Wang cautioned against using that metric alone to make an accusation of gerrymandering.
For example, President Donald Trump has accused Massachusetts, where he won 36 percent of the vote last year but where Republicans won no congressional seats, of having gerrymandered its districts. But the reality is more complicated than that, Wang argued. “They’re spread out evenly across the state,” he said of Republican voters. “And so, because we have to draw districts that are contiguous, there’s no way to give that set of voters a district to their liking in the state of Massachusetts.”
Elected officials from both parties will still likely use this datapoint to attack each other in the redistricting wars that appear to be coming. But Democrats are at something of a disadvantage by virtue of the way they have tried to pursue redistricting.
Republicans have argued for keeping the process in the hands of state governments, which are more prone to gerrymandering when controlled by one party. “We are allowed to be partisan in drawing on the maps and that’s what we’re going to do,” Texas state Rep. Carl Tepper, who sits on the committee that proposed the state’s new maps, told PBS News. “The courts have been very clear on that and that’s absolutely what we’re doing. We’re not going to try to fool you. We’re not going to lie to you. These are partisan maps. And these are maps that, frankly, are going to be representing our constituents and our voters better.” Texas has few controls on redistricting, leading Wang to describe it as “truly the Wild West.”
Until now, the Democratic solution has been proposing independent redistricting commissions. The party even tried to mandate that every state use one, passing a bill to that end when it controlled the House in 2021.
In a 2010 ballot initiative, California voters chose to give such a panel the responsibility to draw congressional maps. For Newsom to be successful in responding to Texas, he’ll need to override that measure through a popular referendum, but voters object to doing that by a margin of 28 points, according to a poll released last week.
If California voters thwart Newsom’s counter-gerrymander and Texas voters don’t punish their state lawmakers for their redistricting effort, it will be what the will of the people in the states has dictated. The fate of the gerrymandering wars, then, remains in the hands of voters.
