The totals are a little misleading because there is partisan gerrymandering on both sides, so they somewhat balance each other out. Courts have also been highly involved in rejecting the most brazenly disproportionate maps, but that may soon change next year due to the newly constituted Supreme Court.
The bigger problem is that it incentivizes partisanship and extremist views in uncompetitive districts because the representative is effectively decided in the party’s primary election, not the general election which has higher turnout and a more representative electorate.
Also the fact that 90%+ of congressional seats are safe except for the occasional primary opponent discourages accountability. Our districts are so distorted, they make no geographic sense. And it means a large percentage of our population is permanently disenfranchised, which dampens voter participation. It really is one of the biggest structural problems of our democracy right now.
My opinion is that it’s just partisan gerrymandering creating safe districts is pushing our politics towards the extremes as both parties run far left and far right candidates in their safe district primary. It gives us candidates out of touch with the overall electorate and unable to compromise.
If you overlay the Congressional districts I bet you can see the impact of Gerrymandering on some of these maps. When a party can receive well less than 50% of the votes and attain well more than 50% of the house seats you must congratulate them on trampling the intent of representative Democracy.
Non-representative outcomes is a symptom of Gerrymandering, ont the goal of it. The reason for gerrymandering a district varies, but overall it tends to preserve the status quo. Those in power can use it to disenfranchise a group of people, or they can use it to create safe districts for party leaders. Gerrymandering should be thought of as a tool. The illustrations popular online showing how gerrymandering can be used to produce paradoxical representation have done a lot to raise awarenss, but it's also made people confused about what it is. Gerrymandering is a tool, not a goal.
Gerrymandering is probably the single most important issue in our democracy.
It makes the House unrepresentative: democrats routinely win a higher percentage of the total vote cast for the House than their representation by number of seats (in 2014 republicans won 52% of the vote but controlled 57% of seats, couldn't find a number for this election season sadly). Effectively, democrats aren't democratically represented in the House.
It contributes to extremism: in 2014 only 16 of 247 republicans in the house won by less than 10 percentage points. In that scenario, the only real election is the primary, where you're competing against someone of your own party. Typically only the most committed (usually the least moderate) voters come out in primaries, so you're more likely to lose to someone more extreme than to someone more moderate. As a result we get people that are completely unwilling to compromise, and government grinds to a halt.
We can't have good government without two (or more, but never gonna happen in the US) reasonably functional parties that are willing to compromise to get stuff done. Partisan gerrymandering massively impedes that objective by reducing effective representation and increasing extremism.
One of my professors at UT Dallas has a book that argues that districts in fact should be partisan. It's been a few years but the logic is something like if you've got a 50-50 district, you're gonna end up with 50% of the people in the district unhappy. Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy.
Not sure if I believe him, but it's interesting.
Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections are Bad for America
That’s not enough when the way the country’s election districts are set gives the Republican Party a heavy advantage at the polls (even without district level gerrymandering - the state boundaries alone are enough to accomplish that in the House; and do far worse in the senate).
And then there’s the issue of all the citizens who have been misled into supporting Republican positions and are intensely ideological about them.
There is also gerrymandering against independents and third parties.
A fair metric minimizes average distance from a citizen to the centroid of their district. The lowest energy Voronoi diagram wins. Nobody gets screwed.
How many seats are actually gerrymandered? From the sources I can find, it's around a net 5 seat advantage for the republicans (out of 435). If that is the biggest issue in American politics, then the rest can't be that bad.
The root of the issue is that the US doesn't separate elected lawmakers from district distribution. The fact[0] elected officials can redraw their own electoral map is just beyond belief, in a tough competition with Citizen's United for the worst political bug (well... feature) in the US. Cherry on top is calling/dubbing one such major and catastrophic instance of gerrymandering "REDMAP". So brazenly rubbing it in while openly chipping at US democracy.
As long as that holds true, theoretical solutions don't really matter when those using them will pry any model into their favor. Not that a mathematical solution even makes sense for a district map that accounts of cultural ties for local representation (short of going for proportional elections, which I think is desirable with some form of local representation).
In Canada, and I presume most countries of the G7, it's an independent entity[1], which one would think goes without saying. That's not incorruptible of course, but I wager it's held it's own for over 60 years here, modern district maps are quite reasonable.
Actually, if it weren't for gerrymandering these districts would probably be more politically homogenous. The point of the gerrymandering is to split up a district that would have had a majority of some party. Now instead of having a majority in one district, they have a minority in several districts.
OTOH, results of elections to congress (house of representatives) looks balanced - total seats gained by each party matches popular vote with deviation < 1%. Which is much better than i expected considering single-seat system leads to advantages for dominant players even without gerrymandering.
Even in my home country, which is european country with proportional system and no gerrymandering, such deviation is higher (< 2%) due to rounding effects.
Gerrymandering is main issue in (some) state elections (e.g. Wisconsin 2018 is egregious example), not federal elections.
Some but not all of the reasons: It's virtually impossible for a primary candidate to unseat an incumbent in their own party, and gerrymandering makes it so that opposing parties rarely have solid candidates.
Gerrymandering is so ridiculous. Clearly geographic coordinates is the wrong data structure for systematically biasing votes for/against certain demographics.
A voting system should be explicit about exactly which demographic criteria should carry weighted bias, what value that weight should be, and what it's purpose is.
It should also be clear to each voter which demographic categories they fall under, what the final strength of their vote will be, and what the justification is for that outcome.
Eliminating partisan gerrymandering would go a long way.
Less than 10% of congressional districts this year will be competitive (defined as the most recent presidential election margin was within 10 percentage points). Only 41 seats!
I haven’t really seen a realistic plan to do it though.
The house doesn't represent the people in the sense that the party that got a significant majority of the votes has a significant minority of the seats because of gerrymandering.
I wish they could come up with a solution to this that made sense. The things I find particularly troubling about gerrymandering in the US isn’t only that one party gets a few more representatives either way. The reason it’s absolutely terrible in the United States is that it creates uncompetitive districts on both sides and we get extreme candidates that don’t appeal to people in the middle at all and seem to have no ability to compromise and get basic things done. I’m not sure that proportional representation addresses this issue.
The bigger problem is that it incentivizes partisanship and extremist views in uncompetitive districts because the representative is effectively decided in the party’s primary election, not the general election which has higher turnout and a more representative electorate.
Also the fact that 90%+ of congressional seats are safe except for the occasional primary opponent discourages accountability. Our districts are so distorted, they make no geographic sense. And it means a large percentage of our population is permanently disenfranchised, which dampens voter participation. It really is one of the biggest structural problems of our democracy right now.
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