Shhh, don’t tell anyone but the sky may not be falling as soon as we thought:
The Democratic House majority was supposed to die in redistricting. For months now, pundits and political forecasters have predicted that Republicans could win back the House next year without flipping a single voter. After all, the GOP controls far more state governments than the Democrats, and this is a post-Census year, when states redraw their congressional maps. Republicans boast sole authority over the boundaries of 193 congressional districts, while Democrats command just 94. Given the slimness of Nancy Pelosi’s majority, several analyses projected that GOP cartographers would generate enough new, safe “red” seats to retake the House through gerrymandering alone.
This has been a foundational premise of much of my own commentary. And it’s an assumption that’s animated the progressive movement’s push for a package of democracy reforms that would, among other things, forbid partisan redistricting.
But it’s starting to look wrong.
The new House map is more than half finished. And in many states where maps haven’t been finalized, the broad outlines are already visible. Taken together, the emerging picture is far more favorable for Democrats than most anticipated. As of this writing, it looks like the new House map will be much less biased in the GOP’s favor than the old one. And according to at least one analyst, there is actually an outside chance that the final map will be tilted, ever so slightly, in the Democrats’ favor.My Week In New YorkA week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine.
For proponents of equal representation, the key criterion for congressional maps is partisan fairness: Is each party’s share of a state’s congressional delegation roughly proportional to its share of the statewide vote? Right now, in many closely divided states, it isn’t. And typically, Republicans mine disproportional representation from the inequities. For example, in 2020, Joe Biden won more than 50 percent of the two-party vote in Wisconsin — but Democrats claimed just 37.5 percent of the state’s House seats. That discrepancy did not reflect widespread ticket-splitting but rather, the concentration of Democratic voters within three heavily urban congressional districts.
On a national level, a fair congressional map would be one in which the “tipping point” congressional seat — the one that puts either party over the top in assembling a majority — has a partisan lean roughly similar to that of the nation. In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by about 4.5 points. Thus, on a fair map, about half of all House districts would have voted for Biden by more than 4.5 points, while the other half would have either given him a smaller margin than that, or else gone for Trump.
In a recent analysis for the progressive think tank Data for Progress, Joel Wertheimer applied this criterion to the 25 states that had finalized their House maps. In the chart below, a House district “leans Democratic” if its voters supported Biden by more than 4.5 percent in 2020 and “leans Republican” if Biden’s margin was smaller than that (or nonexistent). Across all the revised maps, the number of seats to the left of the nation as a whole increased by 16.
This does not mean that 2022 is a shoe-in. Anything but. But it’s just one of the vote suppression mechanisms that may not be as potent as we might have thought it was. If it’s a red wave, this won’t help that much. But if it’s tighter, there’s a possibility that the Democrats may be able to hang on.
Every little bit helps.