Texas gerrymandering amounts to GOP playing ‘catch-up’

Editors at National Review Online assess plans to redraw Texas’ electoral map.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled legislature have decided to play hardball by redrawing the state’s congressional map, with the aim of adding as many as five new Republican seats to a delegation that is presently 25–13, favoring the GOP. They may live to regret the overreach. The predictable Democratic hue and cry about gerrymandering, however, could hardly be more hypocritical. …

… Entering the 2024 election, Republicans controlled the governorship and the state legislature in 23 states. Across those states, they won 59.3 percent of the popular House vote and 132 of the 176 House seats — 75 percent of the seats, or a 16-point advantage over purely proportional representation. (In our first-past-the-post, single-member-district system, representation is rarely precisely proportional.) In the ten states with divided government, Republicans won 52.3 percent of the popular House vote and 47 of the 75 House seats — 62.7 percent of the seats, or a 10.4-point advantage. In the 17 states run entirely by Democrats, the Dems won 56.7 percent of the popular House vote but 143 of the 185 House seats — 77.7 percent of the seats, or a 21-point advantage.

By this or any other metric, the blue states are already more favorable to Democrats maximizing their House delegations than red states are for Republicans. That’s why it rings so hollow to hear threats of retaliation from the governors of states such as California (with a 43–9 Democratic delegation from winning 58.4 percent of the vote) or Illinois (14 to 3 from winning 52.8 percent, with an egregious gerrymander that ran anti-Trump Republican Adam Kinzinger out of Congress). Only New York State’s highest court enforcing a voter-adopted state constitutional provision prevented that state’s Democrats from adopting a similarly one-sided map. …

… And if Democrats are restrained from gerrymandering more aggressively to their advantage, it’s sometimes because they insist that the Voting Rights Act requires majority-minority districts — which benefits them in states such as Alabama and Louisiana, but elsewhere drains Democratic votes that could more profitably be spread across multiple districts.

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