Overall who won this redistricting cycle?

[Del Tachi]

Democrats won for two reasons:  California and Illinois

[Del Tachi]

Democrats won for two reasons:  California and Illinois

I'm going to snap the next time anybody cites CA as a Democratic gerrymander. You are simply displaying GOP hackery, an ignorance and lack of knowledge about the CA map, or both, when they do this. Sure, the map is ugly, and it hurts the GOP in places, but it hurts Democrats in others too. It more or less cancels out. The map is much fairer than, say, the 'fair maps' drawn in CO and AZ (those are way more of a gerrymander than CA, honestly, especially AZ).

California isn't maximally gerrymandered for the Democrats, but the commission map makes decisions that on balance favor Democrats and results is a very disproportional 44-8 split.

[Del Tachi]

Democrats won for two reasons:  California and Illinois

I'm going to snap the next time anybody cites CA as a Democratic gerrymander. You are simply displaying GOP hackery, an ignorance and lack of knowledge about the CA map, or both, when they do this. Sure, the map is ugly, and it hurts the GOP in places, but it hurts Democrats in others too. It more or less cancels out. The map is much fairer than, say, the 'fair maps' drawn in CO and AZ (those are way more of a gerrymander than CA, honestly, especially AZ).

California isn't maximally gerrymandered for the Democrats, but the commission map makes decisions that on balance favor Democrats and results is a very disproportional 44-8 split.

a.) Compare it to the old map. The shift in partisan balance is minor and is more or less the same.
b.) "Proportionality" is the dumbest, worst argument I've ever heard. If we were talking 'proportional', MS should have 2 Democratic seats and 2 GOP ones. However, political geography means that a 3-1 GOP split is most prudent and fairest. In MA, a 6-3 Democratic split would be most proportional, but 9-0 is the only composition that's even feasible, because of how GOPers are distributed. In WI, a 4-4 split is unquestionably the closest to proportional in such a purple state, but 6-2 is how it's ended up. You don't hear people complain, because the 6-2 composition isn't unfair for WI, given how Democratic voters are distributed in the state (packed in the urban centres of Madison and Milwaukee) and WI's political geography. If we were talking proportional, we'd have a 4-3 map in SC (and it's actually quite possible and not unfair at all), not a 6-1 map. In fact, the GOP should be happy with the number of seats they have. There are lots of Democratic 'packs' in CA that give us wasted Democratic votes. In contrast, all 8 GOP seats are not overwhelmingly Republican and don't waste (m)any votes. I'm not complaining about that, no one complains about that, because of CA's political geography. A "proportional" map would mean something like, say, 33-19 or 34-18 or something of the like. That is literally impossible. 44-8 is actually very reasonable.

1) The previous map was also gerrymandered in favor of the Democrats
2) Proportionality is often the first argument employed by "reformers" to attack GOP-drawn maps.  The "efficiency gap" analysis advanced by petitioners in Gill v. Whitford as a test of partisan gerrymandering results in +2.1 "extra" Democratic seats in California, the most of any state.  If its such a bad criterion, stop only using it when it fits your narrative