Overall who won this redistricting cycle?

[Schiff for Senate]

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).

[Schiff for Senate]

I don't know which side necessarily won, but I sure know who lost: our democracy, and the American voters who just want their vote to count and want to choose their representatives rather than the other way around.

[Schiff for Senate]

I mean there’s not much debate, GOP clearly has the advantage but Dems did relatively better compared to a decade ago

This is the perfect answer. So it depends on how you define win. Democrats have absolutely gained ground from earlier (though the GOP shored up a whole bunch of seats too, especially in TX - this matters a great deal because otherwise, I could see a whole bunch of seats from the 2010s decade flipping sometime this decade had they not been shored up, especially in suburban TX). But, overall the GOP still has a (comparatively mild) advantage.

[Schiff for Senate]

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.

[Schiff for Senate]

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.

Yeah the fact that rural Cali in split into 5 districts is pretty good for the GOP. The only district I'd argue is a bit of a pack is McCarthy's district which takes out a lot of higher turnout white communities to allow for 3 Hispanic seats in the central valley.

Also Orange County is pretty good in the sense they could easily win 2, maybe 3 of the 4 seats based in it in a normal year despite being Biden + 10 County.

Like Republicans can't realistically expect to get seats anywhere out of the greater Bay Area or LA; it's  literally impossible.

I do agree Cali map is a bit messy though and they might've took minority group protection a bit too far in some cases, but there's not really any clear partisan sorting.

Agree with all of this, basically.

[Schiff for Senate]

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

1.) No, it was quiet plainly not. Agree to disagree on this I guess.
2.) I don’t use proportionality as a metric myself because it’s objectively a dumb way to decide if a map has partisan balance. And +2.1 may be the highest in raw numbers, but CA also has way, way more House seats than most states, so raw numbers don’t mean all that much. 2.1/53 is not much at all, and I’m sure for other states, (net bias number)/(total seats) is much higher than 2.1/53.