Overall who won this redistricting cycle?

[ProgressiveModerate]

You can make a decently strong case for both.

The case for Republicans:

-Overall, the House has a bias of about 2% favour of Republicans
-Drew more districts
-Republicans successfully overturned NY map
-Relative to Dems, significant Republicans gerrymanders tend to be more airtight and “trend proof” (see TX, GA)
-A lot of legal victories towards the end of the cycle
-Still legal ambiguity around VRA, so far has successfully gotten away with controversial racial decisions particularly in southern states
-Got to gerrymander a lot of sunbelt state legistlatures that would’ve otherwise have a good chance of flipping Dem

The case for Democrats:

-Favorable population shifts
-Generally performed well with Commission and Court maps, both on the congressional and state legislative level, making certain state legislatures more winnable
-Outperformed initial expectations by quite a bit despite some legal setbacks
-House bias is smaller than last decades, and most swing districts are shifting left
-More potential for victories later in the decade (mid-decade redraws in OH, MO, FL, OK, AR vs just OR, NC, and small chance of IL for Rs)
-Reduction of competitive seats helps given they normally win NPV
-Lot of “missed opportunities” on republicans part (KY-3, MO-5, IN-1, ect)


To me kinda seems like Rs are the winners in terms of raw outcome while Dems won relative to expectations and in making things less bad compared to last decade.

[ProgressiveModerate]

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.

[ProgressiveModerate]

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. This isn't really true, though a lot of Romney-Clinton-Biden districts in SoCal could make it seem that way. Many of Dems OC seats got weakened and they lost a seat in LA. look at the old map on 2008 and 2012 numbers; there are quite a lot of R seats. Clinton jsut did significantly better than Obama and so did Biden.

2. The efficiency gap becomes flawed as states get more politically lopsided and should not be used for this reason, especially when analyzing California. There really is no "perfect" metric but a metric I came up with basically said the map was neutral relative to what one would expect when factoring in variables such as geography. Other metrics around partisan symmetry could argue the map is R-biased due to the relative concentration of seats around R+10. All these metrics tell a specific story.

A Republican community in Cali isn't by default a COI. Many are going to be split/paired with Dem communities by default. Republicans aren't "entitled" to a Republican leaning seat based around Huntington and Newport beaches the same way Dems aren't entitled to an R leaning seat the same way Palm Springs doesn't have to be in a D leaning seat.

Do I think the map is unnecessarily messy? yes. May I have done it differently? Yes. But ultimately the map produced is relatively fair from a partisanship standpoint, even if there were decisions made along the way that may have favoured both sides.