Can we confidently say that gerrymandering gives this many seats to this party? Or is it super convoluted? Is as much of a big deal as I remember it being in my high school gov class?
There’s zero way to get rid of it. Not even a constitutional amendment would be enough unless that amendment redefined what a congressional district is and how representation is apportioned.
Regarding Wisconsins extremely imbalanced assembly I have seen speculation that they might be in violation of the Constitutons 'guarantee clause'. Good luck getting the Democrats to pursue this or a fair hearing from the Supreme Court though.
In the 2018, 2020 and 2022 House elections, the winning party's victory margin in the popular vote was within 1% of their victory margin in terms of seats, so the pronounced GOP-favouring effects we saw between 2010 and 2016 seem to be fading. Right now gerrymandering is probably more of an urgent problem at the state level.
Thanks for the update. This answers the implied question of, did the dems really fuck up that bad? And the answer was yes
Yep. I don't think I've seen any "blame gerrymandering for the Dems not winning the house" articles over the last week and a half. We were deluged with them in 2012 if I remember correctly.
States they have taken control of are def also gerrymandering Congressional seats.
Wisconsin is pretty fuckedup.
Some good news is that Michigans Prop 2 from 2018 seems to have done a lot of good work, I think they will try to stop that happening again elsewhere plus also not every state can bring ballot initiatives.
