How Gerrymandering Tilts the 2024 Race for the House
---
It is no surprise that the effects of gerrymandering tilt in favor of the GOP. This decade, as last, Republicans disproportionately controlled the redistricting process, drawing 191 (or 44 percent) of the districts that will be used in this year’s elections. By contrast, Democrats fully controlled the drawing of only 75 districts. The rest were drawn by commissions, courts, or divided governments.
State courts also played a role in creating Republican advantages, because courts in states where Republicans drew maps (many of them with judges elected in partisan elections) have been much less inclined to police partisan gerrymandering than their counterparts in Democratic states. Thus, while large Democratic-favoring skews have been mostly corrected through legal review, Republican-favoring skews have almost uniformly remained uncorrected. Indeed, courts in many GOP states have followed federal courts’ lead in declaring gerrymandering claims to be political questions that courts have no authority to address.
Democrats also drew skewed maps in a few places, but the 7 extra Democratic or Democratic-leaning seats in those maps are less than a third of the 23 extra GOP or GOP-leaning seats in states with Republican-favoring maps.
---
"Freedom to Vote Act", if passed, would've helped
