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Texas Republicans could release their new gerrymandered map as soon as today. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries will be meeting with the state’s Democrats in the Lone Star State.
The Texas gerrymander is another one of Trump’s ideas, but there is a problem that even Republicans are admitting.
Via Politico:
But the most wired-in Republicans privately concede that they’re not going to win the midterms through redistricting efforts alone.
“If we are relying on redistricting to hold the majorities, we have bigger issues,” said a Republican operative close to the White House who works on Senate and House races. Still, this operative defended the push: “Frankly, [Democrats] do it, so we are giving them a dose of their own medicine.”
Historically speaking, it wasn’t Democrats that kicked off the modern wave of gerrymandering.
According to Brookings:
Republicans caught Democrats flat-footed in the redistricting that followed the 2010 Census. Putting together a powerful plan called REDMAP, Redistricting Majority Project, they used sophisticated new software to gain Republican seats and translated their strong showing in state gubernatorial and legislative elections into district lines that favored their candidates. And second, because Democratic voters were more geographically concentrated in urban areas than Republicans were in the rest of the country, Republicans could more efficiently translate votes into House seats than could Democrats, who won supermajorities in urban areas but lost contested elections elsewhere. This made possible anomalies such as 2012, when Republicans ended up with a healthy majority of 234 seats, even though they lost the national popular vote.
The same Brookings study agreed with the point that the Republicans made to Politico. Gerrymandering doesn’t make that big of a difference in overall election results.
The bigger issue outside of election results is protecting the right of every eligible voter to vote no matter where they live. The devastating impact of gerrymandering comes in diluting the votes of people, so that the weight of their voices is lessened in democracy.
Gerrymandering won’t save the Republican House majority, but the practice does erode democracy and strip power away from the people.
What do you think about Republicans admitting that they can’t rig the map to win? Share your thoughts in the comments below.z
