How Republican efforts to redraw congressional maps ‘failed epically’

If there was one obvious conclusion from Democrats’ sweeping victories in the mid-term elections on Tuesday, it seemed to be that the Republican effort to redraw congressional districts in their favor backfired.Starting last summer, Trump and Republican allies undertook an aggressive effort to redraw congressional districts, reconfiguring the lines to give Republican candidates an advantage. Ahead of the midterms, Republicans redrew 15 seats to their advantage. After Tuesday’s election, they appear poised to lose all but two of them. “It was definitely the wrong move,” an unnamed House Republican told Fox News. “One of the truisms in politics is never to overreach. We did and that was part of the reason for the backlash.”The Republicans losses included defeats in Texas, Florida and North Carolina where Republicans hoped to pick up as many as 10 combined congressional seats.“The maps themselves did fail, and failed quite epically,” said John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a Democratic redistricting group. “I would also argue the idea itself was an even bigger failure. Allowing an environment to be created around you in which everyone begins to realize how deeply corrupt this administration is and how fearful they are of the American people in elections, so much so that their main tactical path forward is going to be to redraw maps to steal as many voters as they can.”But even though Republicans failed to pick up nearly all of the new seats they drew, it would be misleading to say that gerrymandering did not work at all in this election, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard who studies redistricting. Republicans didn’t pick up the seats because Democrats had the strongest midterm elections in half a century.“Compared to [GOP] dreams of winning like five more seats, all of these maps under-delivered,” he said. “There’s no reason why the best-case scenario of the gerrymander is the right baseline.” Compared to a fair map that didn’t favor either party, he added, “a lot of these maps performed very well for Republicans.”It would be a mistake to interpret the election results to mean that gerrymandering is not a problem, Bisognano said.“Democrats should not have needed to overperform by 10 to 15% in order to find the success that they found,” he said. “It’s a corrosive problem that still plagues this country regardless of these electoral outcomes, and they’re going to come back with more of it.”In Texas, for example, Republicans already held 25 of the state’s 38 congressional districts. Last year, they redrew the map to try and gain as many as five new congressional seats. They wound up winning just one of the districts they redrew.That means Texas will hold 24 of the state’s 38 congressional districts, even though Democrats Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico got more than 50% of the vote statewide.“Nobody should think gerrymandering failed when Republicans are winning 65% of the seats in Texas with 45% of the vote. That’s a massive victory for a gerrymander,” Stephanopoulos said.Adam Kincaid, a Republican mapmaker who drew the Texas maps, said he always saw the seats redrawn for Republicans to pick up in Texas as competitive seats. “The pickup opportunities were not deep, deep red seats. And that was on purpose, because in a cycle like this, you didn’t want to put incumbents in jeopardy going into the fall that otherwise wouldn’t have been in jeopardy,” he said.There may be no state that had more of a gerrymandering backfire for Republicans than North Carolina.Republicans already held 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats, and then redrew them last year to add an additional Republican seat. The new map made it harder for Don Davis, a Black Democrat in the north-eastern part of the state, to win re-election. Davis won re-election and Democrats may flip as many as six seats, giving them a 10-4 advantage in the state’s delegation. Several Democrats barely won their races, even though Roy Cooper, a Democrat running for US Senate, won his race by nearly 20 points.In North Carolina, Republican lawmakers drew their advantage by efficiently distributing Republican votes efficiently – giving each GOP district a solid firewall that was durable under usual election conditions. But when the generationally large Democratic wave hit in the state, it completely overwhelmed the map. “The point is not to protect from the flood, it’s to protect from the wave,” Kincaid said.“With any gerrymander, there’s literally some electoral tide that’s big enough to overwhelm the gerrymander. You almost never see that tide,” Stephanopoulos said. “North Carolina got the once-in-a-50-year wave that happened to wash out their gerrymander.”Even though the unprecedented Democratic wave neutralized gerrymanders this election, they are poised to give Republicans an advantage in future elections this decade should the electoral environment shift back in their favor.“In Florida and in Texas and in numerous other places, if we snap back to a more neutral electoral environment in 2028 or 2030, like a lot of these districts will just flip right back to Republicans,” Stephanopoulos said.