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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Norm. LOL. Here is the New Jersey map. District 10 is a triskellion. District 6 is your classic salamander. District 3 for some reason has a dagger through the heart of Monmouth County. District 11 is a Republican area plus just enough of deep blue Essex to flip it Democratic. And District 8 is just WTF.

The only "norm" broken here is the Republicans are doing it loudly instead of the Democrats in a back room.

We don't have to go back far in time to find a situation where NJ was roughly 50-50 in party congressional seats (2014 and 2016). The big swing towards Democrats happened in 2018, but new maps were not drawn until 2021, so partisan gerrymandering could not have played a role there.

the previous district map was drawn in 2011 by a bi partisan committee, in which a Republican cast the tie-breaking vote.

Looking at the two maps, one is not clearly more gerrymandered than the other.

So my conclusion is that regardless of how squiggly lines on the map are, Republicans have historically been proportionally competitive in nj-- so the squigglyness tells us little.

Of course cherry picking squiggly districts is orthogonal to the question of whether Republicans in this specific case are smashing the 'defect' button and trying to pick up extra house seats 'for free' . (They definitely are.)

You've provided a map without much context with regards to population or voting demographics, so in the absence of that information the map doesn't demonstrate much of anything about the prevalence of gerrymandering