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Notes -
Redistricting fight
It's been in the news that Trump is pushing for mid-decade redistricting. Yesterday, the Texas house approved a new map(https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/) which nets the GOP five seats- while not a done deal de jure, in Texas politics when something the republican party wants passes the house, it's as good as done. Texas has only in-person filibustering(that is, a filibuster in the Senate needs to talk the entire time), so democrats can't delay the map for weeks in the upper chamber.
Separately, Gavin Newsom is pushing for redistricting California to gain more seats for democrats(https://apnews.com/article/california-texas-redistricting-congressional-map-4c22e21d5d4022d33a257045693b6fd4). One problem: California law doesn't allow the legislature to unilaterally do this. They need voter approval to override their independent redistricting commission. As gerrymandering tends to be unpopular with actual voters, their odds are a lot worse than Texas'. Other solidly blue states like Colorado have the same issue that they can't actually gerrymander on short notice due to their 'independent' redistricting commissions.
The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against. Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions and it's pretty clear that democrats will lose in an all-out war of redistricting.
Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?
From my perspective, gerrymandered districts are an insult to the idea of representative democracy. I hope CA fails in its shenanigans. I hope we Texans find a spine. Failing that, it would be nice if our leadership could pander to anyone other than Trump.
But I know how much those hopes are worth.
Texas being gerrymandered isn't exactly new. Trump et al. just want to make it more gerrymandered.
Prior to the mid 2000s there was gerrymandering in both Red and Blue states, but it was piecemeal and wasn't that impactful because it was largely aimed at protecting state-level incumbents (and, in the South, keeping the wrong people out of power), not generating national political advantage (also it was harder without computers). Still not great, but not a hugely pressing issue.
In the mid 2000s the GOP put together a national strategy for gerrymandering their way to success. They largely succeeded, which is also why they've repeatedly refused offers of mutual disarmament. (That and the tribal mindset of the many conservative struggles with the idea of independent redistricting - a process which isn't biased in their favor must necessarily be biased against them).
Two critical problems with gerrymandering reform: 1) virtually nobody prioritizes it highly enough to mobilize voters against it, and even if they did, gerrymandering makes it extraordinarily difficult for electoral reform to win 2) even when the electorate avails themselves of means to override state governments, it is not uncommon for the state government to simply ignore them.
i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.
It's relatively straightforward to figure out how any given rule would alter the existing electoral chances. Announce your commission, and people will figure out what ruleset gives them the best advantage, and then insist that this ruleset is clearly the "unbiased, optimal" rule and that the commission should adopt it.
I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.
Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.
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