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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Gerrymandering: California will soon vote on whether to redistrict itself for the express purpose of counteracting a Republican gerrymandering plan in Texas. The rewards from gerrymandering are extra House seats which could tip the balance of House control -- a tasty prize. Democrats had unilaterally disarmed themselves with bipartisan commissions in many states, but that did little to convince Republicans to ease up. Democrats could probably go even if they play hardball, which is a lot better than the status quo where they’re down somewhere between 8-20 seats depending on the fairness metric used.

I disagree that California's independent commission constitutes unilateral disarmament. In 2024 the difference between the percentage of the vote that went to the out party (Rs in California and Ds in Texas) an the percentage of house seats they won was more "unfair" in California, and a commission which is 1/3 D 1/3 R and 1/3 "neutral" parties who all agree with the D side all the time is not exactly the platonic ideal of fair districting. And there are D states where Rs are wildly underrepresented, but the district lines look fair and the Ds say "well its not gerrymandered, what do you want?" as if the problem was squiggly lines on a map and not the unrepresentative outcomes. I am not saying that refusing the gerrymander and have independent commissions is BAD, but getting worse outcomes than Texas and then acting holier than thou about Texas's districting is laughable.

The correct solution for all states with more than 1-2 seats is multi-member districts which would get the ratios better and allow everyone to be represented, but that never seems to be on the table unfortunately.

the difference between the percentage of the vote that went to the out party

First off, it's not correct to just take a simple percentage and say something like "if party A won 40% of the vote, it should get 40% of the seats". It doesn't work like that. Think about it: in an FPTP system, if voters were totally uniformly distributed, then a party that won 60% of the votes would get 100% of the seats. The reason this doesn't happen in practice is because of sorting. The simplest rule for "fairness" that's used in academic lit is something like the following:

  1. “Efficency Gap” rule. The difference between the two parties’ seat-shares should be twice their vote-share difference i.e. if one party gets 60% of the vote and the other gets 40% (a 20% vote-share difference), then they should split seats 70%-30% (a 40% seat-share difference).

You can go to this link for more info, specifically under the 4 definitions of fairness.

While you're right that it's not like the Dems have totally disarmed themselves from using gerrymandering, the important point is that they're not pushing nearly as hard as Republicans have done over the past few decades. As I said, R's are up 8 to 20 seats depending on the fairness metric used.

But this IS the reason that gerrymandering feels bad, the reason that people instinctively dislike it. Its not that people hate the squiggly lines in and of themselves, they dislike that the lines lead to unfair vote distributions. So it is not immediately obvious to me why having even worse distributions without squiggly lines is better.

Well sure, people dislike unfair representation, but 1) a lot of that is due to FPTP, not gerrymandering, and 2) they don't really care enough to do much about, certainly not enough that it'd be worth 8-20 House seats to continue being unilaterally semi-disarmed.

Everyone always talks about gerrymandering at the level of congressional representation, but I think it's far more insidious at the city level: in the city I live in (and I suspect this is true of many cities in the country), the '24 presidential vote shares (which haven't changed much) were somewhere around 65-35 blue-red. But wouldn't you know it, every city council district voted for a blue candidate (even notionally "non-party-affiliated", but as far as I can tell everyone is aware of the alignment from the messaging), and there was no shortage of complaining when a single red candidate won a special election for a truncated term a couple years back.

As far as I can tell, this statement describes almost every moderate-size or larger city in the country.

That can arise naturally from FPTP without gerrymandering. If a 65-35 city is reasonably homogeneous, then every district will be roughly 65-35 and a majority-party sweep is the default outcome.

They usually aren't reasonably homogeneous, though. And this same logic has been used to forbid at-large representatives under the Voting Rights Act.

I think a decent chunk of the popular opposition to gerrymandering is specifically being upset at majority-party sweeps or over-representation, so I'm not sure I feel better about that.

I agree that it is a bad outcome. But the solution is proportional representation, not redrawing districts.

I think this is the only real answer to gerrymandering, so I think we agree.

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