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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:
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.
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