Why gerrymandering Texas is not rigging the elections - already gerrymandered - why some mainstream media say it's risky for Republicans to re-gerrymander - and less effect than you'd think

There's a lot of gerrymandering in the USA but it has much less effect than you'd expect. And many states don't permit it.

Texas is already gerrymandered to the max and gerrymandering is not seen as rigging elections. Some Democrat states do it too.

The Republicans do likely have a few seats advantage because of a long tradition of gerrymandering in many of their states, but they always have, for a long time.

It might possibly add more seats but there is also a risk that if they guess wrong when they draw the boundaries that they make things harder for themselves.

Gerrymandering works by moving the democratic votes into very safe dem seats from marginal Republican seats to make them safer - so the result is that Texas already has several very safe Dem seats surrounded by Republican seats.

There are very few borderline seats which could go either way after gerrymandering.

I found only 3 close Dem wins left in Texas. They don’t say which are the 5 sets they hope to turn into Republican seats from Dems.

And then the thing is they don't know which way Hispanics will vote or whether young white men will turn out to vote like they did for Trump, or which way young women will vote etc and if they guess wrong they could find they have made it worse rather than better given that the map is already gerrymandered to the max.

In principle if you can draw the maps completely arbitrarily you could try to do it so that all the seats are majority Republican by the biggest margin you can get with the same % for each and with no dem seats at all. But that would be very risky in case you've misread the way voters are trending but it also would run against legal cases because even in Texas gerrymandering can be stopped by legal cases if it is too extreme.

From the Associated Press - before they can know how to gerrymander they need to know which way the hispanic population will vote in Texas. Or they might end up packing Democrats into Republican seats.

QUOTE STARTS

Texas has long been eyed as a state trending Democratic because of its growing nonwhite population. But those communities swung right last year and helped Trump expand his margin to 14 percentage points, a significant improvement on his 6-point win in 2020.

Michael Li, a Texas native and longtime watcher of the state at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said there’s no way to know whether that trend will continue in next year’s elections or whether the state will return to its blue-trending ways.

“Anyone who can tell you what the politics of Texas looks like for the balance of the decade has a better crystal ball than I do,” Li said. https://apnews.com/article/trump-republicans-congress-redistricting-gerrymandering-texas-cb63c6b0102bc45a11515c6b33efc697

Texas already has very odd shaped districts. See this for instance:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/map

[if you click through to the map I used, you can use right button to turn / tilt the map on that page to see it as in the screenshot]

Face on:

So it is already gerrymandered to the max and they have laws that restrict how they can gerrymander them.

This shows how they voted in 2024 for the House of Representatives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Texas

There are some seats with huge margins for Republicans and mathematically if they can somehow join bits of them to the Dem districts they could in principle reduce the number of Dem seats further.

So it's about the politics and the law rather than simple maths.

But the Dem districts tend to have large margins because that's the whole point in the gerrymandering is to move dem votes into concentrated Dem districts.

So to make a new Republican district, they have to find a dem district with a small margin and move some of those into neighbouring Republican districts until it is majority Republican.

I find 3 Dem seats in Texas with very narrow margins.

16 is the small light blue patch at far left of the map I just shared. 28 and 34 are the two ones at middle bottom.

2024 Texas's 16th congressional district election

• Democratic Veronica Escobar (incumbent) 131,391 59.54%

• Republican Irene Armendariz-Jackson 89,281 40.46%

Total votes 220,672

2024 Texas's 28th congressional district election

• Democratic Henry Cuellar (incumbent) 125,490 52.8%

• Republican Jay Furman 112,117 47.2%

Total votes 237,607

2024 Texas's 34th congressional district election

• Democratic Vicente Gonzalez (incumbent) 102,680 51.3%

• Republican Mayra Flores 97,603 48.7%

Total votes 200,283

I found them by looking up Democrat held seats from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_representatives_from_Texas

and looking at their margins here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Texas#Results_44

So in principle they might be able to find nearby strong Republican seats and more some Republican votes into those three close Dem seats. Or move some of the Dems from a marginal seat into a strong Republican seat.

Or move dem voters into a neighbouring strong dem seat.

And presumably most of that sort of thing has been done already.

This is just a made up map someone did of how they could change it, not a real proposed map. Notice how the new districts spiral into the cities. But it’s the same to some extent with the map they have already. The idea there is that by dividing up the cities which tend to vote Democrat and putting a bit of each city in a different rural Republican area around the city they can hope to dilute the Dem vote so much they don’t win any seats. But if they get it wrong they risk flipping nearby Republican seats.

https://dvr.capitol.texas.gov/Congress/0/PLANC2201

So then there's the risk of voters changing their preferences.

They could easily carefully reshape it to include more hispanics in Republican seats for instance, because they did well for Trump in the last elections and then the vote comes and the hispanics or young women or whatever vote differently from what they expected.

Or the swing is more than they expected and is uneven with some that they thought were safe getting lost.

There's no doubt that Texas is gerrymandered already and favours Republicans by several seats. Nobody questions that.

What the mainstream articles question is whether it can be gerrymandered to gain significantly more seats than it does in a way that passes scrutiny in Texas and at the same time gain more seats than they do already. Trying too hard could lose seats if they guess wrong.

I remember back when they did the 2020 cycle redistricting, the Republicans were expected to be able to use gerrymandering to get several extra seats but they didn't.

It ended up with the Dems and Republicans making their seats more entrenched.

It certainly didn't lead to a large Republican gain in 2022 or in 2024.

The House margin has remained very small despite aggressive gerrymandering by Republicans - but also by Dems - and despite a favorable situation for Republicans in 2024.

This was a 538 piece after the 2020 redictricting before the 2022 mid terms https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-countless-confusing-sometimes-contradictory-takeaways-of-the-2021-22-redistricting-cycle/

By strengthening Republican seats they also strengthen Dems in the seats they leave for them as well because that's how it works. Which limits their ability to pick up extra seats over whatever they manage to force by redistricting. And the Dems do the same in Dem gerrymandered states.

There are lots of Republican borderline votes including for instance in California, people forget that there are many Republican representatives from Democrat majority states. This is a Republican seat that won by 51.7 to 48.3 in California.

https://ballotpedia.org/California%27s_41st_Congressional_District

It seems to be the closest race in California won by republicans last election.

Second closest : 53.4 to 46.6

https://ballotpedia.org/California's_22nd_Congressional_District

So the effect on Texas is debatable if they do go ahead and succeed in a gerrymander if it's a big swing they could potentially found they have made themselves more vulnerable.

The swings tend not to be a uniform swing but some larger some smaller.

And there are plenty of marginal seats for Dems to win in other places if Texas tries to make it harder to take a seat except with a really big swing.

It is true that Democrats have less seats they can gerrymander than Republicans. However if we focus on the most gerrymandered states some have a Democrat partisan advantage: Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, South Carolina,

Of those the ones currently under Democrat control for redistricting:

• Oregon (6 seats)

• New Mexico (3)

• Illinois (17 seats)

So there are 26 seats that Democrats could redistrict if it is permitted between censuses.

The Republicans have far more: Texas (38), Florida (28), Georgia (14), South Carolina (7), Utah (4) and Tennessee (9) of the most gerrymandered Republican states.

38+28+14+7+4+9 = 100

However, those are already gerrymandered to the max in the last redistricting cycle.

So it's really about whether any of them are worth redistricting between cycles or if the result would just be the same or might even end up accidentally favouring Democrats.

The redistricting process can take a long time, often with legal cases that delay it while challenges are settled because even in states with gerrymandering there are limits on what you can do either by state law or because of the voting regulations at Federal level.

I got the maps here https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan-composition (state partisan composition with legislature + Governor control)

Redistricting report card https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/

And got the figures for seats in each state from the Wikipedia map - this turned up a mistake in the Redistricting map - it shows Utah as gerrymandered to favour Democrat if you hover the mouse over Utah but as Republican if you click through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States#2010%E2%80%932020

And if the swing is as big as in 2018 then no amount of gerrymandering would prevent it.

It was a net gain of 40 seats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_elections

Popularity is tracking with Trump's first term. He could easily lose that many.

https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

There’s an analysis here which looks at the districts won by Harris and the districts that Trump won in 2024. It finds only 3 House Republican districts in districts won by Harris in 2024.

While in 2018 there were 25 House Republicans in districts won by Clinton.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/steve-kornacki-redistricting-change-fight-house-majority-rcna220354

However the 2024 election was unusual with Democrats often doing well in seats that Harris lost.

We can see this by comparing the electoral college vote with the house of Representatives tally.

2016 electoral college vote:

• Trump 304, Clinton 217

https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2016

2024 electoral college vote:

• Trump 312, Harris 216

https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2024

But now look at the House of Representatives in 2016:

Republicans 241, Democrats 194

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections

In 2024:

Republicans 220, Democrats 215

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections

It’s dramatically different. Clearly how voters voted for Harris gives very little indication to whether they will vote for Democrat or Republican representatives for marginal seats.

So that’s why there were so few House Republican seats in districts won by Harris - because the dems did very well in 2024 in the House.

Then in 2024 Trump was on the ballot, people would turn up to vote for him and then they'd probably vote for a representative and senator too. He managed to enthuse lots of hispanics and young men to turn out to vote for him. But this time it could be that many of those won't be as enthused and stay at home and others would be enthused to vote against him.

I don't want to predict. There are no election forecasts yet that I know of anyway and a lot likely happens between now and then. And even sharing election forecasts a few days before an election is a bit of a mugs game nowadays, as we've had many elections for several years now where the prediction didn't match the results in the US and in France, Romania, Trump's own election.

Then others such as the elections in Canada - if you'd asked a few months before nobody would have guessed the result accurately.

I think the Democrats have a good chance indeed an excellent chance based on showing so far, and that's probably the most we can say.

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