Amid all the ominous political news of this season, Democrats have kept their eyes fixed on a ray of hope: States were redrawing the lines that define congressional districts, and Democrats were making out well in the process. “How Democrats are winning congressional redistricting fights” was a CNN.com headline last month. “Republicans built on their existing gerrymanders to try to expand their House advantage, but Democrats fired back even more powerfully with gerrymanders of their own,” reports Vox.
But gerrymandering isn’t going to save the Democrats. Not this year, and probably not this decade. It may not even do much to help them.
In part, that’s because the new lines aren’t final. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has persuaded the state Senate to revise the borders in a special legislative session. If his new map prevails, the state will have four more Republican-leaning House seats than it does now.
But there are also trade-offs in redistricting that pose an especially acute problem for contemporary Democrats. Their voters have gotten more geographically concentrated over time; they’ve shed rural voters while gaining city-dwellers. To maximize the number of House seats they can contest, they have to divide the voters in their urban strongholds among districts. Because the 2020 election left them with full control over redistricting in relatively few places, they have to use this tactic very aggressively where they can.
Nevada is a case in point. Three of the state’s four House districts tilt Republican. The Democrats, who control the governorship and both houses of the legislature, took Democratic voters out of the district centered in Las Vegas and split them among two other seats. The result was a new map with three districts that voted for Joe Biden in 2020.