Can You Gerrymander Your Party to Power? | Hacker News Reader

Can You Gerrymander Your Party to Power?

nytimes.com

15 pointsjaredwiener21 comments

The whole discourse around gerrymandering is fundamentally broken because national politics is too influential compared to local politics.

What should happen is that candidates should position themselves based on the districts that they represent. A West Virginia Democrat is a different creature than a New York Democrat, and a New York Republican is different than a West Virginia Republican. This is how it should be! The candidates should be trying to win races in their districts.

Instead we have this horrifying attempt to fix the parties in time and space and say "this is what the national party represents" and try to shape districts to align to those parties. This is the tail wagging the dog.

In a perfect world the districts should be shaped based on common interests, not based on voting record. Geography or population density are pretty good heuristics. Voting record is not because they are votes for candidates, not for parties.

I don't think national elections need to have districts smaller than a state at all. If all of a state's seats in the House that are up for election were decided in a single state-wide election with multiple winners allocated with proportional representation, it is impossible to gerrymander. Many other countries have this kind of system.

In the US there is pretty fierce opposition to the idea of giving political parties any legal status. In the US they are private companies that help candidates satisfy the legal requirements for candidacy (which are party agnostic) and politicians are voluntary members that can pool resources and engage in voluntary collective activities on behalf of their party. But the party itself has no real standing. [1]

There are a variety of systems for doing proportional representation with parties, but the preference in the US has been to vote for people, not for parties. When I vote for my local candidate, I'm not voting for the local party bigwigs to decide who will be my representative in cigar-smoke filled back rooms whilst sipping brandy and complaining about the poors.

Maybe this is a hopeless dream as more and more politics shifts to the national level, but I still like the idea of it.

[1] There are some exceptions to this procedurally; there are majority/minority systems in various legislatures. And in presidential elections the nature of electors is kind of strange about this.

It's possible to do proportional representation with a ranked choice voting system where you vote for individuals rather than parties. Or you could allow voters to rank either parties or individual candidates based on their preference; an example of this is the Australian Senate election.

Of course you can gerrymander your way to power. You can turn a fairly small minority in votes to a majority of the seats.

Professor Braunschweiger explains it well in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2EnuHsRJd4

By definition you can Gerrymander your party to power - unless the ruling party has a death wish. The Gerrymander is a tool of a majority party that keeps the majority in power.

It's not a magic bullet - it exchanges depth for width and in so doing it can expose risk of different types. I'm not saying it's right or fair, I think it's neither and wouldn't support it but it's politics.

The best solution to my mind is to increase the number of representatives. I've heard the counter-argument to that and it has some plausibility but I reject those arguments because I'm close minded.

https://archive.ph/RQ0hW if you just want the gist (it is a game to do what the title says). But you’ll need a subscription to do it, the button at the bottom of the archive page doesn’t work.

A similar game which demonstrates different methods of gerrymandering can be found here: https://polytrope.com/district/

You could amend the Constitution to define an algorithm to calculate districts.

The bun fight would then move to the data informing the algorithm.

1) you don't need to amend the constitution. The constition just requires proportional seats in the house per size of state, how those seats get allocated isn't defined by the consititution. It's currently defined by federal law (i.e. congress has the ability to define it) and is defined as single district voting. That can easily change if congress (i.e. the people) wanted it to

2) as others have noted, there's no reason we even need districts under the constitution. Just let people vote for a party and divide the seats that way. I did the math after the previous election and if we divided each states seats by the way they voted for president, california would have a lot more republican seats, but the republicans would still control the house with a smaller margin overall.

Yes, you can and the Republicans have done it in Texas. Democrats have effectively no representation here.

"effectively" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In the same sense that the Democrats have not representation in the Senate, the House or the Presidency. I mean, it's true but it's not the whole truth.

Democrats in Texas are under-represented compared with their numbers. It's not fair or democratic but I wouldn't say they have no representation any more then Republicans in CA. or NY have no representation.

California was undergoing non-partisan redistricting, which when they started, republicans actually picked up a seat or two. See https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/

New York actually is less gerry mandered than CA, neither CA nor NY list any party getting more representation than their votes. Illinois, however, is just as gerrymandered as Texas.

States where Democrats have the strong advantage due to gerry mandering:

* Illinois

* Oregon

* Nevada

* New Mexico

NY and CA are both states where representation roughly corresponds to votes. Democrats also have less strong advantages in Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Mississippi (out of all places!). I'm guessing Alabama and Mississippi are just flukes.

States were Republicans have a strong advantage due to gerrymandering:

* Utah

* Kansas

* Texas

* Louisiana

* Wisconsin (??)

* Ohio

* Kentucky

* North Carolina

* South Carolina

* Georgia

* Florida

Arkansas and Oklahoma are moderately biased to Republican. Republicans have minor advantages in Maryland, New Hampshire, and Iowa.

Given that representation is roughly balanced in NY and CA right now, the Democrats could probably get a bunch of seats out of those two states if they decide to gerrymander.

I've read that the GOP in California gets about 40% of the votes in House elections to net them 17% of the seats.

In NY I read it's 43% of the vote for 27% of the seats

Is that true?

You can look at the wikipedia page for the most recent US House election:

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

Democrats got 57.21% of the votes and 19 out of 19+7, which is 73%, which corresponds to your numbers. The chart I included above was for the 2022 election:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re...

Where Democrats got 55.59% of the vote and 57% of the seats. I'm guessing they were just basing the results on the first election after redistricting occurred, and it could have been Democrats were playing a long game with their gerrymandering about predicting how demographics would change in 2024 vs 2022? Or perhaps they gerrymandered but it didn't work in 2022 which was an off election with lower turn out, or maybe it was just a fluke either way.

The problem is that we would have to average each election over 10 years to figure out if the redistricting was actually biased or not.

Incidentally, this is why Republicans are playing a dangerous game here: If 2026 turns out to be a blue wave year like 2018 was, then watering down GOP margins in Texan districts could wind up amplifying rather than calming that wave. Trump definitely has that arrogance he had in 2018 that would lead him to pressure his allies to go in a direction with an idea that he is in a better position than he actually is. I'm really not sure why Democrats don't just let Trump shoot himself in the foot.

> I'm really not sure why Democrats don't just let Trump shoot himself in the foot.

That had been their strategy, to just let Trump do things and become unpopular without drawing attention to themselves, but while Trump and Republicans have become less popular, Democrats' approval ratings have been sliding down as well (although they have a lead in the generic ballot) and polling indicates most Democratic voters think they're not doing enough to stop Trump. So, making a big show of "playing dirty" (threatening to gerrymander back in retaliation), and publicly saying that they'll no longer tie their hands behind their back, probably brings satisfaction to those people they're polling badly with. It's the kind of sentiment I've heard for years from online Democratic voters, and from people I know, but never was validated by the actual Democrats until now.

It doesn’t really matter how popular the democrats are, wherever the economy is around the midterm election will be out purely at the republicans feet since they control all branches of government. Unless Trump somehow gets lucky and America is able to magic up factories and supply chains that took China two decades to build, people are going to be pretty angry next year and a blue wave is all but guaranteed.

But ya, I guess “playing nice” is no longer in style, and taking the moral high ground (eg either CA’s non partisan redistributing process) is simply no longer viable or appreciated. Democrats have to show backbone…Or maybe we just need to find next Obama or Clinton (Bill not Hillary)…uninspiring leaders like Newsom aren’t going to do it, also AOC is old enough to run for president now, I think. Going slimy like Trump doesn’t feel right.

Also I just looked at Maryland. I can't figure out just how many people voted for the GOP in the House but 35% voted for Trump - a reasonable proxy I think. The GOP for that gets 12.5% of the House representatives.

My larger point is that the GOP isn't without representation. Heck if the GOP had zero out of 8 seats and was getting 55% of the vote they wouldn't be without representation. They'd just be getting representation that wasn't proportionate. Even in that case I think they'd be getting more then you suspect - that degree of gerrymandering generally means that no one has a huge margin and even the most ideological politician will cast a glance backwards every now and then on a tough vote.

The chart was based on 2022, the first election after redistricting. Since it wasn't a presidential election, and Trump wasn't present as a polarizing influence, it makes sense that the numbers would change greatly in 2024. You can do the math on your own for Maryland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re...

and

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

In both cases the Republicans win one house district in a very boring district boundary. The republican advantage comes from local senate and house election results.

Of course!

Titular gerrymandering video by CGP Grey

  https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY

Also an excellent video by Alpha Phoenix on how you can make it almost impossible to detect.

https://youtu.be/Lq-Y7crQo44

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