“House Democrats spent the past two elections crowing about ousting Republicans from longtime red districts that had suddenly grown competitive. Now, Republicans are about to make many of those targets disappear from the battlefield entirely,” Politico reports.

“GOP mapmakers are readying to shore up more than a dozen of the most hotly contested House battlegrounds from the past four years, narrowing Democrats’ path to maintain control of the House, as they prepare for midterm elections that are historically tough for the party in power.”

“Seven years ago, New Yorkers voted decisively to empower a new bipartisan commission to do what self-interested politicians could not: draw new congressional district lines that were not gerrymandered to favor a particular party,” the New York Times reports.

“But as the panel prepares to unveil its proposed maps for the first time on Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers in New York and Washington are already laying the groundwork to cast them aside — plotting to use their supermajorities in Albany to draw new district boundaries for the next decade that might eliminate as many as five Republican-held seats.”

“Under the most aggressive scenarios, Democrats could emerge from 2022’s midterm elections with control of as many as 23 of New York’s 26 House seats in an all-out effort to prop up their chances of retaining control of Congress.”

The Cook Political Report has a new map to track which incumbents (or retiring incumbents’ districts) are most at risk in the redistricting process.

Nebraska Republicans have proposed splitting Omaha between two congressional districts, turning one swing district into two safe Republican seats, the Lincoln Journal Star reports.

“That dramatic move could alter the political landscape of Nebraska’s only swing congressional district, which handed an electoral vote to Democratic President Joe Biden last November and elected a Democratic congressman in 2014.”

If this proposal goes through, the biggest losers will be Omaha’s television stations which run millions of dollars in political ads every two years.

Dallas Morning News: “Two Democratic state senators on Wednesday filed a lawsuit that challenges the plans of Gov. Greg Abbott and GOP legislative leaders to redraw political maps in a special session this year. The senators argued that the Texas Constitution requires that it be done in a regular session that won’t happen until 2023.”

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) “keeps hearing Missouri Republicans will try to redraw his Kansas City-area district to get him out of office. He’s starting to believe it,” the Kansas City Star reports.

Said Cleaver: “I hear that literally every day from somebody. So I guess I have to, at this point, assume that it’s going to be a serious effort to alter the present construct of the Fifth District.”

Richmond Times-Dispatch: “A new redistricting commission made up of citizens and legislators was meant to end decades of partisan gerrymandering and produce fair maps for Virginia’s political districts. Early in the process, partisan tensions are already dividing the commission and threatening to derail its work amid a fast-approaching deadline.”

New Jersey Globe: “The New Jersey Supreme Court has picked John Wallace as the tiebreaker for the Congressional Redistricting Commission, siding with the choice of Democrats for the post.”

“The tiebreaker vote could have national implications in President Joe Biden’s midterm elections, where Republicans are just five seats away from controlling the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Redistricting expert David Wasserman has an early read on the U.S. Census data: “Based on the strong urban and weaker rural numbers I’m seeing, this is a much more favorable Census count than minority advocacy groups and Democrats had feared.”

Nate Cohn: “It’s a pretty decent set of data for Democrats in redistricting.”

Axios: “Almost all of the country’s population growth occurred in large metro areas over the decade.”

Politico: “The Census Bureau’s long-awaited release of redistricting data Thursday will unleash a torrent of new state political maps in the weeks and months to come, starting with the handful of states pressed against early fall deadlines to enact new district boundaries.”

“Altogether, the maps could tilt control of Congress for the next decade, but they’ll come out one by one at first. Strategists from both parties predict that some states will finalize maps as soon as September and that roughly half of the states will set their new lines by the end of the year. The rest will follow in the first few months of 2022.”

Punchbowl News: “But Republicans and Democrats have this lingering elation or dread — depending on which side of the aisle you are on — the GOP is already close to winning back the House even before one vote is cast in the 2022 midterms.”

“Fresh off sweeping electoral victories a decade ago, Republican politicians used census data to draw voting districts that gave them a greater political advantage in more states than either party had in the past 50 years,” according to a new Associated Press analysis.

Here’s one to bookmark: FiveThirtyEight has launched their redistricting tracker ahead of the 2022 House midterms.

“You can look up which party controls redistricting in each state, where the process currently stands and when to expect a new map to take effect; for states with proposed or final maps, you can also view the demographic and partisan breakdown of the new districts, see which party gained or lost ground and check if the map exhibits any signs of gerrymandering.”

“Census Bureau statisticians and outside experts are trying to unravel a mystery: Why were so many questions about households in the 2020 census left unanswered?,” the AP reports.

“Residents did not respond to a multitude of questions about sex, race, Hispanic background, family relationships and age, even when providing a count of the number of people living in the home.”

“Federal judges will no longer play the role of referee when the intensely partisan, once-per-decade fight over congressional mapmaking gets underway this year,” The Hill reports.

“As a result of decisions by the Roberts Court, federal courthouses will be forced to turn away even the most egregious cases of partisan gerrymandering, which could make it easier for state lawmakers to lock in politically manipulated voting maps for the next decade.”

Associated Press: “After a delay of more than four months caused by the pandemic, data from the 2020 census used for drawing congressional and legislative districts will be released next week, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.”

“The bureau will publicize the data next Thursday, Aug. 12, four days before it had promised in a court agreement with the state of Ohio. The information was supposed to be released at the end of March but was pushed back to August to give bureau statisticians more time to crunch the numbers, which came in late because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The postponement sent states scrambling to change their redistricting deadlines.”

Ari Berman: “Republicans could pick up anywhere from six to 13 seats in the House of Representatives — enough to retake the House in 2022 — through its control of the redistricting process in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas alone.”

This is somewhat misleading since it doesn’t net out states like New York where Democrat will likely gain seats due to redistricting.

Kyle Kondik: “While partisan gerrymandering is nothing new in American politics, it has become easier to find examples of states where gerrymanders are consistently effective and harder to find examples of dummymanders — gerrymanders that fail.”

“Republicans control the drawing of more districts in this round of decennial redistricting than Democrats do. Democrats arguably would be better off if no states had bipartisan/independent redistricting commissions.”