“Until recently, gerrymandered districts tended to stick out, identifiable by their contorted tendrils. This is no longer the case,” Quanta Magazine reports.
Said mathematician Beth Malmskog: “With modern technology, you can gerrymander pretty effectively without making your shapes very weird.”
“This makes it that much harder to figure out whether a map has been unfairly manipulated.”
Cook Political Report: “There’s already buzz that Albany Democrats, if given the chance, could opt for a ‘safer play’ than the map they pursued in 2022, targeting five or six GOP incumbents who are already at varying degrees of risk in 2024. That could mean a 20D-6R or 21D-5R map — not quite as ambitious as the 22D-4R gerrymander that backfired in court, but enough to offset North Carolina and keep Democrats in close contention to make Jeffries speaker.”
“Part of Democrats’ calculus is legal: a subtler, less brazen gerrymander could give Court of Appeals judges more rationale to uphold it. For example, no more crazy S-shaped tentacles allowing liberal Park Slope to be folded in with Trump-loving Staten Island.”
ProPublica: “Facing the possibility of an unsafe district, South Carolina’s most powerful Democrat sent his aide to consult with the GOP on a redistricting plan that diluted Black voting strength and harmed his party’s chances of gaining seats in Congress.”
“In a landmark decision, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled Friday that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the Alaska Constitution’s equal protection doctrine,” the Anchorage Daily News reports.
“The court ruled Friday that the redistricting board would have 90 days to appear before a Superior Court judge and show cause why the interim political map should not be used until the 2032 general election.”
“Political and racial tensions in Tennessee erupted into public view last week when Republicans in the state Assembly voted to expel two Black Democrats from the chamber,” NBC News reports.
“It was an unprecedented action that Democrats across the country — including President Joe Biden — excoriated as racist and political.”
“But politics watchers in Tennessee and around the nation say that what happened was nothing new for the state’s GOP lawmakers and that the process Republicans have taken to minimize representation of Democrats — on both the federal and state levels — has actually been years in the making.”
“New York Attorney General Tish James and Gov. Kathy Hochul submitted a court brief Friday in support of having new district lines drawn for the U.S. House after the current ones crafted by a judge last year fueled Republican gains,” Politico reports.
“The move by the two statewide Democratic leaders helps to reignite the fight over whether the current map that benefited Republicans on Long Island and the Hudson Valley should be redrawn by the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission ahead of the 2024 elections.”
“The battle for control of Congress next year is already being waged in a New York appellate court where Democrats are seeking to revive a case challenging the redrawing of state congressional boundaries after 11 New York Republicans won elections last year — helping secure their party’s narrow majority in the House,” the Albany Times Union reports.
“The lawsuit seeks to compel the state Independent Redistricting Commission to submit a new map to the Legislature that would reshape New York’s congressional boundaries after a series of court rulings scrapped the gerrymandered districts that were created by state Democratic lawmakers. The boundaries were subsequently redrawn by a court prior to last year’s elections, and those maps are set to remain in place for the next decade.”
“The U.S. Supreme Court won’t review a congressional redistricting law enacted by the Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature that some voters and Democrats saw as political gerrymandering,” the AP reports.
“The nation’s highest court said Monday without explaination that it won’t hear an appeal of a Kansas Supreme Court ruling from May 2022 that partisan gerrymandering does not violate the state constitution.”
“Republican justices look ready to use their new majority on the North Carolina’s state Supreme Court to tear up the state’s congressional maps, and the new ones would likely favor the GOP up and down the ballot,” Politico reports.
“The Tar Heel state’s highest court heard arguments Tuesday about a case surrounding the power to set the state’s internal political boundaries. A previous iteration of the state Supreme Court ruled that the congressional lines drawn by GOP lawmakers were an illegal partisan gerrymander, and during the 2022 midterms a court-ordered congressional map that resulted in an even split in the state’s congressional delegation ended up being used.”
“The North Carolina Supreme Court, which flipped to a Republican majority with last year’s elections, said Friday it would rehear a redistricting case and a voter ID case – cases that the state’s GOP legislature had lost when they were previously before the state’s highest court,” CNN reports.
“The redistricting case has since traveled to the US Supreme Court, where the justices have been weighing whether to hand down a far-reaching decision that would transform the authority state courts have to place limits on how state legislatures configure election rules. The US Supreme Court heard the redistricting case – Moore v. Harper – in December but is not expected to issue a decision until spring or early summer.”
Ron Brownstein: “As many as a dozen or more states could redraw the lines governing their congressional elections again before the 2024 election, more than enough to shift the balance of power in a House where the two parties have only managed to eke out mirror image five-seat majorities over the past two elections.”
“Experts agree it’s unprecedented in modern times for this many House seats to remain in flux this long after the decennial redrawing of Congressional districts that last occurred following the 2020 Census.”
A panel of federal judges rules that South Carolina lawmaker drew the 1st Congressional District held by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) “in such a way that it discriminates against Black voters and must be recrafted by the end of March,” the Charleston Post & Courier reports.
“Mace’s hold on the office is not immediately affected by the decision issued Jan. 6 but it likely means a much different congressional map will be in place in 2024.”
Cook Political Report: “Our analysis, using an approach similar to the Cook PVI, arrives at a similar conclusion: Republicans wouldn’t have won the House without gerrymanders in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas. But overall, Democrats fared slightly better than they would have under old maps thanks to their own gerrymanders in Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon and a temporary court-drawn map in North Carolina.”
“Whereas Republicans focused on locking in as many safe GOP seats as possible (some of which have produced McCarthy detractors), Democrats embarked on a riskier strategy of drawing as many Democratic-leaning seats as possible — and it paid off. Democrats won 24 of the 25 seats they set out to draw for themselves in Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon — including five seats by less than five points.”
“The number of state legislative districts where racial or ethnic minorities make up a majority or a near majority of the population dropped substantially after the latest round of redistricting, even as those minority groups accounted for virtually all of the population growth the nation experienced over the last decade,” Pluribus reports.
Politico: “After a shockingly disappointing election night, Republicans will have a razor-thin majority of no more than five seats (and maybe as small as four). A margin that small means that the GOP could not have reclaimed control without their redistricting advantage.”
“Republicans drew several red districts in states where they controlled the redistricting process: one each in Tennessee, Texas and Georgia, and three in Florida. Without them there would be no GOP majority.”
“The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dismissed the appeal of Michigan Republicans who had challenged the state’s new congressional map as drawn by the redistricting commission last year,” the Detroit News reports.
“The Republicans had argued that the congressional map unjustifiably deviated from constitutional requirements for apportionment by failing to have more equal population among the 13 districts, pointing to a roughly 1,200-person difference between the largest and smallest districts by population.”
ProPublica finds evidence contradicting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) claim that his plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts wasn’t driven by partisanship.
“The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state legislature and may also have violated Florida law. DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus.” A former state Supreme Court chief justice calls it “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.