How much will gerrymandering actually affect the 2024 election?

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has long argued that Wisconsin is a purple state. The state’s voting record on the national level would suggest he’s right.

In 2020, President Joe Biden won the state by just around 20,000 votes – less than one percentage point. In 2016, former President Donald Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by about the same margin – also within one percentage point.

But looking at the state legislature over the last decade, you would see a solidly red state.

“It was just clear over the last 10 years that the previous maps did not reflect the people’s wishes,” Evers tells The Independent. “Let’s just use my race as an example: I won one race by 1 per cent and another one by 3 per cent [but] the Republicans had a supermajority in the Senate and a huge majority in the assembly.”

When Evers was elected in 2018, Democrats won the popular vote in the state assembly by 53 to 45 per cent, but the heavily skewed map still gave the Republicans a majority of 63 to 36 seats.

This was the result of gerrymandering – the practice of drawing districts in a way that maximizes the seats of one party or another. The practice was named after Elbridge Gerry, a vice president of the United States at the time of his death, who in 1812, when he was the governor of Massachusetts, signed a bill that created a district the shape of which was compared to a mythological salamander.

Political science Professor Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University tells The Independent that “gerrymandering is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, risks we face for democracy in the United States. Obviously, I think [former President Donald] Trump presents a whole other set of risks. But … at a structural level, I think gerrymandering is a really profound risk for democracy”.

“The central impetus [for] gerrymandering in most places, historically, has been partisanship – one party tries to screw over the other party,” he adds. “Certainly the other motivation for gerrymandering in many places is racial, for the part of white people that controlled offices of power [to] minimize the voting power of African Americans and other racial minorities.”

Districts are redrawn every 10 years after the census, and Republicans took advantage of their 2010 midterm gains when Americans came out to vote against Obamacare and its new namesake president.

On December 22 last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the gerrymandered maps were unconstitutional, but that ruling only came after liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the court, flipping its ideological majority.

Evers tells The Independent that having the state Supreme Court declare the maps illegal was the “only way” forward.

The new maps were created by Evers and his staff and were approved by Republicans and Democrats in the legislature out of four options.

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Republican state Senator Van Wanggaard said in a statement after the passing of the new maps that “Republicans were not stuck between a rock and a hard place. It was a matter of choosing to be stabbed, shot, poisoned or led to the guillotine. We chose to be stabbed, so we can live to fight another day.”

“That was a clever statement, but I’m not sure it was accurate,” Evers says. “The four maps that were still in play in the Supreme Court were almost identical, so I don’t think between stabbing or a guillotine is necessarily an appropriate observation.”

“This is reflective of Wisconsin, it’s a purple state … When the legislature is either mildly red or violet blue, that’s going to force people to collaborate if they want to get something done,” he adds.

Evers laments the lack of a nonpartisan commission in Wisconsin, saying it would be preferable instead of his office creating the new maps.

Commissions take the redrawing of the maps out of the hands of legislators to create fairer maps. But they’re almost exclusively available in states with ballot initiatives – the practice of handing a decision on a specific issue over to the voters.

John Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette University in Milwaukee, tells The Independent that ballot initiatives are “an idea that became popular later in America’s history and so you mostly see it in the constitutions of western states” who joined the US much later than eastern states. “So to get something like an independent commission in Wisconsin, you would have to get legislators to agree with that. And it doesn’t matter what party a legislator is – they usually don’t like that idea.”

“It’s not surprising that Republicans are the biggest beneficiary of gerrymandering because they control far more space and far more seats in the drawing of the maps,” Michael Li at the Brennan Center for Justice tells The Independent.

He notes that a lot of Democratic states, such as California, are “governed by an independent commission, and they’re not gerrymandered. Democrats didn’t have a lot of seats where they could gerrymander”. Meanwhile, Republicans control “seat-rich Southern states” where they can “maximize [their] advantage”.

Li says gerrymandering doesn’t only give an outsized advantage to one party, it also eliminates competition.

“There are only about 25 seats right now that are toss-ups of the 435 in the US House. Compare that to 1998, when there were 186 seats that were competitive … There was much more in play three decades ago than there is today – a large part of that is gerrymandering,” he says.

“When Republicans drew maps in Texas, they didn’t sit there and say, ‘Okay, let’s get rid of this Democrat’ … but what they did is they took what they had and said, ‘Gosh, you know, these seats are really competitive, let’s make them non-competitive’. And that’s sort of the danger,” he adds.

Most Americans live in the suburbs, which are usually swing areas, and should be “the most competitive places regardless of state, and yet in most of the country, that doesn’t happen because of the way the maps are drawn,” Li says.

Republicans won a small majority in the US House in 2022, which has shrunk further since following resignations and special elections.

“Why do we have elections every two years? Because [when] the mood of the country changes, so should the composition of Congress. But that really doesn’t happen for most people,” Li says. “Democrats would have an easier path to a House majority if you had better balanced and more competitive maps” in North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and Florida, he argues.

But a lot of progress has been made since the 2010 midterms.

“Gerrymandering is not going to determine who controls Congress in 2024 – that’s a big victory for democracy,” Warshaw says. “That’s not where we were 10 years ago, when … Republicans won a majority in the House, even while Democrats won a majority of votes.”

“One academic called the 2012 election ‘the great gerrymander of 2012’,” Warshaw adds. “And I think that really does fairly describe it … Gerrymandering was pivotal in determining the outcome of elections across that decade starting in 2012. That’s true now at the state-by-state level – [but] at the national level, that’s no longer true.”

Johnson notes that a recent study found that Democrats are “good enough at gerrymandering in the places where they had control that the main consequence in net terms was a reduction in competitive seats, but not a big change in terms of the partisan balance”.

In a consequential swing state like Wisconsin, the Democratic governor thinks the new maps will encourage “more people to vote on both sides”.

“We’ll hopefully set some records as far as the number of people voting,” Evers says.

One example of where things are developing in the opposite direction is in North Carolina. The state currently has seven Democrats and seven Republicans in the US House but thanks to a new Republican majority on the Supreme Court, that may flip in 2024 to 11 Republicans and three Democrats.

Li calls it a “wild skew” in a state that is about 50-50.

“Now you have a map that is 10-4 – maybe in the right cycle could even be 11-3 — and that is just out of whack for a state that is a presidential battleground every cycle for every election,” he says.

In swing states during the 2010s, most had “deeply pro-Republican” gerrymanders that led to massive Republican biases in the legislatures, Warshaw says. “So in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, you had huge advantages for Republicans.”

“The maps in all of those places now are [fairer]. Ohio had a ballot initiative that required fairer maps and the maps there are not what advocates wanted – they’re not totally fair. But they’re probably better than the counterfactual – what they would have been absent that ballot initiative,” he adds.

How the maps look hinges on who’s in power when it’s time for redistricting. Republicans dominated the 2010 elections and were then able to “aggressively gerrymander as much as they wanted in many states” but in more recent elections “Democrats won governorships in a bunch of states that were the most gerrymandered,” Warshaw notes.

“East of the Mississippi [River], very few states allow for ballot initiatives. And almost no southern states do, and so the South, which has some of the worst gerrymandering, is also where it’s hardest to reform. And I do think that you will ultimately have to have the federal government play some role,” Li argues.

“Congress has the power to set the rules for redistricting. It could require partisan fairness, require potentially the use of independent commissions — even short of that it could just have a robust anti-partisan gerrymandering standard, which I think is going to be key,” he adds.

For now, it’s up to each state to find a solution – if the political will exists among lawmakers or the public.

“There are lots of ways to get to fair maps,” Li says. “Unfortunately, the road there, short of congressional action, is a little bit of a patchwork quilt.”

“For Michigan, there was a nonpartisan commission,” Warshaw says. “In Wisconsin, it was dual litigation and changes in the composition of the Supreme Court. And I think also just in politics.”

There were changes in the bipartisan commission that led to fairer maps in Pennsylvania. Another factor was simple geography, specifically in the upper Midwest.

“Whereas rural areas have gotten more Republican and the suburbs have gotten more contested, it’s made it a little bit easier to draw fair maps and harder for Republicans to draw super aggressive gerrymanders,” Warshaw notes.

Speaking about the new map in Wisconsin drawn up by the governor’s office and grudgingly accepted by the Republicans in the state legislature, Johnson says it “doesn’t actually increase the number of competitive seats all that much compared to the old gerrymandered maps. What it does is it raises the Democratic floor a lot and it lowers the Republican ceiling a lot”.

“It makes the relatively small number of competitive seats that remain actually determine which party controls the assembly. So the competitive seats we do have are very consequential. And in that sense, the map is competitive. But it’s not a map that maximises the number of competitive seats,” he argues. “For the first time in over a decade, we don’t know which party will control the state assembly after the next elections.”

When asked what could’ve been passed in Wisconsin if it weren’t for gerrymandering, Evers mentions Medicaid expansion, saying that the state “did not receive several billion dollars over time … which would have gone a long way to take care of all sorts of disproportionate health outcomes”.

While Evers has been able to block Republican initiatives, he says that before he came to office in early 2019, Republicans “decided to essentially neuter teacher unions in the state of Wisconsin … making it much more difficult for teachers to unionize and, frankly, take away a lot of side benefits, like health care.”

The measure took “money right out of their pockets” and the issue hasn’t been resolved even though about a decade has passed, the governor tells The Independent.

Johnson says another example is medical marijuana, which “overwhelming majorities of Wisconsin voters support”. There are “Republican members of the legislature who publicly support this. And yet, they failed to even bring such a bill to a vote in the assembly.”

Johnson adds that the Republicans in Wisconsin “didn’t need to do anything to keep their legislative majority – there was not really any electoral pressure on them to do popular things or refrain from doing unpopular things in the state legislature”.

“The effects of gerrymandering go beyond the districts that are gerrymandered themselves,” Li says.

Having seats be non-competitive means that many voters won’t be targeted by mobilizing efforts, which in the end may result in lower turnout across large swaths of the country, affecting races up and down the ballot.

“Due to polarization and improving technology, it’s easier to gerrymander than it’s ever been before,” Warshaw says. “If you have the ability to gerrymander, and you want to draw a map that locks your party into power, it’s pretty easy to do so.”

Gerrymandering has long been used to target racial minorities. “The reality right now is that if you are trying to gerrymander a map, it’s much easier to target communities of color to get there – and that’s true whether you’re a Democratic gerrymanderer or a Republican gerrymanderer,” Li says.

It’s all about residential segregation. “Let’s say you’re a Republican gerrymanderer. The problem with trying to target white Democrats is that they oftentimes live really close to white Republicans – sometimes in the same house,” Li notes. “Unless you can figure out a way to draw a line on somebody’s bed to separate spouses, it’s really hard.”

“It’s much easier to say, ‘Oh, well, let’s just pack all these Black neighbourhoods together’, or, ‘Let’s split these Black neighbourhoods apart and lose the partisan valence of a map up or down’,” he adds, about the gerrymandering tactics known as “packing and cracking”.

It’s “hard to decouple that from partisanship given that the vast majority of Black voters are Democrats – how much of that is racial animus versus partisan animus?” Warshaw asks. But he adds that “if we didn’t have the Voting Rights Act, you would see a mass disenfranchisement of Black voters throughout the South”.

Johnson notes that in Wisconsin, Black and Latino voters “are the only groups who live in sufficient concentrations that the Voting Rights Act applies to them”.

“What’s weird about that is that the Voting Rights Act requirements and Republican goals for gerrymandering are in agreement in a place like Wisconsin – the VRA basically says you have to pack Black and Latino voters into majority-Black and Latino districts,” he adds. “And because Black and Latino voters vote strongly for Democrats, that amounts to legally-mandated packing of Democratic voters, which Republicans are enthusiastic to do.”

When asked which state is the worst for gerrymandering, Warshaw says, “Until recently, I would have said Wisconsin, but the new map is a huge improvement”.

“Illinois on the Democratic side, that’s probably the worst remaining one,” he adds. “After Wisconsin on the Republican side – Ohio, despite being better than it could be, it’s still pretty deeply gerrymandered.”

“Reformers in Ohio are trying to pass a truly nonpartisan commission, which would be a huge reform,” Warshaw says. “Getting [fairer] maps in Ohio will really lead to a transformation across almost the entire upper Midwest compared to 2012.”

But in the end, when thinking about the general election in the autumn, Johnson argues that “almost everyone has an opinion about Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It’s those attitudes towards the top of the ticket that are going to drive down-ballot voting more than the other way around. So even though we have this more competitive state legislative race in Wisconsin, I don’t think that’s going to drive turnout up for the presidential election”.

Encapsulating the change over the last decade, Johnson says it’s possible that Trump will win in November, but that “Democrats could still win a majority in the House even in that scenario, which would be remarkable”.

The Marquette research fellow goes on to say that partisanship may be replacing gerrymandering, producing similar effects.

“The growing problem is going to be that so many voters vote the same way every single time. There are so many people who only vote for Republicans or only vote for Democrats that even if you’re trying to draw non-partisan maps, you will still end up with a situation where there just aren’t very many competitive seats, and you don’t have a very responsive legislature for that reason,” Johnson says. “The parties are so bad at competing for votes – they have their bases locked up.”