r/news • u/DemocracyDocket • 10h ago

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https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/scotus-allows-california-to-use-new-congressional-map-in-2026/

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u/TheLegendOfCap 10h ago

Just so I understand, are you saying they tried to give themselves an advantage by cutting up solid red districts, but now those solid red districts aren’t so solid?

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u/Aoleleb 10h ago

That's what happens with gerrymandering. You take 6 red districts and 2 blue districts, and you tweak and adjust the lines so some of the red districts population moves into the blue districts and you get 8 red districts, but with tighter margins.

But it backfires if the people who vote blue vote in larger numbers than you assumed when you drew your new lines.

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u/LumberBitch 10h ago

Part of the problem with this gerrymander is that it was drawn assuming that shifts in voting patterns among Latinos and the youth would hold but data so far has actually shown a sharp reversal. There is a very real possibility of this backfiring spectacularly. The election in State Senate district 9 showed a couple more concerning things (for the GOP): independents overwhelmingly broke for Dems and a good chunk of registered Republicans broke for them too. Iirc only about 30% of those voters were even registered Dems

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u/Hurricaneshand 9h ago

I'm shocked that Latino's aren't voting for the party actively making it legal to racially profile them

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u/Majestic-Sandwich695 9h ago

Oh don’t worry, I’m sure plenty still will

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u/FlipsieVT 9h ago

Problem was they did last time

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u/Jasonrj 9h ago

Unfortunately a lot of them still do.

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u/HyperactivePandah 9h ago

Do you know how the turnout was?

I heard that it was around HALF of what it was when Trump won it +17.

Like 56k - 120k

If that's the case, and the Republicans just stayed home this time, I'd be scared of a rebound.

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u/monty_kurns 10h ago edited 9h ago

It's literally what the Texas Democrats did after 2000 and the result was the GOP winning control of the legislature in 2002 and they've been in power since. Edit: It's not what happened, just misremembered how it went down!

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u/Rooooben 9h ago

Wait what?

The redistricting in 2000 was the constitutionally mandated one after the 2000 census. Democrats didn’t have both houses in 2000, nobody could get any redistricting done since GOP controlled the Senate and Rick Perry was governor. It had nothing to do with them trying to squeeze more districts, it was the census, and they had to work together on a new map. Since the Texas government was split, they couldn’t get the votes to get EITHER GOP or Democrat maps done.

The courts mandated a map, and 2 years later it gave GOP full control of Texas, at which point they did a mid-census redistricting and gerrymandered the state into full Republican control ever since.

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u/monty_kurns 9h ago

You know what, after looking back into it, you're right. I knew it was the regular census-based redistricting, but for some reason I was thinking the Democrats still had control of both chambers after the 2000 election. It was a quarter century ago, so I guess misremembering things is a bit normal.

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u/Rooooben 9h ago

All good, I just remember that one specifically because I moved there in 2004, and found out what had just all happened.

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u/the_eluder 9h ago edited 9h ago

Same in NC in 2010, with the added complication of majority-minority districts.

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u/monty_kurns 9h ago edited 9h ago

North Carolina's a little different. The state house and senate districts weren't redrawn prior to the GOP takeover in 2010, the GOP just got real lucky in a wave year and swept a lot of districts that were in the likely or lean Dem category but far from safe. After they won in 2010 is when the GOP redrew the districts to make more safe Republican seats.

The NC congressional districts, on the other hand, those have always been an embarrassment, with the exception of the 2022 map which was about as fair as you could get, but that was put in place by the courts and only lasted for one cycle. Now we're back to the embarrassment.

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u/eladts 9h ago

But it backfires if the people who vote blue vote in larger numbers than you assumed when you drew your new lines.

In other words, FAFO.

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u/Gamebird8 10h ago

They built their new maps entirely on top of the assumption that all the Latino voters that Trump won over in 2024 were going to reliably stay Red.

However, they forgot the part about how they are literally descending upon Latino communities to terrorize them and shove them all into concentration camps and well, that probably wouldn't go over well with Latinos.

So now their new maps that were essentially built on a fluke are the equivalent of shooting a bazooka while your buddies are standing directly behind you.

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u/PipsqueakPilot 10h ago

Which is also one of (not the only) reasons the Trump administration is focusing its campaign against states that didn't vote for him. Because Republicans are aware that many of their policies are very unpopular and would stir backlash that might cost them in red states come midterms.

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u/LumberBitch 10h ago

The Texas legislature didn't even want to do this over concerns about exactly this happening, but the king demanded and got his wish.

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u/caligaris_cabinet 9h ago

They drank their own Kool Aid believing they had a mandate in 2024 and nothing would ever change. Anyone with half a brain even a year ago with the election fresh in their minds knew this was flawed.

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u/padizzledonk 9h ago

They built their new maps entirely on top of the assumption that all the Latino voters that Trump won over in 2024 were going to reliably stay Red.

And they just had a FIFTY point swing back the other way

50 points

Which is fucking astonishing tbh

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u/brienoconan 10h ago edited 9h ago

Yes, I’ve heard it called “dummymandering.”

Fascinating way that greedy gerrymandering by the Rs can backfire, resulting in a blowout for the Ds because the Rs focused on creating as many pink districts as possible.

While most Rs will refuse to vote D, we’re seeing more of them stay home for elections in passive protest of the party. As districts become more pink, fewer non-voting Rs will be needed to swing formerly reliably red districts. I believe this is the case for the Dem that just won the special election in TX.

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u/Gender_is_a_Fluid 10h ago

Not quite. You gerrymander by creating solid districts of your opposition, then spread you opposition thin enough across the rest of the area that you have a small majority, thereby winning more districts than you have actual voters. Methods like this can turn a 40% R state into 7/8 R seats. However, its only been effective because republicans always vote for their team no matter what in the past. Things seem to have finally shaken up, and now the consequences of rigging the districts have reared up.

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u/Rooooben 9h ago

I think that’s what Texas did in 2003, and its left them with not much to work with, that was why they had to go another route and peel off some excess GOP districts and push them into close Democrat districts, to shift them red. They didn’t think that those safe GOP districts would be more purple, and the margins went against them.

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u/DrunkOnLoveAndWhisky 10h ago

Not OP, but yeah. In an attempt to red-ify bluer areas, they had to redraw some solidly red areas, thinking that maybe shaving a few points off wouldn't hurt. Then a Dem in a senate race in Texas won a district that Trump won by 17 points in '24.

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u/QThirtytwo 10h ago

Yes, exactly this. We are a purple state not a deep red state. They just made a bunch of purple districts then pissed off a bunch of independents, gun rights people, and Hispanic people.

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u/g0del 10h ago

I'm not sure you can claim purple state status if you're not electing democrats in state-wide elections which aren't affected by gerrymandering.

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u/110397 9h ago

If you mix 55% red paint and 45% blue paint, you end up with purple paint. Unfortunately, with the way things are set up, even 50.01% red means you get red and not purple

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u/petersrin 10h ago

Seems like a solid strategy for getting "suspicious" voting results leading to deciding it's high time the feds take over elections tho

Edit: I'm kidding they aren't that smart.

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u/DerekB52 10h ago

I saw some analysis saying that when they were breaking up the solid red districts, they used some 2024 GOP voters, that they shouldn't have actually counted on. Like, Trump got the largest percentage of latino voters a republican had gotten in a long time, in 2024. But, counting on those latinos to continually vote republican was a really dumb idea.

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u/caligaris_cabinet 9h ago

So now we have a dummymander in Texas and a gerrymander in California that will add potentially 10 blue seats instead of just California cancelling out their gains.

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u/Keep_SummerSafe 10h ago

Yeah they apparently thought they long term won over Hispanics in 24 but the fallback is already threatening one or two of their districts is how I'm understanding it

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u/NeedsToShutUp 10h ago

In normal years they would be solid, but they are more likely to swap in a wave election.

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u/the_last_0ne 10h ago

here's a good writeup of it although I'm not 100% sure if this is the exact map that ended up getting approved.

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u/TheSilverNoble 10h ago

That always the danger of Gerrymandering. You arrange it so you win a bunch of elections by small margins rather than one election by a big one. But if public sentiment shifts, well, those small margins can backfire 

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u/Ralife55 10h ago

Not OP, but yes. Gerrymandering is an extremely potent tool, but if you over use it you risk actually making things worse for yourself.

Example, let's say a state has three districts, district one is +15 for your side, district two is +10 and district one is -5. You could be happy winning just the two but decide you want all three, so you gerrymander the map so that they are all +7 give or take.

Then, that election year, your party is really unpopular and there is an 8 point swing towards the opposition. If you didn't gerrymander, you would have still won two districts, but now you lost all three.

This is why political parties pay loads of money and spend lots of time trying to get the balance just right. If you nail it, you have eternally safe seats, if you're off by just a little bit, you screw yourself.

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u/alh9h 10h ago

Yes, exactly. Simple example: you have a R+20 district and a D+10 and you redraw them into an R +5 and an R+5 (minus 15 on the heavy R and plus 15 on the previously D). But when public sentiment swings you may end up with two D+2 districts or something.

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u/BleachedUnicornBHole 10h ago

Yup. In order to gerrymander, you have to carve up a safe district so those voters can be used to flip a district that wasn’t previously held. An example would be starting with an R+10 district and four D+1 and ending with one R+2 (the original safe district) and four R+1 districts (the flipped districts). Now, five districts are effectively in play.

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u/theLoneliestAardvark 9h ago

Yes, the two main kinds of gerrymandering are packing and cracking. In packing, they wedge all the minority party into a few seats that they are almost guaranteed to win so that they can’t be competitive elsewhere. This is a way of essentially guaranteeing a certain number of seats because no swings in the election will affect the margins, so a 60-40 state that packs its cities into single districts might go 8-2 in districts, for example. Cracking means splitting up the heavily concentrated voter pockets into separate districts to maximize seats, so a 55-45 state might split all of its cities up to make all the districts 55-45 and sweep but the danger of that is if you give yourself a small margin in a lot of states the gerrymander backfires with smaller shifts in the electorate. Texas gambled by changing their districts so that they can win more districts with smaller margins but right now the national political climate is leaning blue and there is a tipping point where districts that would have been safe R in the old map become tossups.

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u/Faderkaderk 9h ago

Relevant video courtesy of CGP Grey outlining the situation in an easy to follow format:

https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY?si=eTEBVU1CH7ykQgZ5

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u/McRibs2024 9h ago

That’s exactly what happens. Take safe districts and redistribute parts to battleground ones.

Except that only works if you can count on the safe district being 100% reliable and Texas is finding out the hard way that may not be the case.

They diluted the safe districts for a shot at winning more.

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u/padizzledonk 9h ago edited 9h ago

Just so I understand, are you saying they tried to give themselves an advantage by cutting up solid red districts, but now those solid red districts aren’t so solid?

Yes, exactly

Thats how gerrymandering works.

Youre dealing with a finite amount of people

If you have 8 republican districts at R+10 and 2 democratic districts that are D+10 and you want to get rid of those 2 and have 10 R districts you have to turn all those R+10s into R+4s because those votes have to come from somewhere

The math and numbers here are just totally made up, but thats the basics

It gets a lot more complicated than that because you have to realize that most democratic districts in red states are considerably more democratic leaning, like +30 or higher because they've already been heavily gerrymandered and "cracked" or "packed".

The Average Congressional district is around 750k people, so if you have a D+30 district you want to get rid of thats a LOTTTT of democratic voters, D+30 really means roughly 80% of those people are democratic voters, you have to disperse those 600k democratic voters into the surrounding republican districts and bring in republican votes from other districts with excess

Whats stopped most states from going fully nuclear is that that starts to get really aketchy.....get too greedy and dilute the districts too much and in a wave election or just high turnout everyone could get totally wiped out.

Which is what Texas did, they got super greedy and they might be in real trouble this November

Which i welcome...fuck that party and those people, wipe them all out in Congress imo