Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
As an example, this Wikipedia page lists every district in the country by Cook PVI. The most extreme red district in the country is R+33. There are 21 districts that are D+33 or higher (up to D+43), and all of them are in or around big cities:
NYC (x7)
Oakland
Philadelphia
Chicago (x2)
SF
LA (x4)
Miami
Atlanta
Boston
Detroit
Seattle
The extra blue-ness of these districts (to the extent that can be quantified) essentially represents wasted votes, in that there is no Republican district that matches their level of partisanship. Without any gerrymandering at all, this fact alone would still allow Republicans to win the House without necessarily winning the popular House vote.
While there are certainly some districts that will always be extra blue and waste votes, the key here is there aren't any Republican districts that are that bad... and THAT is a product of gerrymandering. If you look at North Carolina, they have three Democratic districts with Cook PVI's of +17, +17, +18. Meanwhile there are six Republican districts with Cook PVI's of +6 to +9, then a couple in the 10-12 range and one +14.
Thus, you get ~2.4M Republican votes and ~2M Democrat votes, which should leave the balance around 7-6 Republican but instead it's 10-3... and let's not forget they're also disenfranchising minorities in North Carolina.
The issue isn't the districts in major metropolitan areas like NYC, Chicago and LA, even though that does hurt Democrats a little. That's offset to some degree by districts in the midwest and south that waste Republican votes because they're all always going red.
The issue is taking swing states or right leaning states and carving up the districts to combine small/mid-sized cities and concentrate/waste Democrat votes in those districts, or to exclude Republican-leaning suburbs from districts they belong in, but where their votes would be wasted. I'm pretty sure that's what happened in NC-04, and you can see a great example of connecting small/mid-sized cities in the now-redrawn FL-05, which used to snake from Jacksonville to Gainesville to Orlando, with sections of it about the width of a highway (
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.c379d19de7fb).
Gerrymandering is probably worth about 20 seats in the House for the GOP right now. Flip them and it's very, very close. Flip them and the AHCA doesn't pass the House.