How Republicans held the House: It's the gerrymander, stupid

Republicans have held the House of Representatives by an extraordinarily small margin. Partisan gerrymandering is once again a huge reason why the right will hold the chamber. The three seats nabbed by the GOP in a mid-decade gerrymander of North Carolina look like they will be the difference-maker.

First the math: As of Thanksgiving weekend, the Associated Press has Republicans winning 220 seats and Democrats winning 214, with only one race still undecided. That's in California's 13th district, where it looks as if Democrat Adam Gray may defeat GOP Rep. John Duarte by a few hundred votes. 

If the final result is a 220-215 GOP majority, that's already one of the smallest margins ever. But it's about to get smaller. Two sitting members — Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida — have been nominated or appointed to posts in the Trump administration, and Florida firebrand Matt Gaetz resigned from the House after his nomination as attorney general. (Despite withdrawing from consideration, Gaetz has said he will not return to the House in January.) So at least temporarily, the GOP will hold a minuscule edge of just 217-215.

In other words, Republicans’ margin of victory was just three seats, and their working majority as the next term begins will be almost nonexistent. 

As it happens, three seats is exactly the number that Republicans engineered in their favor this cycle in North Carolina, as the result of an extreme gerrymander gifted to them by that state’s Republican-controlled Supreme Court.

Those extra seats in the Tar Heel State, at least arguably, were enough to determine who will control the next Congress. But of course it’s not quite that simple: Those were not the only congressional districts redrawn in 2024, or the only ones gerrymandered for partisan advantage by one side or the other. 

Still, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that gerrymandering once again determined nearly everything about this year’s contest for control of the House. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson will once again hold the gavel because his drew more lines and awarded itself more clear-cut advantages. 

They got away with this because Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow Republicans on the Supreme Court not only refused to accept multiple proposed nonpartisan standards for determining when a gerrymander went too far, but effectively closed the federal courts to all such claims now or in the future. That has left state legislatures — themselves often the products of extreme gerrymandering — and increasingly partisan state supreme courts as the final authorities on the fairness of congressional maps.

There is an active campaign underway to deny this, both in mainstream and conservative media. Those employed by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire systematically ignore decades of extreme GOP gerrymanders and focus solely on New York and Illinois, where Democrats responded to Republican aggression, and the Supreme Court’s invitation, by nabbing a handful of seats for themselves. But their efforts produced fewer seats than Republicans gerrymandered in Florida alone. 

Nonpartisan analysts will point to the Republican edge in the national popular vote for Congress, and even suggest that Democrats now receive a "battleground bonus": As of this week, they're tracking for just below 48 percent of the vote but 49.5 percent of the seats. That’s not a meaningful statistic: The aggregate total of 435 congressional races, many of them almost entirely uncompetitive (and some with no competition at all), is not a valid measurement of popular will. Overall, the congressional map has been so maximally gerrymandered that it can’t be said to mean much of anything. 

At the moment, it appears that Republican congressional candidates have won roughly 4.4 million more votes than Democrats. That margin, although modest, may sound decisive. But it can largely be accounted for by three wildly gerrymandered states where the GOP ran up big numbers: In Florida, they had a 1.67-million vote edge, while they won by more than 1.1 million in Texas and more than 500,000 votes in both Ohio and North Carolina. 

If districts in those purple/red states had been drawn more fairly, rather than drawn to ensure that Republicans would win 70 to 80 percent of House seats, and if competitive races had drawn better Democratic candidates, those numbers would look very different today. No one would look at the results in other nations where district lines have been so drastically manipulated and suggest that they reflect popular consensus. Neither should we. 

In the race for Congress in these polarized times, really only one thing matters: Control the map, and you control the outcomes. Yes, the voters still cast ballots. But the winners and losers have, in many cases, been chosen already.

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So what happened in North Carolina? In this election, it was the most deep-purple state in the nation, going for Donald Trump but electing Democrats as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state. Democrats also have the narrowest of leads in a state Supreme Court race, and won the state’s only competitive U.S. House district. 

But Republicans gained three U.S. House seats here before a single vote was cast, thanks to gerrymandering and a partisan Republican court.

In 2022, this magenta state produced a balanced delegation of seven Republicans and seven Democrats, very likely a fair representation of voter preferences. Now  Republicans will hold 10 of the 14 seats Republican — and the only surprise is that they didn’t win 11.

The much fairer 7-7 map was imposed in 2022 when North Carolina’s then-Democratic high court overturned an egregious gerrymander crafted by the GOP legislature. 

When Wesley Pegden, a mathematician and computer scientist who specializes in identifying partisan gerrymanders, examined the congressional map drawn by North Carolina Republicans in 2021, he reached a conclusion that startled even him.

That map wasn’t just an extreme partisan gerrymander, but one more carefully crafted to favor Republicans than 99.9999 percent of all possible maps in North Carolina. That is to say, of the 1 trillion maps created by Pegden’s supercomputer, the one drawn by the GOP was among the 00.000031 most partisan.

The court determined that to be a violation of the state constitution’s protections that all elections shall be free and ordered the creation of a fairer, more proportionate map — not a countervailing Democratic gerrymander, but one that ensured every vote mattered. But that equitable map disappeared almost as soon as Republicans captured a majority on the state court that fall. In an unprecedented but hardly shocking move, the partisan judges on the GOP court decided to revisit the barely year-old decision. 

Then the Republican justices went a step further than even John Roberts: They suggested that partisan gerrymandering is a “nonjusticiable” political issue — even in state courts — and returned the map to the GOP legislature to do its worst. They produced a gerrymander so one-sided that Democratic incumbents simply withdrew, surrendering before a vote was cast. Republicans immediately gained three House seats in the most 50-50 state’s most 50-50 year. 

In a 220-215 House, those three flips make the difference between Speaker Mike Johnson or Speaker Hakeem Jeffries.

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But the issue isn’t just that the fight for control of the House was extremely close, and that those three newly gerrymandered seats proved consequential. It’s that the entire playing field was tilted decisively toward the GOP. That’s something the Murdoch hacks and the hot-take pundit brigade won’t tell you.

It’s true that Democrats controlled a new map in New York this year that netted them one seat. But unlike North Carolina Republicans, Democrats did not radically improve their standing in the Empire State. One district in western New York was shifted in their favor, but the partisan balance under the new map did not change more than about a percentage point in any other district. The court-ordered map from 2021 that produced a fair 16-10 map in 2022 largely remained in place. (Democrats ultimately flipped two GOP-held seats in New York, but not because of redistricting.)

On a national scale, Republicans retained a huge edge because they designed most of the state congressional maps themselves. Of the 435 U.S. House districts, the GOP drew 191, while Democrats drew just 71. (The rest were drawn by courts, commissions or divided governments. Seven states have just one House member.)

Much of the existing GOP bias — such as the 6-2 delegation from Wisconsin — remains intact from redistricting after the 2010 census. As part of the GOP’s REDMAP operation, Republicans targeted just over 100 state legislative seats that year in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and elsewhere. 

When Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012, he carried Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. But thanks to their new gerrymanders, Republicans controlled the House delegations from all those states — and it wasn’t close. The GOP won 64 of 94 districts in those states, an astounding 68 percent of the seats in states Mitt Romney lost. That makesi t abundantly clear why Republicans comfortably held the House in that election, 234-201. If those 94 seats in Obama states had simply split evenly between the two parties, Democrats would have won a 218-217 majority.

State courts in Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania helped push maps toward fairness in the latter part of the 2010s. In the 2018 midterms, those maps, along with unexpected wins in a handful of red-state districts (in Kansas, Utah and Oklahoma) helped Democrats retake the House. It wasn’t that they defeated gerrymandering in 2018, more like they worked around it; the GOP’s bespoke maps in North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin held firm.

During the 2021 cycle, following the Supreme Court’s abdication, both parties looked to lock in every advantage they could. 

The nonpartisan Brennan Center at NYU Law School suggests that there is a 16-seat edge for Republicans nationwide, and that the “bias in this cycle’s maps strongly favors Republicans due primarily to aggressive gerrymandering in GOP strongholds in the South and Midwest.”

Republicans controlled more states thanks to previous gerrymanders, and had more and better opportunities. Democrats worked around the margins in states they controlled, adding three seats in Illinois, one in Oregon and another in New Mexico.

Those are the only gerrymanders Fox News or the New York Post will ever tell you about. In reality, Republicans got most of that back in Florida alone, nabbing an additional four seats. They added seats in Texas, grabbed one in Tennessee by cracking the largely Democratic city of Nashville in half and dividing it among two red districts, and wiped competitive seats that the Democrats won in 2018 in Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City and Indianapolis completely off the map.

Thanks to the courts, the Wisconsin gerrymander remained intact. Federal courts slow-walked racial gerrymandering lawsuits that helped the GOP hold seats in Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama.

In Ohio, the state Supreme Court twice declared GOP maps unconstitutional, but lawmakers defied a court order and enacted them anyway. In Arizona, Republicans played a brazen long game to capture the state’s supposedly independent commission with party loyalists, flipping a balanced map that produced a 5-4 Democratic delegation in 2020 into a 6-3 GOP edge in 2022, even as voters elected a Democratic governor and U.S. senator. They also played hardball in Iowa, undermining the state's nonpartisan commission and allowing the GOP to push one additional seat largely into their column.

All of which is to say: Both parties have won House seats through gerrymandering, but the Republicans have a clear advantage, certainly larger than the three or four seats that will determine control of the chamber.

On a national map with two dozen swing seats, Republicans have baked in about a 16-seat advantage. In practice, that means Democrats must win almost every competitive seat to have a legitimate shot at the majority. That’s not impossible; horserace analysts and party fundraisers will keep on telling you it can be done. But it’s now more difficult than ever.  

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None of this is to claim that Democrats "really won" this year's election, or that they should control the House in 2025. Obviously, election results this November tilted rightward. But when you take into account gerrymanders by both parties, the GOP margin in the 2024 election is less than the advantage Republicans netted through redistricting. 

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As stated earlier, the “national popular vote” for the House — which once aligned more closely to the national will — has become an entirely bogus measure. More than three dozen House races had no major-party challenger and more than two dozen had no challenger, period. That inevitably distorts the national totals because few votes, sometimes none at all, were cast for non-incumbents in those districts. And that’s without counting the hundreds of lopsided districts where both major parties fielded candidates but the results were preordained and voters barely paid attention.

Consider North Carolina, where Trump defeated Kamala Harris by 51 to 47.8 percent, a margin of 184,000 votes. Democrat Josh Stein won the gubernatorial race easily, thanks to a scandal-plagued opponent, but every other statewide race was extremely close. Democrats took the most important offices by about two points each, while Republicans won tight races for auditor, state treasurer and insurance commissioner. 

But only one of North Carolina’s 14 congressional districts was competitive. Two were drawn in such lopsided fashion that they generated no Democratic challenger at all. In the other 11, losing parties ran sacrificial lambs with zero chance of winning, who generated little electoral heat. More than 270,000 voters who cast a ballot for either Harris or Trump didn’t even bother to vote for a U.S. House candidate — even though that was the next item on the ballot. 

In the “popular vote” for the House in North Carolina, Republicans had an advantage of about 540,000 votes. That’s a garbage statistic, which artificially inflates the GOP’s national total through uncompetitive races based on maps the party drew for itself. Add those garbage statistics to the ones from Ohio, Texas, Florida, Maryland, Illinois, and all the other states with lesser gerrymanders by one side or the other, and what you get is a gigantic trash heap.

There are better ways to do this. A more proportional system, such as that proposed in the Fair Representation Act sponsored by Reps. Don Beyer, D-Va., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., would combine multi-member districts and ranked choice voting to un-gerrymander every state, and generate more balanced results, even in largely one-party states like Massachusetts or Tennessee. It would create a more accurate portrait of the people’s will, everywhere.

Until we have a national fix, or a Supreme Court that is less determined to help Republicans win elections, we are stuck with the mess that we have: A nationally gerrymandered map of blue and red states with little incentive for either party to play fair. Within that mess, Republicans have locked in control of more purple states than Democrats because of their aggressive redistricting a decade ago — and because they are willing to run roughshod over state constitutions and to disregard the rulings of state supreme courts.

We can call this a lot of things. We can’t call it fair, balanced or democratic. It may seem reasonable that Republicans will control the House after a Republican year. But gerrymandering made their victory far more likely, by narrowing the map to an ever-shrinking number of swing seats. We still live in a nation where those who draw the lines, not the voters, largely determine who wins and who loses.