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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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So I'm Canadian so a lamen to the situation. I always heard Republicans take Gerrymandering to an extreme but do Dems practice it or is this a moral highground thing?..
Before 2010, a number of Democratic states, including California, implemented independent redistricting commissions and the likes in order to prevent gerrymanders.
In 2010, the Republicans took a number of state legislatures, and were then able to use the every-10-years redistricting to gerrymander their way into permanent power and increase their share of seats in the the federal House of Representatives.
This has meant that further anti-gerrymandering measures in Democratic-leaning states would give the Republicans permanent control over one branch of the Federal government, so Democratic-leaning states adopted a no-unilateral-disarmament policy, where they're no longer passing measures like that at the state level, but regularly try to pass a federal anti-gerrymandering law, which would eliminate it nationally. To date, none of those attempts has gotten past a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
Minority rule
Oligarchy.
The major notable instance of Democrat gerrymandering is in Massachusetts. They gerrymandered the state so that rather than Republicans having 0 winnable districts, they have 1.
You don't need to cheat when your party hasn't been attacking the citizenry for the last 50+ years.
Historically, both are guilty. Today, Republicans are more guilty than Democrats, and this largely comes down to timing and new algorithms to create maps. I'm not going to claim Democrats are inherently more righteous on this issue, except to say that they're the victimized group and therefore have more incentive to create fair maps right now.
The US Constitution specifies having a census every 10 years, and then a redistricting happens. In 2010, Republicans rode a wave of hate against Obama with the Tea Party, which swept them into a lot of state level offices. This meant they controlled the state legislatures and governors offices that were in charge of redistricting. At the same time, new mapping software let them create extremely lopsided maps. There are cases of individual houses being carved out into one district or another.
This let them hold onto power in those states for the next 10 years. When the 2020 census came around, they still had power, and thus controlled the next round of redistricting. In Wisconsin, that affected the 2022 elections. However, there was also a series of elections for state supreme court, and the 2022 election put in the last liberal justice needed to swing the decision. The maps were ruled unconstitutional, and now we have something where Republicans getting 45% of the vote in the State Assembly means they lose.
(That, BTW, is based on what happened in 2018 for the Wisconsin State Assembly. Vote was 53% D/45% R, but the seats broke down 36D/63R.)