Macoupin County Republican Central Committee Chairman Tom Stoecker poses for a photo outside the Macoupin County Courthouse Tuesday, May 23, 2023, in Carlinville, Ill. Carlinville is located in one of Illinois’ Congressional districts that flipped from Republican to Democrat as a result of gerrymandering. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Democrats have for years bemoaned partisan redistricting plans that helped Republicans win far more congressional seats than expected. But that advantage has disappeared.
In the first elections held with 2020 census data, Democrats battled back with their own gerrymandering that shaped districts to their advantage and essentially evened the outcome. Though Republicans won control of the House from Democrats, the closely divided chamber more accurately reflects the ratio of Republicans to Democrats among voters nationally than at any time in recent years, according to a new Associated Press analysis.
“On the one hand, we have fairer, more representative outcomes. But it looks like we have more gerrymandering happening,” said Doug Spencer, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who administers the All About Redistricting website.
The AP’s analysis found that Republicans won just one more U.S. House seat in 2022 than would have been expected based on the average share of the vote they received nationwide — an insignificant edge in determining the GOP’s 222-213 seat majority.
A similar situation played out in state capitols in the 2022 elections. The AP found that Democrats and Republicans notched a nearly equal number of states with House or Assembly districts tilted in their favor — a sharp contrast to the sizable Republican edge during the previous decade.
The difference is not just that Republicans gerrymandered less but that “more Democrats picked up the practice,” Spencer said.
A lot is at stake. Districts drawn to the advantage of one party can help it win, maintain or expand majorities, which in turn can affect the types of laws enacted on divisive topics such as abortion, guns, taxes and transgender rights. That’s evident this year, as Republican- and Democratic-led states move in opposite directions on many of those issues.
The dissatisfaction once voiced most loudly by Democrats in states gerrymandered by Republicans is now also rising from Republicans in such places as rural Macoupin County, Illinois. A Republican represented the former coal mining county in Congress during the past decade. But a Democrat won the redrawn district in 2022 after it got transformed into a slender snake-like shape — with a head in the twin university cities of Champaign and Urbana and a new tail in the Democratic suburbs of St. Louis.
Republican-leaning Macoupin County resembles a bulge in the middle — the only entire county remaining in the 13th District.
“We’re tied now to people – boat anchors up to the north and boat anchors in the south – that we have very little in common with, and we’re not happy,” said Tom Stoecker, the Macoupin County GOP chairman.
Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
