m vote this year was at a 44-year high, but the Republican-drawn maps in those states mostly protected House Republican incumbents from defeat (two Republican U.S. House members from Michigan lost, and one extremely close race in North Carolina remains undecided pending an investigation into election fraud).
Successful partisan gerrymandering rests on one major concept: distributing the votes for your political party more evenly among districts than your opponent. One way to measure how successfully a party is distributing its votes is through what political scientists and legal scholars call “wasted votes.”
The idea is that any vote for the winner in excess of one more than the loser got is “wasted,” as would be the votes for a losing candidate of the same party in another district. This isn’t, of course, to say the voters who cast them don’t matter — but these votes didn’t directly decide the races.
As a party that is increasingly dependent on votes from urban areas, Democratic voters are often less efficiently distributed across most states than Republican voters are.
But even with population distribution in mind, being in control of the line-drawing process confers enormous advantages to a party. Consider North Carolina, where Republicans were able to keep at least nine of the 10 seats they hold in the House — in spite of the fact that Democrats received more House votes in the state than Republicans. Democrats held the other three seats. (The outcome of the state’s 9th District remains up in the air pending an investigation into possible fraud.)
Most of the votes for Democrats would be considered “wasted” by being packed into heavily Democratic districts rather than being distributed throughout the state.
It’s a similar story in Ohio, where Republicans statewide beat Democrats 52 percent to 48 percent, but the GOP won 10 of the state’s 14 congressional districts — over 70 percent of the seats.
This slow-moving political chess game will keep playing out over the next three years (and perhaps longer depending on litigation). But Levitt, the redistricting expert, believes voters are becoming increasingly savvy about the issue.
“This process … can seem like the sort of thing political scientists care about and eggheads care about but real people don’t necessarily reflect on, but I think that is also changing,” he says.
WHYY reporter Joe Hernandez contributed reporting to this story.