I think the last 15 years of elections would seem to contradict you.

My guess is that if gerrymandering were completely outlawed, Democrats would easily maintain control of the House, with a healthy margin, more or less permanently.

Wave elections are a thing, but as we've seen, they don't give a the waved party a massive margin.

> We have had lots of wave elections in the past 100 years: 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010

2010 is a bit of a magic number, because that was the point when Republicans started their concerted, coordinated, country-wide gerrymandering campaign. So I don't think elections prior to then can support or refute any points about gerrymandering.

They already had done that, and they lost two big wave elections. (E.g., Texas redistricted in 2004.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

It'd be better if the electoral boundaries were drawn with a polling-naive algorithm, but that isn't how it works in practice - you've probably noticed that every election is knife edge and there are regular upsets. This is because if one party is guaranteed to lose it will change its policies just enough to attract marginal voters from the other party.

For example, there were confident predictions of a similar nature that the Republicans would be unable to win elections because of the shrinking white demographic. We can see in the polling that what actually starts to happen is Trump still on the ballot but they've been in a long strategic process of picking voters from non-white demographics. The elections themselves are still knife-edge.

There'd be a different policy mix, but one thing we can predict about the future anyway is that there will be different policy mixes. Gerrymandering just privileges minority incumbent policies.

The republicans would then find it necessary to change the constituencies to which they appeal. Anyhow, a few states are horribly gerrymandered by the democrats. The problem is that democrats did so horribly during the Obama years midterms that most states ended up in control of republicans for the 2010 and 2020 census.

You do know that, in the seven House elections since 2010, republicans won the congressional popular vote four times: https://ballotpedia.org/Proportion_of_each_party%27s_nationa.... They won 1-6 million more total votes. Republicans will almost certainly win the House popular vote this year too.

I’m deeply curious how you formed the belief that democrats would consistently win without gerrymandering. That’s obviously not true even if you look at polling, which obviously isn’t affected by gerrymandering. Democrats are 0.5 points ahead on the generic congressional polls, but republicans were 2.5 points ahead last fall. RCP clocked them 2.5 points ahead in 2022 (actual was 2.8).

It really isn't. It's self-perpetuating. A gerrymandered state might _eventually_ switch sides, but far more likely it'll become more red (and yes, gerrymandering is predominantly a Republican tactic).

Here's a nice overview: https://medium.com/rantt/the-top-10-most-gerrymandered-state...

Democrats before ‘67 were racist as hell. Their southern strategy in ‘67 destroyed the party. Non racist republicans merged with the non racist democrats into the DNC. Racist democrats, pushing the southern strategy, left the DNC and joined the Republican party.

However, now it's pretty much only Republicans who rely on computer-aided models to gerrymander the districts.

There _are_ Democratic examples, and the worst ones are in Maryland and Illinois. But they pale before the Republican gerrymandering.