Redistricting Is An Inherently Raw Political Power Activity and Should Remain So
Texas Republicans are merely doing what many Democrat states have already done without nary a whimper from the media.
Redistricting is back in the news because Texas is trying to redistrict its congressional districts to create more Republican districts. To stop them, Texas Democrats have fled to Illinois, America’s most partisan big state when it comes to redistricting. As George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley pointed out, nothing is more anti-democratic than fleeing your state to stop democracy from happening. Democrats may not like what Republicans in Texas are doing, but they are acting perfectly within their political rights to redraw congressional lines to favor more Republicans. Democrats do it and, according the data, do it more and better.
I have some history with the topic. Believe it or not, my last work as a lawyer way back in 2001 was to represent Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson when nineteen plaintiffs sued her to adopt their proposed congressional districts maps after Colorado got a seventh congressional seat post-2000 U.S. Census. The final map adopted resulted in the new district being the number one race in America in 2002, with the winner squeaking out a 527-vote victory. I’ve also gone on record stating that I preferred as many congressional districts as possible in each state to be as competitive as possible in order to increase accountability to voters given that safe seats decrease accountability due to the low odds of losing the next election. If most seats were politically competitive (i.e., either party had a real chance to win every cycle), I believe winners would work far harder at delivering for voters than safe seats incent them to do.
Regardless of that preference, the Constitution is pretty clear about where the power on this issue resides. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution states: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” The Tenth Amendment reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That is it. There isn’t another word touching on redistricting. States control the process. Period. Thus, if Texas or California (as it does) wants to draw congressional districts to favor one party, then so be it.
Redistricting is an activity exercising inherently raw political power. I believe that is how the Founder Fathers intended it. Why? Because they wanted states to be in control and for state politics to matter greatly. What better way to strengthen state politics than to make control of the U.S. House of Representatives entirely dependent on control of the fifty state legislatures and governor’s offices (that is also why U.S. Senators used to be chosen by state legislatures so senators were loyal to the states, not the people). If you control a majority of states based on population, you will control the U.S. House. To the victor go the spoils. The idea that congressional districts should be drawn by apolitical or nonpartisan commissions is poppycock (such entities aren’t truly apolitical or nonpartisan anyway). If you want to control how congressional districts are drawn, then get in the state trenches and win state legislatures and governor’s offices. Otherwise, pound sand.
If you crunch the data, it looks like the U.S. House largely conforms to how America voted for the presidency in 2024. Republicans currently control the U.S. House 219-212 with four vacancies. If you allocated U.S. House seats based on how each state voted for the presidency in 2024, excluding seats with four seats or less given that those states are too small to make much of a difference, Republicans should control the U.S. House 221-207 (the seven “missing” seats come from votes cast for other candidates than Trump and Joe Biden). So, the partisan process used currently aligns fairly closely with presidential voting.
The interesting part comes from looking at how far each state’s congressional allocation of power is from its presidential voting. Eight states are within ten points or less (see the yellow states), which includes, coincidentally, Texas at 9.65 percent. If you look at states with four congressional seats or more, the average gap between congressional power and presidential voting is 25.21% for Democrat states and 22.53% for Republican states, thereby indicating Democrats are a little more partisan/aggressive at pushing political lines than Republicans. If you look at states with ten congressional seats or more (i.e., states with lots of seats to move around), Democrats again outmuscle Republicans 20.66% to 15.25 percent. Illinois, where Texas Democrats fled to "protect Democracy,” is the most egregious big Democrats state at 25.82%, which means its congressional seats are skewed that far beyond how the state voted for Biden. That is how it has a 14-3 Democrat delegation even though it only voted for Biden 54.4%-43.5 percent. North Carolina is the top Republican state at 20.57% greater than how that state voted presidentially.
Of note, Ohio should follow Illinois’s lead and flex its partisan muscle a bit more. With a 10-5 Republican congressional advantage, Ohio’s gap is only 11.54% compared to Illinois’s 25.82% gap. Given the Republican supermajority in the legislature and now firm control over the Ohio Supreme Court, Ohio could easily redraw districts to take a 13-2 Republican majority to Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, Governor Mike DeWine would oppose such a move, so Ohio may have to wait for Vivek Ramaswamy to do what other states routinely do.
Beyond the big states with ten or more congressional seats that aggressively draw districts for their own party, smaller states that stand out for their sheer hyper-partisanship: Connecticut (5 Democrats, 0 Republicans; 41.89% gap), Massachusetts (9D, 0R; 36.02%), Maryland (7D, 1R; 21.58%), and Washington (8D, 2R; 19.01%) for Democrats and Tennessee (7R, 1D; 13.57%), Kentucky (5R, 1D; 18.86%), South Carolina (6R, 1D; 27.48%), and Oklahoma (5R, 0D; 33.84%) for Republicans. In those four Democrat states, Democrats control 29/32 seats, or 91% of all seats. The average presidential vote in 2024 in those four states was 59.4 percent, which creates a 31.6%-point gap. In the four Republican states, Republicans control 23/26 seats, or 88.5% of all seats. The average presidential vote in 2024 in those four states was 63.3 percent, which creates a 25.2%-point gap. Thus, Democrats again acted more aggressively when they could than Republicans. Texas Republicans are merely doing what many Democrat states have already done without nary a whimper from the media.
P.S. Like Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett, I’ve spent the better part of my career buried in the monthly jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). I comb through the BLS data EVERY month. When the data looks odd, I see it immediately. Anyone who tracks the data knows the post-pandemic monthly figures have been unreliable. As recently as May 30, 2025, I noted what I saw as likely errors in “I Don’t Get Why Donald Trump Pardoned the Chrisleys--Plus, Regfare News from Europe". Specifically, when it came to the February 2025 and April 2025 private sector numbers, Ohio’s total was way out-of-line, with February’s total equating to 27.8% of all jobs added in America that month and May’s haul totaling 11.8% all jobs added in America. Ohio NEVER dominates private sector job growth like that, so I wrote about in the paragraph below. The revisions for May and June might be right, but such huge swings indicate a fundamental problem in the data collection. After last year’s single month swing of 818,000, the head of BLS should have fixed what wasn’t working. She clearly didn’t, so Donald Trump should replace her with someone who will fix the post-pandemic unreliability of the BLS data. Bad data hurts real people when their 401(k)s or stock portfolios arbitrarily sink because BLS issues unreliable data. Companies also watch the data to make decisions on investments, inventory, and hiring. America needs reliable, accurate BLS data. Hopefully, Trump will appoint someone who fixes what is broken as soon as possible so massive swings no longer rock the economy.
