I have previously posted about how the Republicans gerrymandered North Carolina districts with "surgical precision" after the 2010 elections. There are pending court cases over many of the districts - some courts ruled that districts will need to be changed after the 2018 election.
Note that the Democrats gerrymandered our state from 1900 to 2000 -- (a century) of gerrymandering while they were in control of the state legislature - but they did not do it with surgical precision using modern computer tools. So in many ways the current gerrymandering is simply payback for 100 years of abuse by Democrats in our state. For many decades, the Democrats rejected setting up an independent commission to create districts - now after 2010 they are demanding it.
This article provides some good in-depth information
How gerrymandering kept Democrats from winning even more seats Tuesday
In North Carolina, they won 50 percent of the House votes and 23 percent of the House seats.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...en-more-seats-tuesday/?utm_term=.c3649c29539a
Democrats will pick up at least 26 seats and take a majority in the House of Representatives if preliminary results from Tuesday’s midterm elections hold. But partisan gerrymandering is still a major issue. Our analysis of one state’s results shows that the party would almost certainly have won more if Republicans hadn’t deliberately drawn districts to limit Democratic chances.
North Carolina’s congressional district lines are already the subject of federal litigation claiming they give Republicans a systematic, unconstitutional advantage in winning seats. Tuesday’s results bear those claims out. Democrats won roughly 50 percent of the vote in North Carolina, their best performance in almost a decade. But despite an extraordinary year, they netted just three of the state’s 13 congressional seats — the same as in 2014 and 2016. That happened because a promising Democratic wave crashed against one of the country’s most extreme gerrymanders, a congressional map that Republican legislators brazenly stated on the record that they carefully crafted “to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats.”
To engineer this advantage, the leaders of the Republican caucus worked in secret with a consultant to pack likely Democrats into three super-blue districts. In each of these districts, Democrats would win by very large margins. The Republican mapmakers then spread the rest of the state’s Democrats more thinly across the remaining 10 districts, ensuring Republican candidates would win by small, but safe, margins. They made many of these districts safe for the GOP by giving each one just enough Republican voters to win elections in normal years.
With this scientific slicing and dicing of voters, it didn’t matter if Democrats got 30 percent of the statewide vote or 50 percent, as they did this year. The figure below shows the share of the statewide vote at which the Democrats would be expected to win each of the districts. They are guaranteed wins in three districts but then face a tremendously steep climb to win any additional seats. In fact, they didn’t stand a chance of picking up a fourth seat unless they could net 52.5 percent of the statewide vote, something they achieved only once since 2000, in the 2008 election.
(much more at above url)
Note that the Democrats gerrymandered our state from 1900 to 2000 -- (a century) of gerrymandering while they were in control of the state legislature - but they did not do it with surgical precision using modern computer tools. So in many ways the current gerrymandering is simply payback for 100 years of abuse by Democrats in our state. For many decades, the Democrats rejected setting up an independent commission to create districts - now after 2010 they are demanding it.
This article provides some good in-depth information
How gerrymandering kept Democrats from winning even more seats Tuesday
In North Carolina, they won 50 percent of the House votes and 23 percent of the House seats.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...en-more-seats-tuesday/?utm_term=.c3649c29539a
Democrats will pick up at least 26 seats and take a majority in the House of Representatives if preliminary results from Tuesday’s midterm elections hold. But partisan gerrymandering is still a major issue. Our analysis of one state’s results shows that the party would almost certainly have won more if Republicans hadn’t deliberately drawn districts to limit Democratic chances.
North Carolina’s congressional district lines are already the subject of federal litigation claiming they give Republicans a systematic, unconstitutional advantage in winning seats. Tuesday’s results bear those claims out. Democrats won roughly 50 percent of the vote in North Carolina, their best performance in almost a decade. But despite an extraordinary year, they netted just three of the state’s 13 congressional seats — the same as in 2014 and 2016. That happened because a promising Democratic wave crashed against one of the country’s most extreme gerrymanders, a congressional map that Republican legislators brazenly stated on the record that they carefully crafted “to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats.”
To engineer this advantage, the leaders of the Republican caucus worked in secret with a consultant to pack likely Democrats into three super-blue districts. In each of these districts, Democrats would win by very large margins. The Republican mapmakers then spread the rest of the state’s Democrats more thinly across the remaining 10 districts, ensuring Republican candidates would win by small, but safe, margins. They made many of these districts safe for the GOP by giving each one just enough Republican voters to win elections in normal years.
With this scientific slicing and dicing of voters, it didn’t matter if Democrats got 30 percent of the statewide vote or 50 percent, as they did this year. The figure below shows the share of the statewide vote at which the Democrats would be expected to win each of the districts. They are guaranteed wins in three districts but then face a tremendously steep climb to win any additional seats. In fact, they didn’t stand a chance of picking up a fourth seat unless they could net 52.5 percent of the statewide vote, something they achieved only once since 2000, in the 2008 election.
(much more at above url)
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