Thanks To Trump's General Psychosis, Democrats Managed To Get Around A Great Deal Of Pernicious GOP Gerrymandering

Actual photo of the man who sank gerrymandering to new depths

When Republicans in Texas gained control of the state legislature, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay went home to work with them on creating new Republican seats where Democratic seats existed before— and in the middle of the decade, no less, not satisfied to wait for the 2010 census. The most blatant power grab in contemporary history ensued. In 2005, the NY Times editors noted that “DeLay’s 2003 redrawing of Texas' Congressional district lines threw aside the longstanding tradition that new lines are drawn only every 10 years, after the census. The purpose of this heavy-handed line-drawing was purely to increase the number of Republican districts. It worked. The number of Republicans in the delegation went to 21 from 16, helping to entrench Mr. DeLay as majority leader.” One of those seats, TX-32, long the home of GOP powerhouse Pete Sessions, just fell to a Democrat, Colin Allred. It wasn’t even that close.

• Colin Allred (D)- 142,885 (52.2%
• Pete Sessions (R)- 125,600 (45.9%)

Years after DeLay carved Sessions a nice safe red district in north Dallas, the GOP intervened again when it looked like there were too many Latinos registering to vote, excising some Latino towns and neighborhoods out of the district and putting in some wealthy white areas, extending Sessions’ dominance for another couple of cycles. This year, the gerrymandering trick had come to the end of the road; there were no more wealthy white areas left for the GOP to draw on without endangering Republicans in nearby districts. And that was the end of Pete Sessions, former head of the NRCC, which didn’t even bother spending any money to try to save their doomer ex-leader.

Tuesday morning, Scott Bland and Elena Schneider, writing for Politico added this to the definition of The Trump Effect: Republicans used redistricting to build a wall around the House. Trump just tore it down.. In short, years and years of studiously crafted Republican gerrymandering from sea to shining sea “did not envision the upending of the Republican coalition” by a narcissistic sociopath. What the Democrats have called “an insurmountable roadblock to the House majority,” was destroyed by their own guy in the White House. “Trump,” they wrote, “altered the two parties’ coalitions in ways that specifically undermined conventional wisdom about the House map, bringing more rural voters into the GOP tent while driving away college-educated voters. The trade worked in some states. But it was a Republican disaster in the House, where well-off suburbs, once the backbone of many GOP districts, rebelled against Trump in 2016 and then threw out House members in 2018.

Two Illinois races in particular illustrate how political evolution outpaced the boundaries drawn after the 2010 census. GOP Reps. Peter Roskam and Randy Hultgren, who lost last week, had not been Democratic targets in any of the first three elections under the current map, and Mitt Romney carried their districts outside Chicago handily in the 2012 presidential election. Democrats designed the districts thinking they would elect Republicans in perpetuity, instead drawing maps aimed at flipping other districts in the state in 2012.

But Roskam’s district flipped to Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016, while Trump won Hultgren’s district with just 48 percent of the vote that year. More than half of Roskam’s adult constituents and 40 percent of Hultgren’s are college-educated, according to census data. And in the midterm elections, 26 of the 36 GOP districts that Democrats have flipped so far had larger college-educated populations than the national average.

“In Illinois, we had two suburban districts that everyone assumed would be Republican holds" but flipped, said Ian Russell, a former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee political director who coordinated with Illinois Democrats on redistricting seven years ago. He added that another district in a more rural area downstate, which was drawn for a former Democratic congressman, is still represented by a Republican.

“Trump accelerated all of" those trends, Russell said.

Democrats won 15 of the 25 GOP-held districts with the highest share of college-educated residents— and that doesn’t count CA-45, in Orange County, CA, where Katie Porter is on the verge of ousting Republican Mimi Walters. These are the 15 red districts that Dems just won— along with the percentage of residents with 4-year degrees.

• GA-06- 59.1%- Lucy McBath replaced Karen Handel
• VA-10- 54.4%- Jennifer Wexton replaced Barbara Comstock
• NJ-11- 52.3%- Mikie Sherrill beat Jay Webber
• NJ-07- 51.4%- Tom Malinowski replaced Leonard Lance
• IL-06- 50.9%- Sean Casten replaced Pete Roskam
• TX-07- 49%- Lizzie Fletcher replaced John Culberson
• MN-03- 47.8%- Dean Phillips replaced Erik Paulsen
• MI-11- 45.8%- Haley Stevens replaced Lena Epstein
• KS-03- 45.6%- Sharice Davids replaced Ken Yoder
• CA-48- 44.2%- Harley Rouda replaced Dana Rohrabacher
• CA-49- 43%- Mike Levin beat Diane Harkey
• TX-32- 43%- Colin Allred replaced Pete Sessions
• PA-06- 42.5%- Chrissy Houlahan beat Greg McCauley
• PA-07- 42.2%- Susan Wild beat Marty Nothstein
• CO-06- 41.5%- Jason Crow replaced Mike Coffman

The education shift was still clear even in districts Republicans managed to hold. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO) won by just 4 points in a slice of the St. Louis suburbs where 48 percent of adults have bachelor's degrees. Wagner won by 21 points in 2016.

In California, New Jersey and elsewhere, the shifts among college-educated voters drove Republican House members out of districts that had not been battleground seats before Trump took over the political scene.

Despite Democrats’ massive House gains— the party’s biggest since 1974, after Richard Nixon’s resignation— redistricting clearly held them back in some places. Democrats netted at least 21 districts drawn by independent commissions or courts— getting a major boost from courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia that altered GOP-drawn maps in the past two years— along with 10 districts drawn by Republicans and the two in Illinois that were drawn by Democrats.

In two swing states, Ohio and North Carolina, Democratic challengers forced close races in five districts that had not previously had competitive campaigns. But they all lost to GOP incumbents, preserving Republicans’ 10-3 edge in North Carolina’s congressional delegation and their 12-4 advantage in Ohio. Each of those districts combined Democratic-leaning big-city suburbs with stretches of heavily Republican rural territory that served as a decisive counterweight.