Gerrrymandering indeed has a long history, and it's a bit like nukes - if the other side is already using them, it's hard to hold off on your side.
In 2018, North Carolina saw 50% of the vote go to Republicans, but they received 77% of the Congressional seats. A couple rounds of that is a recipe for a permanent minority for the other party.
Should the region/counties that have a smaller population but different work forces or geographical makeup not have representation? Population alone cannot dictate the house of representatives.
But that is how the House is explicitly defined in the US constitution: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers..."
Part of the problem is that the number of Representatives in the house has been fixed at 435 since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. There would be no "small/rural/unique regions aren't represented without drawing crazy district lines" argument if the number of people represented per US Rep were lower.
And, as we see now, the lines of districts are simply not drawn according to regional peculiar needs. They are drawn by party affiliation, by the parties themselves. Which is insane.
That is what the Senate is for. A minority party should never get control of all three branches of government with only 46% of the popular vote. Control of one branch of government is sufficient to exert influence on the legislative process. In our current setup, the minority party has zero reason to appeal to the median voter. This results in increasing polarization as the two parties are no longer competing against each other for voters, but instead are trying to drive turnout.
The ability of the partisan brain to consistently be outraged by the perceived foul play of the other side, while never bothering to check how one's own side is measuring up, is a fascinating phenomenon.
This is really easy to sanity check. For example CA, the best known blue state in the nation. 2020 elections, 79% of the Congressional delegation is D, while only (edit) 66% of the popular vote went for (edit) Ds.
But, but, but, the other guys are even worse than us. We won't stand for truth, fairness or justice, obviously the correct course of action is to out-foul them whenever we can. And then we wonder why the country is on the brink of an ugly divorce.
California, indeed no state, uses proportional representation. The last person to recommend looking at that was ... Lani Guinier. In fact, it's a good idea but it would mean that Wyoming wouldn't get two Senators for its population of 578,000. As a Californian, yeah, proportional representation is a good idea.
California passed non-partisan redistricting back in 2005. This took re-drawing the districts out of the hands of the legislature. It was proposed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and passed as a ballot proposition by the electorate.
First of all, your numbers are wrong[1]. And second, thanks to Trump, R's lost a lot of seats in CA by close margins. Before Trump, the CA delegation was more balanced. It should also be said that CA Democrats are a super majority. Once you get into super majority territory, it would essentially require a reverse gerrymander to protect minority seats.
CA uses a nonpartisan process to create their congressional maps. If and when the Republicans manage to claw their way out of super minority status, I fully expect that the congressional delegation will return to a more balanced state.
I don't think anyone on either side really thinks this is a problem. Look at Utah for a counter example, 75% of delegates with 60% of the congressional vote.
No one on the left is complaining about Utah. When elections are winner take all, big majorities result in oversized representation. And there are still ways for minority party voters to exert influence in these states. For example, they can vote for the more moderate candidate in the other parties primary. The problem is when a state is voting closer to 50-50 like Wisconsin. The Republicans hold a near super majority in the state legislature despite receiving fewer total votes. And because the legislature controls redistricting, Republicans can essentially maintain permanent control of the legislature. That is not healthy for Democracy.
But if you really wanted to fix the CA delegation representation, I would fully support moving to a system where the congressional delegation is determined by statewide popular vote. But that introduces a whole set of issues. For example that means folks would vote for the party instead of candidate, which means we could see further entrenchment of party insiders. The flip side is it would probably make it easier for third parties to get representation in congress. I think this generally would be a hard sell in the US though. I think both core left and core right are too distrustful of their respective party bosses to trust the selection process, and we are a very diverse country, geographically and culturally. So having local representation is meaningful (for example, neither AOC or Taylor Greene would survive a process like this, but both of them have very passionate followers that deserve some representation in congress).
Gerrymandering and disproportionality are separate issues: the former implies the latter, but the First Past The Post voting system (where the winner is the person with the plurality of votes in a given district, irrespective of magnitude) tends to generate the latter even if apportionment is fair.
Example: the United Kingdom. We have independent redistricting, and the Boundary Commission are genuinely not in anyone's pocket. The criteria are debatable in some areas, but gerrymandering is essentially absent. And yet, if you look at the most recent general election, the SNP won the overwhelming majority of the seats in Scotland with only 45% of the vote! [0]
Now that's partly because there are four effective parties in Scotland, but they would have done very nearly that well against any single opposition party. FPTP magnifies the seats for the more popular party.
Bluntly, if the votes are distributed completely evenly, 51% of the votes gets you 100% of the seats. See the Eisenhower/Stevenson presidential election in 1956: Eisenhower got 86% of the electoral college votes for only 57% of the popular vote, because he was (a bit) more popular nearly everywhere.
There are systems which aim to have seats and votes be proportional: they're very popular in democracies beyond Great Britain's former colonies. So the gap you mention is, in principle, fixable. But it's not in either party's interests to do so, so it's likely to persist.
The plan to fix it would be proportional representation (independent redistricting is also a good plan for most states but California already has that). It seems to be getting a bit more attention recently but nowhere near a major push for it that I've seen, even here in Oregon where unaffiliated voters outnumber Republicans and are getting closer to outnumbering Democrats as well. I think we have a decent chance of getting independent redistricting in the next few years and hopefully the state supreme court will improve the districting passed by the legislature.
Edit: We also don't have the top two system that California and Washington have and that high number of unaffiliated voters is even under a closed primary system.
Edit2: Unaffiliated voters in Oregon do include most non-voters, unlike some states.
> There is a noticeable gap there, any plan to fix it?
A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem, unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely.
If you don't want to go all that way, algorithmic/automatic redistricting goes a long way to address issues.
[edit since I was obviously not very clear. I'm not suggesting you do actually want to get rid of all districts, just making the point that by nature regional representation and proportional representation are in conflict in pretty fundamental ways. You can hack around it with ideas like floating representatives, super-regions, etc. but you can't really solve it. Gerrymandering, otoh, is an issue in its own right.
I probably should have said "not a problem, or at least not a problem addressable at this level of the system"]
Proportional representation does not necessarily (or even usually) completely do away with seats having a regional tie, although it does increase the size of the region.
> A gap doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem
Yes, it does.
> unless you believe that proportional representation is important enough to do away with seats having a regional tie completely.
Two problems here:
(1) it prevents a false dichotomy that the only way to address the gap is erasing regional ties completely, and
(2) it confuses the question of “does a problem exist?” with the question of “is there a means of fixing the problem that doesn't have it’s own, equally or more significant problems?”
For a concrete scenario: a 50/50 split state with three Congressional seats. One party will likely get one seat, the other two. Potentially by tiny margins.
There will be a major gap in representation, even with perfectly fairly drawn districts.
Heck, even with three seats with PR you get that result; that's a proportionality problem from limited granularity.
This is also why strong, independent, unitary executive systems are themselves an additional proportionality problem on top of any that exist in the legislative branch, as a one-member body is the extreme limit case of granularity-limited proportionality.
Of course, granularity-limited proportionality in a representative body has a fairly obvious trivial approach for mitigation to any arbitrary extent desired, so proportionality gaps from this source are neither non-problems or problems without corrections available.
Order of magnitude means 10x. This is 27 vs 16, not even a binary order of magnitude :)
I agree that gerrymandering is a major issue. I wholeheartedly disagree that it can be solved if framed through partisan lenses.
Our brains crave to know who is on our side and equate that with the good guys. As long as we don't make an explicit effort to snap out of this very seductive mode of thinking, the future is tribal. Memorably, "why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
Thanks for the link. The congress vote went 66-34. The congressional delegation, 79-21. There is a noticeable gap there.
Perhaps this is a moment to step back, and at the very least analyze the full data set? How much being in charge of the State Legislature gives room for gerrymandering promoting candidates from the same party? Is it really a one side issue, or both parties engage in it with abandon whenever they get the chance?
Well, that was a deeper foray in US politics than I ever wanted. Hastalavista!
The point is, barring consequences for doing it, or a Constitutional amendment banning it, once the other side is doing it, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back if you don't reciprocate.
It's bad, but it's largely unavoidable in the current legal setup.
In 2018, North Carolina saw 50% of the vote go to Republicans, but they received 77% of the Congressional seats. A couple rounds of that is a recipe for a permanent minority for the other party.