Both sides claimed success in the redistricting.
Republicans noted that they removed 15 to 20 Republican incumbents in Congress by pulling out safer Republican districts. And while the House map includes more counties that voted for Biden than those that supported Mr. Trump, Republicans also performed on average two to four percentage points better than Mr. 2020, according to data from the National Republican Redistricting Trust.
“We’re going to have a big offensive playing field this fall,” said Adam Kincaid, the organization’s chief executive officer. “If you told me entering this redistricting cycle that we could achieve the gains we have achieved with less control, with a substantial financial disparity between us and Democrat, I’ll accept in a minute. ”
Democrats have issued their own statements. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the party’s main regional redistricting organization, says its calculations show that Democrats will win a majority in the House in November if they win a majority. popular vote 2.1% nationwide. That represents a huge improvement from 2012, when Mr. Obama’s victory did not cause Republicans to lose control of the House.
“Kelly Burton, chairman of the party’s regional redistricting committee, said. “We have a higher number of basic seats. And that’s true no matter how you shred it.”
Such statements underscore how redistricting the zero-sum game has become when Democrats, who campaign against partisan redistricting, have pursued the same kind of party advantage. factions in states like New York and Illinois as Republicans have achieved in states like Texas and Wisconsin.
A decade of efforts by citizens and suffrage advocates to rein in partisan maps have produced some results, though they were largely a wash-out. A ballot initiative defeated a Republican leader on the House map in Michigan, and a state court knocked out a Republican map operator in North Carolina. But the courts also denied Democrats in New York and Maryland, and left Republicans standing in Kansas and Ohio.
Almost everywhere else, harsh partisanship was the order of the day, which Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey and former president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said was inherent in this system.
“It’s a political process,” he said. “It was intended by the framers to be a political process, and I don’t think you’ll be able to take politics out of it.”
Nate Cohn contribution report.
