Gerrymandering craftsmanship.

Wisconsin nailed gerrymandering.  It is ugly, but it worked.

They got maximum legislative seats for minimum actual votes.

Case Study in Gerrymandering

One of the seminars I attended here at the JFK school took a close look at the 2018 primary election results. Quick takeaways will be familiar to regular readers:

Democrats cluster, which makes them easy targets for gerrymandering.

Young people don't turn out in midterms. They increased their turnout in 2018 above 2014, but voters from 18-29 still only represented 9 percent of the overall vote. Old folks rule.

The marriage gap is bigger than the gender gap. White single women vote Democratic, but white married women vote Republican, along with their husbands.

Democrats cluster in densely populated areas, and win big there. Gerrymandering often then dilutes the value of those votes in districts smaller than the state as a whole by packing Democratic votes into districts.

Wisconsin is a poster child for successful gerrymandering. The website fivethirtyeight.com graphs a very successful result in for Republicans in Wisconsin in a bad Republican year--a year so bad that they lost the statewide race for both Governor and Attorney General, and the lost a majority of the votes for state legislators. Indeed, they lost the state house districts by 190,000 votes statewide, yet retained 63 out of 99 legislative districts.

It sounds impossible, but isn't. 

Vote margin for Republicans in Wisconsin legislative seats.

Take a close look at the results. Red for Republicans, blue for Democrats. Notice that district after district hovered between Republicans winning 52% to 62% of the vote. There were a few solidly Republican seats up there at the top--9 of them. But most districts were drawn so that there was a solid Republican majority, clustering just above the 50% line. Few "wasted" votes.  Districts got just enough votes for a solid win, but no more.

Actual Pennsylvania District

Look at the blue circles. There were exactly 5 races that were competitive and in which a Democrat won.The remaining 31 seats were drawn so that the Democrat won overwhelmingly, indeed had no GOP opposition at all. The districts were drawn so that Democrats were packed into pure Democratic strongholds. So instead of winning 55% of the districts with 55% of the vote, the district lines were arranged so that they won 36% of the seats with 55% of the vote.

In political tradecraft, this is a tremendous success. But there are perils in being so aggressively partisan. Backlash.

The Republican governor, Scott Walker, who approved this gerrymandering lost his re-election bid. He may not care. He won big.

Is it legal to draw lines so that a minority of voters win a huge majority of votes?  

Yes, and Democrats clustering in cities and suburbs make it easy to do. Sometimes, though, a jurisdiction has to stretch the bounds of credibility to draw a district and that can end up being disallowed, like this district in Pennsylvania.This congressional district in the Philadelphia suburbs looks like Disney's Goofy character on the right kicking in the stomach a dog with large floppy ears. The goal was to pick up Republican votes here and there back and forth across city and county lines, while avoiding Democratic neighborhoods so that the incumbent Republican could keep his seat. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court found it unConstitutional.

There are some limits, but apparently Wisconsin did not breach them.