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How Gerrymandering and Fair Maps Affected the Battle for the House [1]

['Michael Li']

Date: 2025-06

Competition Was Scarce, But Enough to Keep the Outcome Uncertain

Heading into Election Day, only 27 House districts were categorized as competitive by Cook Political Report. Other election forecasters had even fewer districts on their lists of tossup and lean districts. In the end, the field proved just about as thin as expected.

Only 37 districts — 22 won by a Democrat and 15 won by a Republican — were decided by five or fewer percentage points, and, of those, just 19 districts flipped between parties.

By contrast, more than 4 out of 5 districts — 169 districts won by a Democrat and 198 districts won by a Republican (90 percent of the GOP House majority) — were decided by comfortable margins of 10 or more percentage points. In fact, the vast majority of these districts were not just safe but ultra-safe.

All told, nearly 6 in 10 House districts — 112 carried by a Democrat and 132 carried by a Republican — saw the winning candidate prevail by 25 or more percentage points. These districts are so safe, it would take an unprecedented tsunami-sized wave election to flip them. Strikingly, there were more districts where the candidates prevailed by a fortress margin of 40 to 50 percentage points (55 of them) than districts where the outcomes were decided by five or fewer points (37).

To be sure, this lack of competition is not entirely due to the manipulation of district boundaries. Some parts of the country are simply too deep blue or red for even the fairest of map drawers to be able to craft many competitive districts. But who was in charge of the map-drawing process did matter.

Consider, for example, the decided lack of competitiveness in maps drawn by Republican-controlled governments.

Republicans drew 184 districts — 42 percent of all congressional districts and far more districts than any other kind of map drawer. Republican-controlled states, moreover, include virtually all the boom states of the South, which are full of the ideologically diverse, “purplish” suburbs of the sort that anchor competitive districts in states like California, Nebraska, and New York. Indeed, in 2018 and 2020, before the most recent round of redistricting, the suburbs of southern states like Georgia and Texas were home to some of the country’s most competitive House races.

But this year, using maps redrawn after the 2020 census, states where Republicans drew lines had just 8 districts that were decided by five or fewer percentage points. Put another way, in 2024, just 4 percent of districts in states where Republicans held the map-drawing pen featured close races.

By contrast, independent commissions drew just 82 of the 435 House districts (less than half as many as Republicans drew) but were responsible for 12 competitive districts. On a percentage basis, over three times as many districts were competitive in states where independent commissions drew maps as in states where Republicans drew maps.

The region and party disparities for competitive elections are equally striking.

In the South, where Republicans controlled almost all of the line drawing, just 2 districts out of the 111 won by a Republican were decided by fewer than 10 points and only 1 district — a district in Virginia adopted by a court after redistricting deadlock — by fewer than 5 points. By comparison, 75 of those same 111 southern districts were decided in favor of GOP candidates by super-safe margins of 25 points or more.

This trend is not a one-off. The paucity of narrowly decided races closely matches outcomes in 2020 and 2022 under different sets of maps and varying electoral conditions.

But, ironically, Republicans’ creation of so many super-safe GOP districts may have the limited the scale of Republicans’ 2024 wins.

This year, Republicans won the total number of votes cast nationally in House races by just over a point more than they won it by in 2022. Yet, despite having a better year, Republicans emerged with a slightly reduced majority. One reason for this seeming anomoly is the way that Republicans gerrymandered in much of the country in the last round of redistricting.

Take Texas, for example. Heading into redistricting in 2021, Republicans in Texas were faced with an electorate that had become steadily more Democratic over the course of the preceding 15 years — a product both of the state’s increasing diversity and political shifts in its fast-growing suburbs after the election of Donald Trump. Indeed, in 2018, Democrats surprised Republicans by flipping two suburban districts thought to be safe, and Democratic Senate challenger Beto O’Rourke come within three percentage points of upsetting Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, the strongest performance for a Democrat in Texas in two decades.

Confronted with these seemingly relentless headwinds, when it came time to redistrict, Republicans chose not to target any Democratic-held seats, including recently flipped seats. Instead, their gerrymanders had a different goal — to protect GOP incumbents.

To accomplish this end, GOP map drawers in Texas redrew districts to pack Republican voters into districts where the GOP candidate is guaranteed to win by overwhelming margins. While undoubtedly welcome by Republican incumbents, the strategy produced the side effect that in a good Republican year, there are precious few swing districts to pick up. Gerrymandering may have made Republican seats safe, but by concentrating Republican voters in heavily Republican districts, it had the parallel effect of also making Democratic seats safe ones.

Paradoxically, this play-it-safe strategy by Republican line drawers in Texas and other states may help Democrats win back the House in the future because it blunts the size of Republican House majorities.

And the hopeful news for Democrats nationally is that while this decade’s maps contain an abundance of safe districts and a scarcity of competitive districts, there are just enough of the latter to give the party multiple reasonable paths back to a majority, especially if future election cycles prove to be more like 2018 or 2020 — strong Democratic years — rather than a year like 2024 with its significant pro-Republican headwinds.

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[1] Url: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-gerrymandering-and-fair-maps-affected-battle-house#:~:text=All%20told%2C%20nearly%206%20in,reported%20by%20the%20Associated%20Press.

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