Sam Wang:
Partisan redistricting peaked 10 years ago in 2012, and until today, until this month, gerrymandering actually is somewhat lower than 10 years ago.
So now, with just a few seats in Congress needing to flip in order to give Democrats control, there’s a certain whiff of desperation to try to find seats anywhere to flip control. Now, in a median year, it only takes 13 seats. A typical change in the midterm year is 13 seats. And so Democrats and Republicans are trying to tilt that a little bit. The major places where they’re trying to do it are Texas, Ohio, and Florida on the Republican side, California on the Democratic side.
The net, if it all came to pass, would be in my estimation, in our estimation at the Electoral Innovation Lab, maybe five or six seats, so not quite as much as what typically happens when people change their minds in an election, but in a really tight race could make the difference.
