Lakshya Jain hosts weekly Substack live videos with election analysts so you’ll know all the latest midterm developments. We wanted to make sure you saw this one, but be sure to sign up for The Mag to get them in your inbox every Wednesday!
Everyone agrees that gerrymandering is bad (at least when the other side does it), but trying to figure out what fair maps look like is hard. What even is fair?
Does it mean that if a state is 52% Republican, every district is 52% Republican? Does it mean districts are drawn in nice compact shapes on a map?
This week, RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende joined Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data, as well as VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini and Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas to talk fair maps.
Trende worries that some approaches to make maps “fair” could basically lock in current partisan skews. After all, you could theoretically produce perfectly proportional “fair” maps with only safe seats:
“I think it’s good to have Democrats who can vote against their party and it’s good to have Republicans who vote against their party. And if you just kind of accept [polarization] as the new normal and write in a requirement to draw Republican/Democratic districts, you basically institutionalize our current polarization, when it’s not necessarily an endemic feature of our system,” he said.
While Lakshya is sympathetic to the desire to keep counties whole, he also worries that having a map that starkly differs from the state’s true partisan makeup hurts people’s trust that they are being properly represented.
Check out the full video above to hear more of their argument. And be sure to stick around until the end, when the crew discusses why Alaska’s outsized vulnerability to price shocks makes it such a promising pickup opportunity for Senate Democrats.
