For years, Democrats have lamented a partisan redistricting plan that helped Republicans win far more seats than expected. But that advantage has disappeared.

In the first election, held using 2020 Census data, Democrats fought back with their own gerrymandering that shaped districts in their favor, resulting in a virtually even result. . A new Associated Press analysis finds that even though Republicans won the House majority from Democrats, the tightly divided chamber more accurately reflects the proportion of Republicans and Democrats in the nation’s electorate than at any time in recent years. It says.

“On the one hand, it gives fairer, more representative results. But gerrymandering seems to be happening more,” says a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on the website All About Redistricting. Manager Doug Spencer said.

Republicans won just one more seat than expected based on their average share of votes won across the nation in 2022, according to an Associated Press analysis, 222 to 213 Republicans. It turned out to be a slight advantage in determining the majority of

A similar situation happened at the State Capitol during the 2022 election. The Associated Press found that Democrats and Republicans won nearly even numbers of states, with a congressional district or congressional district tilting in favor of the Democrats. Republican Dominance in the Last Decade.

The difference is that not only are Republicans less gerrymandering, but “more Democrats have adopted the habit,” Spencer said.

Many things are at stake. A party’s favored constituencies help that party gain, maintain, and expand majorities, and the types of laws enacted on divisive topics such as abortion, guns, taxes, and transgender rights. can affect This year, it’s more noticeable as a state led by Republicans and Democrats. move in the opposite direction on many of those issues.

Once the loudest voice of Democrats in Republican-gerrymandered states, complaints are now coming from rural Republicans such as McCoupin County, Illinois. A Republican has represented an old mining county in Congress for the past decade. But with heads in the twin college cities of Champaign and Urbana, and a new tail in the Democratic suburb of St. Louis, after morphing into a slender, serpentine shape, Democrats won the constituencies redrawn in 2022. bottom.

The Republican-leaning McCoupan County resembles a central ridge and is the only county remaining entirely in the 13th electoral district.

“We’re not happy right now with people who have little in common, North Boat Anchor and South Boat Anchor,” said McCoupin County Republican Commissioner Tom Stoecker.

Illinois congressional districts tended to be the most partisan in the nation, helping Democrats win three more seats than expected based on vote share, according to an Associated Press analysis. The most partisan legislature was the Nevada legislature, which also favored Democrats.

Republicans still benefit in some areas. Republicans in Texas won about two more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than expected based on their share of the vote. A long-running Republican leaning continued in the Wisconsin Legislature.

The Associated Press analyzed the impact of redistricting on the 2022 election using an “efficiency gap” formula aimed at identifying potential cases of gerrymandering. The test, devised by Eric Magee, a bipartisan California Institute of Public Policy researcher, and Nick Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor, is highly effective in turning votes into victories for one party. Identify target states. This could happen if the politicians in charge of redistricting crammed opposition voters into a small number of highly concentrated constituencies or dispersed them across multiple constituencies to weaken voting power. There is

A previous AP analysis found that: Republicans benefited from strong dominance Based on districts sampled after the 2010 Census. Republicans won about 22 more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than expected based on their 2016 vote share. In 2018, about 16 seats remained, and in 2020, about 10 seats remained. By comparison, the tilt of one Republican seat in the 2022 election is essentially a political wash.

“By many metrics, we have the fairest map of Congress and the fairest map of the state legislature in decades, which is really great for democracy,” he said, objecting to the map created by the Republican Party. John Bisagnano, chairman of the National Democratic Re-district Commission, who has advocated, said: court.

Bisagnano attributes the shift primarily to four states: Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Based on Republican maps of Congress, these states together elected 39 Republicans and just 17 Democrats in 2016, about nine more Republicans than expected based on voter turnout. But in 2022, based on a map adopted by courts and Michigan’s new independent commission, those states combined elected 26 Republicans and 29 Democrats. In a reversal, the Democrats won about one more seat than expected based on their share of the vote.

An Associated Press analysis identified 15 states in each of the last two midterm elections in which a party won at least one more seat than expected based on vote counts. In 2018, 12 of them were Republicans.

Last year, however, the gains from the district restructuring were more evenly distributed. Democrats won at least one seat more than expected in eight states — California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico and Washington. Meanwhile, Republicans won at least one seat in seven states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New York, Texas and Wisconsin.

The new Illinois districts will be drawn by a Democratic-majority legislature, Signed into law by Democratic Governor JB PritzkerDespite pledging during the 2018 election campaign to veto any maps drawn by politicians. Pritzker said the map maintains three black-majority neighborhoods while adding a second Latino-majority neighborhood to “ensure that all communities are fairly represented. I will.”

Under the new district, the Illinois Democrats extended their 13-to-5 congressional dominance to a 14-to-3 majority, overturning one Republican seat and annexing the other. The state lost one seat due to a declining population.

Republican Rep. Rodney Davis was poached from the 13th congressional district, where he had served for 10 years, and placed in the predominantly Republican 15th congressional district. He lost the Republican primary to Rep. Mary Miller, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. Democrat Nikki Buzynski, a former aide to Pritzker and President Joe Biden, won the reshuffled 13th congressional district.

“That precinct was drawn in a very gerrymandering way to maximize Democratic voter turnout,” Davis told the Associated Press.

Sheldon H. Jacobson, director of the Institute for Computational Re-districts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said many more politically neutral alternatives may have been deduced.

“This is just a terrible situation and not representative of the people of Illinois,” Jacobson said.

Fair representation was also in question in Nevada, and the Democratic dominance from redistricting was so great that it could shake control of the state legislature. Although the Republican nominee won more votes overall, Democrats won a 28-14 majority last fall, giving them seven more seats than expected, according to an Associated Press analysis.

A lawsuit filed by affected residents and several Republican lawmakers claimed the new district was a “deliberately extreme partisan gerrymander” that illegally diluted votes.But the judge said there was no clear standard for weighing partisan gerrymandering claims under the Nevada constitution, echoing a 2019 ruling. U.S. Supreme Court Decision Federal courts also have no authority to decide partisan gerrymander claims.

The Somerset golf community in the Reno area used to be part of a Republican-controlled congressional district, but the new map splits it in two. The Democrats currently represent part of the block, with the remainder located in Republican-controlled rural districts that stretch hundreds of miles to the Oregon-Idaho border.

“It’s been really bad for our community,” said Jacob Williams, chairman of the Somerset Owners Association, who ran for the Republican primary for state legislature and was unsuccessful.