Let’s say, for the sake of argument, California eliminates all Republican seats and Texas eliminates all Democratic seats…
Texas will struggle to eliminate all Dem districts, simply because there are too many Dem voters. You’re looking at a 1.5M spread of voters between R and D in Texas relative to a 3.2M spread in California.
When a given district has roughly 600k people (of whom barely half reliably vote), it becomes incredibly difficult to crack the existing Dem population into subsets small enough to guarantee a 55/45 split for each Republican candidate. The only real alternative is to pack as many Dems into a single district as possible, in order to dilute the remainder. That’s why the current Texas map only promises to flip 5 seats and leave 7 remaining.
Even then, you’re playing a dangerous game - a la 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2018 - in which a vibe shift costs you dozens of seats very quickly. The Republicans in 2008, for instance, lost every single House Seat in New England.
California can easily gerrymander their Republican minority out of another five seats (maybe more with some clever math) because of the hard liberal swing the state has been on since the Bush Era.
Texas will struggle to eliminate all Dem districts, simply because there are too many Dem voters. You’re looking at a 1.5M spread of voters between R and D in Texas relative to a 3.2M spread in California.
When a given district has roughly 600k people (of whom barely half reliably vote), it becomes incredibly difficult to crack the existing Dem population into subsets small enough to guarantee a 55/45 split for each Republican candidate. The only real alternative is to pack as many Dems into a single district as possible, in order to dilute the remainder. That’s why the current Texas map only promises to flip 5 seats and leave 7 remaining.
Even then, you’re playing a dangerous game - a la 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2018 - in which a vibe shift costs you dozens of seats very quickly. The Republicans in 2008, for instance, lost every single House Seat in New England.
California can easily gerrymander their Republican minority out of another five seats (maybe more with some clever math) because of the hard liberal swing the state has been on since the Bush Era.