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And because partisan gerrymanderers carved up new districts before the extent of pandemic mobility data was understood, they could not neutralize the population shifts.
Like I said quite a while back, gerrymandering districts so you have a 5% advantage fails spectacularly when demographics change the voting so you need 6% to win. A lot of those engineered 5% districts go to the other side. Gerrymandering assumes static demographics for 10 years. Not happening here in America now. And they got the triple-whammy of educated professionals working from home in Red states, conservative anti-vaxers and anti-maskers dying, and over a million elderly voters dying from Covid-19.
Gerrymandering has obvious political effects, but it can also have economic consequences. One 2018 study found that partisan redistricting impacts people’s ability to borrow money. The less competitive a district was, the less access to credit a person living in that district would have.
Significantly skewed maps in states like Texas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio, which many people thought going in might be greater than the majority that Republicans would have in the House. And that seems to have been borne out. Florida, for example, probably gives Republicans four extra seats than they would have under a fairly drawn map. And so if, in fact, Republicans have a very thin majority in the House, it is likely to be due to gerrymandering.
