Progressives on social media claim Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2024 due to gerrymandering by North Carolina’s Republican legislature. But this claim is untrue. Republicans got four million more popular votes than Democrats in House races, so it is only natural than they won control of the House by a narrow margin. Republicans got 74,826,851 votes, compared to only 70,836,229 votes for the Democrats. As law professor Eugene Volokh points out, Democrats got only 48.64% of the vote cast for the two parties, compared to 51.36% for the Republicans. Republicans got only 50.57% of the seats in the House, so they actually received a lower percentage of seats than popular votes.
This suggests that, whatever one thinks of gerrymandering and of geographic representation (as opposed to proportional representation), they didn’t seem to have a particularly distortive effect on this year’s race. (For the aggregate House vote totals, I’m looking at the Cook Political Report totals.)
As it happens, I don’t much like gerrymandering, though I’m not sure what the optimal solution to it would be. (I’m not sure what I think on balance of geographic vs. proportional representation, if we were redesigning our political system from scratch.) I also appreciate that it’s possible that, under some fair systems of district drawing, the 51.36% Republican vote would cash out into a minority in the House, while under other fair systems it would cash out into an even bigger majority. But I think these numbers should put into proportion arguments that Republican control of the House is the fault of “unfair maps.”
This contradicts a false claim commonly made by progressives on social media platforms such as Bluesky, where the progressive dark-money group Court Accountability wrote, “Final results for the 2024 House elections were tallied recently, and Republicans will owe a razor-thin 220-215 majority to the three seats the GOP flipped thanks to the North Carolina legislature’s brazenly partisan gerrymander, a move blessed by the Supreme Court’s Republican justices.”
Many Democratic legislatures gerrymandered their seats, resulting in Democrats claiming almost all seats despite getting barely a majority of the vote.
In Illinois, thanks to gerrymandering, the Democrats won 14 of Illinois’ 17 House seats, despite getting only 52.78% of the vote. Republicans received only 18% of the House seats in Illinois, despite getting 46.97% of the vote. Illinois is one of several states where maps were more skewed in favor of Democrats than maps were skewed in favor of Republicans in North Carolina.
In North Carolina, Democrats won 4 of 14 House seats — 29% — while getting 42.8% of the popular vote. That may slightly bit skewed, but it is much less skewed than the result in Illinois, where Republicans got an even smaller percentage of seats — 18% — while getting far more popular votes than Democrats did in North Carolina — 46.97%.
