A new study shows that the Republican Party is gaining a significant advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives through partisan gerrymandering. The skewed maps are giving Republicans a 16 seat advantage in Congress. Five of those extra seats are coming right out of Texas.
The Brennan Center for Justice released a new study Tuesday titled, “How Gerrymandering Tilts the 2024 Race for the House.”
The study compares what the make-up of Congress is expected to be after the Nov. 5 election against what the outcome would be if the 2022 Freedom to Vote Act was passed. The package of reforms included a prohibition on partisan gerrymandering in the drawing of congressional districts. The bill passed the House and had majority support in the Senate. It died because the Senate failed by two votes to modify the chamber’s filibuster rules to allow the bill an up-or-down floor vote.
The Brennan Center’s redistricting expert Michael Li said without gerrymandered maps, polling shows Democrats would win a House majority in 2024 — but now with partisans' thumbs on the scale, he said “it looks like instead the House is a true tossup.”
Li said this explains why Democrats typically need to win the national aggregate popular vote in congressional races by 2 to 3% in order to win control of the House.
“If Democrats do win a majority, they end up with a very, very thin majority. And that's really because of gerrymandering, predominantly in the South and in the states of the Midwest,” he said.
Li said Texas is one of the worst states for congressional gerrymandering, giving the GOP an extra five seats.
“It's not hard to see why. If you look at maps that, for example, connect the suburbs of Dallas with the Texas panhandle or that break up very diverse coalition districts in and around Houston,” he said.
Another state that delivers an abundance of Republican gerrymandered seats is Florida. In 2024, these two big states alone give Republicans a total of 10 additional safe House seats compared to the Brennan Center’s projected Freedom to Vote Act map.
According to the report, Democrats in Texas currently hold only 13 of 38 seats (34%) despite getting between 46 and 48% of the vote in recent statewide federal elections. The median Freedom to Vote Act–compliant map, by comparison, has 18 Democratic districts (roughly in line with Democrats’ recent statewide vote share).
Gerrymandering in the Lone Star State also created an “electoral firewall” for Republicans. Twenty one of the 25 Texas seats they hold are districts that Donald Trump carried by 15 or more percentage points in 2020. This is a significant change from last decade’s maps, in which there were only 11 such districts.
In Florida, Republicans undertook an even bigger seat grab, transforming a 16–11 edge in the state’s congressional delegation into an astonishing 20–8 advantage. By contrast, the median Freedom to Vote Act–compliant map has 13 Democratic seats. No Florida congressional races are currently rated as competitive.
Li said Republicans are able to create so many gerrymandered seats because the GOP had disproportionate control of the redistricting process.
“They drew 191 congressional districts. Democrats drew only 75. Most of the states where Democrats drew maps were states like Massachusetts or Maryland, where they already control all the seats or almost all of the seats,” he said.
So Democrats really couldn't do much more gerrymandering. Li said Republicans in fast growing and diverse states, especially in the South, did “slice and dice communities to produce results that are wildly disproportionate and not at all what you would expect in very competitive states."
Li added that Democrats also gerrymander but the seven extra Democratic seats in those maps are less than a third of the 23 extra Republican seats.
