comment: >
  
  probably not possible and besides drawing districts is not up the feds, it's up to the states.
  the feds could legislate that states must draw the lines using a bipartisan committee or some such, but it could not draw the lines for the states.
context: Part of the issue is some states simply aren’t competitive outside of hyper concentrated areas. You’d have to go out of your way to create a Republican seat in MA or a Democratic seat in ID. It’s a little easier to imagine Dem seats in red states because so many of them crack deep blue cities (looking at you TN & TX) that left in their own homogenous districts would be unwinnable for Republicans—indeed, their current majority is basically built off of this—than it is more GOP seats in blue ones (many have non-partisan redistricting, although you could argue for IL being worth a couple of red seats). It would make a mockery of the principles people say they want; compact lines that respect municipal & county boundaries and when necessary to split them for population requirements to do so in a way that reflects communities of interest.
  Now what you might be able to argue for would be a plan where the median seat was required to match the statewide partisan lean (perhaps with a secondary requirement that the average across all seats couldn’t deviate by more than…2 points?) The exact formula of what to include and how to weight it would be the subject of a lot of self interested wrangling, but theoretically, a playing field where, for example, Ohio’s 8th seat of 15 was R+7ish or Wisconsin’s 4th and 5th seat of 8 had to average to D+0.5 and only half the seats could be redder or bluer would leave the House very reactive to the electorate. 
  You’d still have very safe seats on both ends, but under this scenario, instead of 18 Biden won GOP held districts, you might have 40. The careful observer will note that’s a lot larger that the 20 recalcitrant holdouts denying the speakership to McCarthy at present, and would also have given the GOP a thundering majority whereby the Freedom Caucus could stomp its feet all they wanted and it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. >
  
  To your point...In the NC case a few years ago, the republicans essentially argued that democrats didn't have a gerrymandering problem, they have a geography problem. When the state legislature drew new compact districts, it created an imbalance since the metro areas leaned so heavily democrat, but were geographically compact. >
  
  That's only really an issue because we have an arbitrary cap (538) on the number of congressional representatives, so you end up in situations where in deep blue areas you might have 1 congressional representative representing >1 million people and in rural areas you have 1 rep representing <500,000 people. >
  
  Do you mean between states? Within a state districts are required to be as  close to even population as possible >
  
  It was capped because even 435 was becoming too cumbersome >
  
  I think for the good of the republic, we're probably going to have to revisit what is "too cumbersome" in that regard. >
  
  Partying like it's 1929.
  I still maintain that you could kill like three or four birds with one stone if you just modernized the Capitol building to not just enable, but make standard "Work from Home (District)".
  
  Far better for the environment. (Frequent air-travel sucks.)    
  Better for the constituents.  
  Better for the congress-critters.  
  Completely invalidates the problem of congressional size.  
  
  Hell, under that system you could theoretically go back to the 1 seat per 30-45k people stipulated in the constitution, though I admit it would be more than a little weird having ~7000 congress members... that's probably just because I'm old and used to being represented by so few. I'm sure in a decade or two people would wonder how the hell we ever managed the way it is now.
  ...which leads to the potential 5th point (if it WERE increased to that level).
  
  Would probably reduce the effect of big money on congress significantly.   
  
  There were like 10 house races last year that ran north of $15M. If you increase the seats by a factor of 10-20 EITHER you're gonna have to swing FAR more money out of the current donor pool (unlikely), massively expand the size of your donor pool (even less likely), or more realistically the price of the majority of campaigns is gonna fall into a level (~50-100k?) that's "reasonable" (for a certain level of reasonable) for... just about anyone with a little grass-roots support in their teeny tiny little district and like... a decent job or something they can borrow against from the bank? >
  
  I'm gonna say the semi-boomer thing of "in-person collaboration is important" because that's still how my industry still works. But there are very likely models and technologies that can make a "virtual Capitol" workable, and also less of a security risk. >
  
  Fetishization of competitiveness as a reaction to gerrymandering is a fine enough goal, but we need to distinguish between seats that are "safe" because they've been designed that way and seats that are "safe" because the existing community of interest has an overwhelming preference for one party over the other.
  Consider AL-7, which packs the state's black voters into a single district and guarantees safe GOP seats across the rest of the state; IL-4 which is drawn to link Chicago's two major Hispanic/Latino populations and guarantee a candidate from that background in Congress; OH-9 which snakes along Lake Eerie packing Democrats, and CA-12 which is pretty neat rectangle parked over Oakland. None of the four seats are competitive, but they're non-competitive for very different reasons.
  Is there value in creating new districts that are "competitive," but link voters with wildly different racial, socioeconomic, cultural, or geographical backgrounds? Pretend we have one million voters, half of which are true-blue Los Angeles young, affluent, educated hipsters and half of which are ruby-red Central Valley farmers. Is it more democratic to have two safe seats where each population is guaranteed to have its needs heard in Congress? Or to split them into two "competitive" seats, where if one side wins both, hundreds of thousands of Americans are ignored at the federal level until the next election? >
  
  2 competitive seats because otherwise the candidates are disincentivized from considering the positions of the other side and instead will only work for the priorities of their "base", parties will run less moderate candidates, and compromise becomes a four letter word.
  Safe seats create greater polarization. >
  
  Having a democracy with competitive elections is certainly better than one without them.
  However, imo, it won't solve the fundamental problems around primaries and fundraising. Primaries will still hew to the extremes and fundraising will still largely be controlled by national parties. You may have more competitive elections and there may be more moderate candidates than you see in very safe seats, now, but you'll still see plenty of candidates who have to play heavily to their base to win. >
  
  I'm pretty aure it actually would do a lot to solve primary issues, since people are nuanced enough to know crazy people won't win a competitive general election. >
  
  That's not true of the current GOP/MAGA caucus. Look at Doug Mastriano for example, and he's hardly alone. >
  
  
  Doug Mastriano
  
  Didn't he lose? >
  
  Yes, the extremist who won the primary lost the statewide general election in a purple state. Hence my response to this comment:
  
  I'm pretty aure it actually would do a lot to solve primary issues, since people are nuanced enough to know crazy people won't win a competitive general election. >
  
  Exactly, are you agreeing with me? Sorry I'm confused,crazy will lose a competitive general election and people don't like to lose. >
  
  I suspect the solution to the quagmire of US politics would be to get away from the winner takes all paradigm and instead have each district represented by the top two vote leaders, with each bringing the votes they received into office (ie 13000 people voted for you - your voting power in the body you’ve been elected to equals that number of votes). >
  
  That's an interesting approach, but I think one consequence is that it would skew the representation away from the population.
  I live in a poor city. People here just don't vote - sometimes as low as 20% in state elections. They still get a representative though, just as much as a suburban town that has an 80% turnout.
  Imagine two cities, one rich, one poor, same population. Why should the rich city have 4x the power as the poor city - because rich people vote more?
  Or another way to look at it is, what if one city is very happy with their representative, and there is no challenger. Turnout would be way down. So they get less representation than the place where 51% of the population hates their corrupt representative, and thus turns out to vote him out? >
  
  Those are great arguments, but ultimately democracy is about participation.
  We won’t know the political will of people who don’t turn up to vote.
  I would also expect that with such a system, people who feel well represented have an incentive to turn up. >
  
  But not everyone has the time to vote. If it was purely based on votes casted, the retired boomers will have even more power than they already do today >
  
  Arguably, that problem is equally present today >
  
  I've thought for years that gerrymandering was one of the biggest threats to our democracy. Just imagine if our representatives had to actually appeal to both sides. They might actually get shit done >
  
  Imagine if there were more than two sides!  If Walmart or GE or Haliburton had to lobby sox different parties, maybe corporate sponsorships would have less of an impact. >
  
  That is what you typically get under a proportional representation rule.
  Under a geographically bound majority rule you rarely see third parties prevail for long.
  Proportional representation would also have the following benefit: If a presidential candidate has more votes, he wins. No matter the states electoral outcomes. To me, handing the presidency to the guy who lost the popular vote is insane. That is a huge damage to democracy. >
  
  They why do most countries, even with first past the post, have more than two parties in their legislative bodies? >
  
  They usually have two dominant large parties and most of the time additional ones only represent their region, like the SNP in the UK. >
  
  Plus, for at least the UK and Canada, they only elect the lower legislative house, rather than both legislative houses and the executive. So the the effects that push towards 2 parties are applied once rather than 3 times. >
  
  How about an even better idea: NO MORE DISTRICTS. NO MORE LINES. 
  Instead, people get a ranked choice vote with everyone running for the representative seats for that state, and the top several winners are sent to congress. >
  
  Why is everything run by the people in the city? Cows need votes too >
  
  I know you say this ironically but the truth is rural areas have very very different lives and needs than urban areas. There needs to be (a reasonable number) of representatives who are beholden to these people and their interests. 
  In some ways we can analogize this with efforts to create majority black or majority Latino districts. The population has different problems and needs someone able to adequately represent their lived experience. If we set districts to always be perfectly proportional to say national or even state racial breakdowns then their voice and concerns would be outnumbered by the majority. 
  In the end it's a matter of balance on a very fuzzy grey line. >
  
  I mean, if they’re a minority of people, why shouldn’t they be outnumbered?
  You’re stating this like we obviously can’t have that without really saying it because sounds fine to me. >
  
  Our political system is based on the concept of majority rule with minority rights. Of course they'd be outnumbered, but they should still be properly respected and represented. Urban and rural folks all have the same exact basic needs, but the context of where they live means implementation needs adjustment. >
  
  Too bad the Senate generally enables minority rule with minority-defined rights. The EC has made minority rule. The way we elect HoR members has made minority rule. >
  
  The primary form of minority rule in this country is the rich over everyone else.  Both political parties serve the interests of the wealthy regardless of the partisan composition of government. >
  
  The primary form of minority rule in this country is the US Senate. Full stop.
  It's what easily enables corporate rule. >
  
  If you agree the Senate is facilitating the rule of the wealthy, then you agree the wealthy rule. >
  
  It's a secondary form though. Not the primary.
  The Senate must be dealt with sooner or later. >
  
  It depends. Would you accept a situation where one party wins every single seat by a 1pt margin? So that roughly half the country voted for one party but delivered no representatives? 
  Highly competitive districts are competitive but can lead to final results that don’t track to aggregate votes. Additionally, you lose the ability to put forward great candidates who may not be palatable to 50-50 districts. Safe seats can be a useful way to bring in talent. 
  When I got to the point where I realized gerrymandered maps reduce choice to the point where elections are pointless and competitive maps are unrepresentative, I ended up convinced the only way forward is proportionally allocated representatives. I don’t see a strong case for districts in modern America (lack of constituent services culture, political division means constituents are often diametrically opposed to their representatives in every way, etc.) so states could allocate their seats proportionally to parties on an at-large basis, ensuring a free vote of conscience for every voter, freedom for parties to put forward a slate of candidates, and a representative outcome. >
  
  You don’t necessarily need to sacrifice districts to get proportional results.  There’s a compromise solution:  Mixed-member proportional voting.  It would make 3rd parties viable, in addition to compensating for any attempts to engage in gerrymandering. >
  
  The question is just what is the point of districts in American society though. There is too much division within communities to justify typical reasons. Not to mention that districting brings with it redistricting, a process fraught with gerrymandering in the US. 
  Mixed-member potentially just encourages deeper gerrymandering of districts to the point where at-large allocations struggle to make up the proportional difference, or at least leads to a situation where voters question integrity when they see one party win 7/8 districts and not understand why the other party sweeps the at-large proportional seats.
  I’ve lived in mixed-member countries and not opposed to the system, but don’t think it’s the right system for the US. >
  
  
  The question is just what is the point of districts in American society though. […]
  
  Representation of interests that correlate to geography.
  
  There is too much division within communities to justify typical reasons.
  
  Maybe you believe in your district that’s the case, but it’s not true universally.
  A coastal district can have different interests than a landlocked one.  A district on a national border can have different interests than an interior one.
  These interests can cut across political party boundaries to some extent, for example maybe blue and red voters are both unhappy about the local effects of illegal immigration on their border district, or maybe both blue and red voters are unhappy about an oil spill on their coastal district.
  You may not think you have many interests that are geospatially correlated but it doesn’t mean others don’t.
  
  Mixed-member potentially just encourages deeper gerrymandering of districts […]
  
  Not in America it wouldn’t.
  “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats,” he said, “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” — David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina’s General Assembly’s redistricting committee
  They are already maximally encouraged.  This idea that they could currently be practicing forbearance is an error.
  Any imperfections in the optimization of their gerrymandering are a function of their competence, not encouragement.
  
  I’ve lived in mixed-member countries and not opposed to the system, but don’t think it’s the right system for the US.
  
  Given how geographically diverse America is, it’s probably a good fit for us. >
  
  I think one unintended consequence is that with so many competitive races, it would be hard for most campaigns to break through the noise to get fundraising etc.
  In that environment, the level-headed moderates might get drowned out by the louder more extreme voices.
  And it might make gerrymandering more extreme.  In lots of states the voters just aren’t divided evenly, so taking slivers of San Francisco    and stretching the districts out into rural areas might make the district more competitive, but also more extreme, or at the least, would leave a lot of people feeling not very well represented. >
  
  Level headed moderates are already drowned out. US politics is not moderate >
  
  That's because the 2010 redistricting made so many safe seats. The crazies can crazy all they want and never lose, unless they are less crazy. (See Eric Cantor)  We NEED ranked voting. Along with independently created districts. >
  
  If you’re trying to solve gerrymandering and the problems that come with it, drawing districts with competitiveness for the sake of it would mean many districts would be still gerrymandered. Take New York City for instance: how do you make most of it “competitive” for House Republicans? They only occupy one district entirely within the city limits, so if the goal is to make the districts viable for them then you’d need to gerrymander the map and extend district lines well into Long Island or the Lower Hudson Valley. In doing so, you dilute the power of urban Democrats and suburban Republicans alike. 
  We need accurate representation of communities in the U.S. House of Representatives, not necessarily (by requirement) competitive races that risk disempowering certain communities so that TV pundits or elections predictors have more races to talk about (which is what this requirement would effectively do). Drawing fair, compact lines that group communities of interest together will mean more competitive elections, but not in every case, and that’s ok too. >
  
  
  We need accurate representation of communities in the U.S. House of Representatives, not necessarily (by requirement) competitive races
  
  Much smaller districts would go a long way towards this. Each House seat should represent no more than a quarter million people. >
  
  They need to use a fair method of re-districting.
  
  The majority leader of the state senate shall appoint a committee of 5 scholars in areas including geography, and political science. The committee shall construct a map of subdistricts, each one third the population of a district. All subdistricts shall be convex. Coastlines and state borders do not affect convexity.
  The minority leader of the state senate shall appoint a committee of 5 scholars in areas including geography, and political science. The committee shall construct a map of districts, each one shall be composed of three subdistricts as constructed by the other committee and shall be contiguous. >
  
  I think you would be surprised at how many races are still uncompetitive. The overall populations have really been segregating themselves. >
  
  As you said in a comment here, it's not a panacea, but I do think it is a good mindset to have. You'll never be able to make all districts tossups, but incentivizing more competitively drawn districts is generally a good thing. 
  The lack of competition in modern US legislatures, specifically the US House, is a critical problem. It reminds me of the rotten boroughs (although the details are quite different) that plagued England a couple hundred years ago where folks could attain a seat in parliament by running in a borough that has only a handful of voters.
  As part of a collection of reforms, it is a good idea to have more competitively drawn districts, or at least a higher ratio of them. >
  
  Even if they were just more even or realistic it would help make or country work better and represent more/all of the people in their district. >
  
  Republicans would never win another election is what. Which is awesome. 
  None of you really needed to write thesis’ here. >
  
  You must not be looking at the split between the parties in terms of popular vote across Congress and the Presidency: this may surprise you ... we're a very divided country.  Democrat voters are not a significant majority and neither are Republicans voters apparently. >
  
  BTW: in 2022 Republicans won what would be termed as the popular vote by 3 Million votes. >
  
  Can you clarify what you mean? There are more democratic voters than republican ones, so in a hypothetical perfectly balanced districting, democrats would win every single house seat by about 5-10% or so. There are just more people who cast votes for democrats than for republicans. 
  Would you draw districts across state borders to try to get more even races? If so, you could theoretically achieve that even 55%-45% balance across all districts I guess. Or would you make most districts in a red state 50/50 and have the rest be nearly 100% republican to achieve the highest possible number of close races? 
  Realistically speaking, the problem you're describing is with the winner take all primary. Ranked choice would result in less reward for fringe extremist candidates riling up the base to win primaries. Districting reform would be nice too, but it's not possible to create all that many "even" districts without getting weird. >
  
  No. The parties would adapt and change. >
  
  Then what is the meaning of a "competitive" district? How can anyone know how to draw district lines that would be competitive between the parties, not as they are now, but as they might become after they adapt and change? 
  Also, can parties change themselves? The GOP is trying to move on from the MAGA debacle, but primaries are winner take all and Trump fanatics vote in primaries. So the GOP ended up with a significant bloc of MAGA candidates who won primaries, then won general elections as the "lesser of two evils" in the minds of republican voters. The party isn't even in control of its own agenda. It can't even elect a speaker of the house. It's about as adaptable as a brick. Magically eliminating gerrymandering wouldn't cause the GOP to adapt, it would cause the GOP to finish destroying itself. But it's impossible for the reasons I just described, so we'll have to keep watching the slow version of the GOP imploding I guess. 
  But again, you can much more realistically force parties to adapt by simply implementing ranked choice voting. >
  
  No party will allow itself to win zero seats. They will change their coalition to be competitive. >
  
  You think "the party" has a choice? The entire GOP is literally being held hostage, right now, by the MAGA wing resulting in total dysfunction that hasn't been seen for a hundred years, maybe since the civil war. Why do you think the GOP is so concerned with continuing to gerrymander house seats if the party can just press a button and redefine itself? The national GOP would quite literally collapse without gerrymandering. >
  
  Kevin McCarthy was unpopular with the Freedom Caucus before Donald Trump was president. These are the same people that kicked Boehner out. 
  Nobody is being held hostage. This is what the GOP congressional caucus is and McCarthy has failed to manage it. >
  
  
  This is what the GOP congressional caucus is and McCarthy has failed to manage it.
  
  Sounds like the party can't adapt. >
  
  They are in the majority now. >
  
  Who is in the majority? >
  
  GOP. 
  Stop being stupid. >
  
  The risk is in producing the most people who feel unrepresented.
  Would you rather 65% people feel represented (and 35% not) or 52% (and 48% not)? 
  Redristincting to achieve a partisan goal is literally gerrymandering. >
  
  The center of both parties serves the wealthy/corporate/billionaire class more than the citizenry. The Princeton study demonstrated this. More moderates = less change and more benefits to the wealthy/corporate/billionaire class. More bricks, please. >
  
  I think there is a nuance between rank and file corpo candidates and those that hold moderate views, corporations do corrupt the system and business generally likes predictability. I think this can be a case of spurious correlation. I do think CU should absolutely be overturned, it’s unfortunately not practical anytime soon until the federalist society loses its grip of the SC. >
  
  It's not a spurious correlation. They have the wealth and media influence to define their own views as the center of the political universe, and to condemn any who disagree as dangerous extremists. 
  If the status quo is toxic (and it is), preserving it moderately isn't a very good plan. >
  
  I prefer districts in theory that don’t give a fuck about anything but raw human body count. Disregard culture, counties, rivers. 
  If you had a magical perfectly square state with nine districts and with a per the census absolutely perfect distribution of humans across every acre of land... in theory nine districts in that state just looks like a tic tac toe grid. 
  Go for a straight of an up and down ideological battle for votes. >
  
  Democrats would win entire chambers by a shocking landslide. The only way most republicans get into office is via gerrymandering. >
  
  The most recent midterm saw Republicans take a small lead in the national popular vote, so in a competitive environment, they'd still end up with 222 or so seats. >
  
  To answer the original question: Our country would run better and the electorate would "over time" begin to trust their government again, no matter which party was in power.  ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) >
  
  If you do that, you're making the results as random as possible in a sense. 
  If you manage every district 50/50, then every election is a coin flip. >
  
  The goal shouldn't be to maximize competitiveness. It should be compactness. Competitiveness isn't something that remains constant and the actual location of votes in a district shouldn't be granular enough for redistricting to work like that. >
  
  It would change the elections to be more balanced and that would lead to either more compromise or more deadlocks.  I like the idea but not sure everyone would. >
  
  There would need to be a new right wing/conservative party. The current Republican Party would not win many competitive races if left up to democracy. That is why they work so hard to minimize the impact of democracy. >
  
  I thought I saw a flying pig in the atmospheric river the other day out here in California. But Gerry Mander told me it would never happen - it was my imagination getting the better of me. >
  
  
  are their risks Im not thinking about?
  
  A big risk is that if all 435 seats were somehow perfectly purple, in an environment such as 2018 or 2014 where Rs and Ds win nationally by over 5 points, you'd see a complete recycling of the chambers. There would likely be 435 Republicans after 2014. There would be 435 Democrats after 2018. So in 2019, when the new Congress is sworn in, you might not have anyone with any prior experience.
  Maybe that's a good thing, but it sounds like it would likely be a catastrophe because if you put any citizen in Congress with no senior members to guide them, who are they going to turn to? Hint: lobbyists. >
  
  Almost every new seat is drawn as competitive until it is not.
  If you want a truly representative method, then use address location and spacial data and have a computer application start at the top left side of the state and increment according to how many people are to be in each district.  Have it go one grid right as it goes one grid down until that district meets the requirements. >
  
  There are ways of making representation spread out so that minority populations (not based on any particular factor even) are assured of some representation.  Like rank order voting.
  Redistricting never works.  Because if the districts have even minority representation across all districts, then minorities are shut out.  If they are grouped into districts (what the law requires right now of southern states as dictated by laws supported by democrats) they only get representation in those districts that gather up minority voters;  they don't contribute to votes from other groups (like white liberals) cutting into democrat elections.
  It is fun to see Democrats complain about gerrymandering that they actually required southern states to do.
  What a joke.  Allowing Parties to run elections ensures election manipulation.  I don't have a solution, but anyone telling you we have clean and fair elections is not paying attention at all.  Third parties are excluded, non party approved candidates like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders are handicapped.  And party conventions are totally manipulated by insiders.
  Add that election changes since 2020 have destroyed the ability to audit elections and even detect election fraud (particularly ballot harvesting) has done nothing to make elections clean and fair. >
  
  It wouldn't necessarily make individual districts more competitive. I think it would likely have the opposite effect in some cases. However the biggest thing it would change is to make the overall representation more in line with public opinion. As it stands many states have large regions where one party completely dominates. The ruling party tries to  spread the population of that region into many different districts in order to win all of those districts, and concentrate the other party into as few as possible, so that they easily win that small handful of districts by an absolute landslide, but cannot quite break through in any others. So the ruling party has more narrow wins, while the other party will have more landslides. A fair system would have both close wins and landslides for either party. An even more fair system would have more than 2 candidates with a viable chance of winning because a fair system would not have first past the post voting, which only the US, Canada, and a handful of mostly African and South Asian countries with mostly backward definitions of freedom still try to pretend is actual  Democracy. >
  
  It seems like it would be easier to implement more competitive voting systems -- or my preference, which would be consensus-building voting systems.
  My state, South Dakota, isn't going to get another congressional seat for a long, long time. It's also got a pretty hefty conservative majority, which isn't the same as my ideology but it is the reality of the situation. Our politicians, as rational actors, only service the majority of the majority. One consequence of this is that only the largest bloc of conservative voters really have a say in our congressional representation, not the rest of the conservative base and certainly not non-conservatives. If we had something like approval voting, or a top-2 jungle primary, then I think we would get political candidates who were responding to something closer to the widest base among the people. >
  
  I want to know what would happen if we stopped manipulating congressional lines all together.
  Install the shortest split line method, and let the chips fall were they may.
  In my opinion, people the people are full of shit, who claim they oppose gerrymandering but want so called "non partisan committees" to draw the lines.
  They want the lines to be manipulated in a way they believe would favor their party.
  I want distric lines drawn that are manipulated at all.  Lines that are based purely on the population nothing else.  Once you start manipulating lines in any direction its corruption >
  
  Maximizing competitive districts maximizes the number of people who are represented by someone they voted against. It increases turnover, preventing accumulation of experience and relationships. It's also incredibly susceptible to minor turnout or demographic swings: while a state with every district at D/R+0 might have proportionate results, a uniform shift of just one point puts the 49% minority party at risk of being completely shut out from government. >
  
  Republicans would never win the house again. Seriously I know it’s an ‘oversimplification’ but the conservative ethos is becoming so far removed from the values of general electorate that competitive districts would, in all likelihood, be almost a guarantee of democrats taking and holding power in perpetuity.