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The Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision was disappointing, but its consequences in 2021 may be mitigated by victories won over the past decade on other fronts. A thread 🧵 #fairmaps 1/
To start, it’s important to remember that aggressive extreme gerrymandering of the sort we saw this decade in NC and PA is factually limited. Indeed, only a handful of states had congressional maps with high bias this decade. #fairmaps 2/ 
Which, note, is not to say that that some level of manipulation can’t occur anywhere - Rs grabbing an additional congressional seat in Utah is a great example of that. #fairmaps 3/
But the huge power grabs seen in the 10-3 or 13-5 congressional maps in NC and PA this decade require the right sort of political geography- and that is relatively rare. #fairmaps 4/
That high risk geography is having a fairly even spread of Democrats and Republicans across large parts of a state (a lot of light blues and pinks if you look at a precinct level map). That makes it easy to slice and dice voters to engineer an outsized advantage. #fairmaps 5/
That’s exactly the political geography of battleground states like NC, OH, PA, and MI and also places like Texas where the major urban centers are increasingly purple. #fairmaps 6/
Contrast that to a place like Brooklyn or West Texas which skew so in favor of one party over the other (I live in a state assembly district in Brooklyn where Hillary Clinton got 96% of the vote) where it can be hard to eek out additional advantage. #fairmaps 7/
Which gets at the sometimes not well understood trick of NC/PA style extreme gerrymandering - the goal is not to draw districts that your party wins by 80% (if you do that you are using your voters inefficiently). You want to spread your voters out as much possible. #fairmaps 8/
It’s that carefully spreading out (combined with packing your political opponents into a few districts) that let’s you create the imbalanced 10-3 and 13-5 maps. #fairmaps 9/
But back to the narrative. If some states are more likely than others to experience extreme gerrymandering, then the good news is that reforms and litigation - and political - wins have made gerrymandering less likely in 2021. #fairmaps 11/
In Michigan, for example, which was one of the worst gerrymandered states in 2011, voters approved creation of an independent commission to draw both legislative and congressional maps starting in 2021. #fairmaps 12/
And in Ohio, voters approved reforms to both the legislative and congressional mapdrawing process that will make the process more bipartisan. #fairmaps 13/
And in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most egregiously - if not blatantly - gerrymandering state this decade, the League of Women Voters won a court case establishing a partisan gerrymandering claim under the *state constitution* #fairmaps 14/
Pennsylvania may soon be joined by North Carolina where a partisan gerrymandering claim over the state’s legislative maps also is pending in state court (scheduled to go to trial this month). #fairmaps 15/
And in Virginia, where political gerrymanders can be hard to pull off without targeting African-American voters, victories in racial gerrymandering cases have given voters a tool to fight partisan gerrymanders that use race as the means to the end. #fairmaps 16/
None of which is to say that these wins are automatically secure or won’t need to be defended against other sorts of attacks or end runs. Only that voters in these high risk states start off in a better position than in 2011 because of a decade of hard fought wins. #fairmaps 17/
In sum, the fight against partisan gerrymandering always has been a multifront war - and it continues to be. Moreover, it is fight is that has produced notable wins that, SCOTUS aside, will make the next cycle better. #fairmaps 18/
