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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Exactly the wrong way to look at it. The way to overcome gerrymandering is to push higher turnout.
Short version is that in order to do that kind of extreme gerrymandering successfully, they have to make assumptions about what the vote will look like. One of those assumptions is that Dem turnout is lower than GOP turnout, because it is - GOP treat voting like a civic duty, Dems generally don't. This is why putting even mild roadblocks in front of voting (like having ID, or waiting in line, or w/e) favor the GOP - GOP voters will jump through whatever hoops are necessary to do their civic duty, Dems get dissuaded from voting with much less effort.
What this means is that if Dems turnout in force, they win. In most places they outnumber GOP, even in gerrymandered maps - they just have to actually vote en masse.
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It's literally impossible to draw districts in such a way that a minority party is the majority of voters in every district. You have to either pack the opposition into seats you are basically giving them to secure yours or you are doing some math on expected turnout and thinking how to promote turnout for your party and depress it for the opposition and aiming to win by a smallish but predictable margin.
It sounds an awful lot like you are in a very red state, and there isn't a blue majority that can hypothetically vote.
Or they've packed enough Dem voters into a single district (depending on the state not doing this can be considered illegal racial gerrymandering, depending on how majority-minority districts fit in - in some cases not having them is racist, in others packing minorities into them is racist). But that requires a small number of total districts, or surrendering more than one to the opposition (the more districts you have, the less impact surrendering one district gives you).
Really, we just need to switch to some fixed, abstract mathematical process that cares not about how people will vote and use that to draw district lines. Something like least split line. But that's a hard sell, because the people who would need to pass it are the people who benefit from it not existing.
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