Massachusetts 2024 presidential election results, by district <\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to understand why President Trump and Republicans point to the Massachusetts congressional map in their push to justify redistricting in Texas and other red states.<\/p>\n
Last year, Mr. Trump won 36 percent of the state\u2019s vote, but neither he nor Republican House candidates managed to win even one of nine congressional districts. The state\u2019s map plan has been ranked as \u201cmore skewed<\/a>\u201d than 95 percent of plans nationwide by PlanScore, a nonprofit group that is advised by legal scholars, political scientists and mapping experts.<\/p>\n It certainly sounds unfair, but is it a gerrymander? That\u2019s not so simple.<\/p>\n While it might seem reasonable to expect that Republicans would win three or four seats with more than a third of the presidential vote, it\u2019s really not obvious that Republicans should win a single district in Massachusetts, let alone three.<\/p>\n The problem is geography \u2014 or more specifically, the geographic distribution of a party\u2019s voters across the state. For better or worse, congressional districts represent the voters of the different geographic areas of a state; they don\u2019t directly represent a state\u2019s voters. There is no guarantee that the state\u2019s population as a whole will be well represented by the winners of each of a state\u2019s geographic areas. This is at the heart of why it can be hard to detect \u2014 let alone prohibit \u2014 partisan gerrymandering.<\/p>\n Imagine, for instance, a state that votes 60-40 for one party, with every neighborhood voting 60-40. If so, it is impossible to draw a district for the minority party: While there are plenty of minority party voters, there\u2019s no area that can be drawn to represent that party\u2019s voters.<\/p>\n Massachusetts poses a similar version of this problem. Mr. Trump won a respectable 36 percent of the vote, but he didn\u2019t win areas containing anywhere near 36 percent of the state\u2019s population. Instead, he won areas containing only about 15 percent of the state\u2019s population.<\/p>\n Massachusetts 2024 presidential results, by precinct <\/p>\n The relatively small number of Trump-voting towns and neighborhoods makes it much harder to draw a Trump district than it might initially seem. Each district in Massachusetts must represent one-ninth of the state\u2019s population; for one of them to back Mr. Trump, much of the state\u2019s Trump-voting area would need to be drawn into one district. But these Trump neighborhoods are scattered through the state and they didn\u2019t usually back him by a wide margin.<\/p>\n If you took any person in Massachusetts and formed a district around the 780,000 people who lived closest to that person, every one of those districts would have voted for Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not impossible to draw a Republican district, but it\u2019s not easy.<\/p>\n A hypothetical Trump district <\/p>\n Now, just because it\u2019s hard to draw a district doesn\u2019t mean the district shouldn\u2019t be drawn. But in this particular case, the typical standards for nonpartisan redistricting \u2014 and the rules of many states \u2014 would argue against the creation of this Trump district. Congressional districts are usually supposed to be compact. They\u2019re supposed to keep counties and cities together, rather than split them up. While these standards are nonpartisan, they will tend toward the creation of a 9-0 map in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n Importantly, none of the state\u2019s counties \u2014 usually the building blocks of nonpartisan districts \u2014 voted for Mr. Trump. This makes it fairly unlikely that anyone would draw a Trump district in the state, unless it was part of a deliberate effort. Indeed, the above Trump district wove through five different counties.<\/p>\n Computer-drawn maps help illustrate the problem.<\/p>\n