Gerrymandering is unpopular. Shocker! | Weekly roundup for August 10, 2025
This week in political data: When life gives you lemons? Plus: Latinos por Trump es no más, UMass on Trump regret, and about that Epstein polling.
Dear readers,
There is a lot of news this week. Just over the last 48, hours there’s new Epstein polling, a big story about Trump negotiating with Putin over Ukraine, the FDA’s new vaccine restrictions, and I’m sure many others to note. But from a politics and data point of view, the most significant throughline is still the GOP’s mid-cycle gerrymandering efforts. The political opportunism of the Republicans in Texas — and now elsewhere — shows the party believes districting is a means to a partisan end, rather than the non-partisan bedrock of our democratic process. This attitude threatens our democracy.
So, despite the other news, redistricting carries the head spot for the data roundup this week.
As always, if you have thoughts or other data to send around, my email is contact@gelliottmorris.com.
Gerrymandering is bad, and people don’t like it
I recommend readers visit these three links from the friends of Strength In Numbers over at The Downballot. They will give you a good overview of what’s going on in Texas, and now several additional GOP-trifecta states, including Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana. Across these 5 states, Republicans could pick up 11 House seats relative to 2024.
I have said and will continue to say that partisan gerrymandering is a betrayal of the democratic values of equal representation and responsive government. I think what the GOP is doing here is best described as cheating and has no place in a modern democracy. Voters should pick their leaders, not the other way around. This was the successful rallying cry against gerrymandering in Michigan that resulted in the creation of the state’s independent redistricting commission in 2018.
Most Americans agree. In a new poll from YouGov this week, 69% of Americans say that gerrymandering legislative districts to advantage one party over the other should be illegal. Republicans (57%) are more tolerant of the practice than Democrats (80%), but still no greater than 14% of the public actively thinks partisan gerrymandering should be legal, regardless of the party. A good chunk of U.S. adults say they’re not sure either way:
But you know what they say: when life gives you lemons, draw your own egregious partisan gerrymanders to counteract the effects of gerrymandering by the other party. If Republicans aren’t going to play by the rules, Democrats get an excuse to skirt them too. Gavin Newsom now says California will let voters decide on a new gerrymandered map (with potentially 5 new Democratic seats) if and only if the Texas GOP goes through on its promise to Trump to rig the maps. YouGov’s poll shows voters are much more tolerant of redistricting, especially by their own party, when it is done to counteract partisan effects from other maps:
Regardless of which party gains the most seats after this bout of redistricting (it will almost certainly be the GOP), voters are the real losers — everywhere. If parties engage in a state-by-state effort to rig maps in their team’s favor, Americans will end up with even fewer competitive congressional districts. That means fewer seats changing hands, and fewer opportunities via which shifts in voters’ preferences register as shifts in policy or political outcomes. We are staring not just into a “doom loop” of partisanship, but into the anti-democratic whirlpool that threatens to consume our republic for good.
Time to pass the FRA and multi-member districts with proportional RCV.
What you missed at Strength In Numbers
Posts! Posts! Get your posts here!
On Tuesday, I published an essay about Trump’s efforts to rig both elections and government statistics in his favor:
On Friday, I did some modeling of our Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling data to estimate public opinion on Trump’s tariffs in every state. He’s underwater everywhere except the most deep-red states:
And here’s last week’s data roundup, touching mainly on that new party ID polling from Gallup that made headlines:
If you’d like to receive more subscribers-only posts and support independent data-driven journalism, become a paying member of Strength In Numbers today:
Even more numbers!
A collection of links from the last week:
Equis research: Trump is underwater 35% to 63% with Latinos. In this poll, Latinos trust Democrats by a 19-point margin to handle inflation, a massive swing from a 5-point lead for Republicans in December 2022.
A UMass Amherst poll finds 6% of Trump voters say they’d vote for Harris if the 2024 election were a do-over. That’s a slight increase from their previous poll. Director of UMass’s polling says “Since April, the number of Trump voters expressing strong confidence in their vote for Trump has declined by 5 percentage points. … Time will tell whether the growing number of disaffected Trump voters are the canaries in the coal mine, indicating a larger problem among the Trump coalition and the MAGA movement more generally.”
I really liked this Marketplace story on the ins and outs of how the BLS does the monthly jobs report.
A new Gallup poll of Ukrainians (in Ukraine) finds a decrease in support for the country’s war against Russia. Interesting to note this given the news that Trump and Putin will meet to negotiate a ceasefire (apparently with or without Zeleskyy).
A new poll from Canadian firm Leger finds that 47% of Republicans say they’d still vote for Trump even if he were implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Two things: (a) This poll was covered as if that’s a shockingly small amount of GOP defection. But given we know how loyal partisans are, I think 53% of a base saying they’d look elsewhere is notable and high. But (b) be careful with headlines like these. Studies have found people are very bad at predicting how they’d behave in the future given new information, namely in that they overestimate change.
The Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has a decent op-ed in WaPo about how some changes in the way Apple categorizes text messages from unknown numbers could imperil text-to-web political polls.
Some academic reading on weighting by past vote in polls.
And finally, a lot of good graphs from Derek Thompson on how AI is transforming the economy.
Updates from the data portal
Trump approval: Trump approval has modestly bounced off his all-time low, but he’s still within the margin of error of where he started the week.
Trump issue approval: Ditto for his issue approval rating, which is roughly unchanged since early July.
House generic ballot average: A couple of new rosy polls this week lifted Democrats to a 2.9-point lead over Republicans. House effects continue to be very important in our generic ballot average, as compared to other outlets.
The economy: Our economic index fell over the last month, as inflation, job growth, services spending, and housing construction have fallen below average.
The charts on the data portal update every day. Feel free to use and cite them liberally!
That’s it for your major political data stories this week.
Got more for next week? Email them or add to the comments below!
Have a nice week,
Elliott
Your work is outstanding and this take on gerrymandering is particularly significant. The question is, how can we possibly convert this insight into a plausible endeavor to reverse the damage already done and prevent further escalation of its use? It appears the Democratic and Republican parties would rather commit political suicide than initiate a move to declare their respect for the voters by reversing this devious mechanism for subverting the Constitution's intent.
Our political leaders know the rules.......they are so low! Our 4 and 5 year olds just learning to share the soccer ball on the field or learning to listen to their neighbors at circle time are much better examples than the GOP peeps in Texas legislature-and elsewhere! As these young kids would say, "cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater!" Dang people! GROW UP and treat people, your neighbors, with the respect they deserve............. Do unto others....... What's good for the goose is good for the gander........that will only take you so far! Bring some honest and the ability to lose....GRACEFULLY back! You are adults! Not every one should get a participation trophy, but every voter should have their vote count, not stolen!