Democrats, Republicans fight to a redistricting stalemate

After nearly a year of partisan battles, number-crunching and lawsuits, the once-adecade congressional redistricting cycle is ending in a draw.

That leaves Republicans positioned to win control of the House of Representatives even if they come up just short of winning a majority of the national vote. That frustrates Democrats, who hoped to shift the dynamic so their success with the popular vote would better be reflected by political power in Washington. Some Republicans, meanwhile, hoped to cement an even larger advantage this time.

But both parties ultimately fought each other to a standstill. The new congressional maps have a total of 226 House districts won by Democrat Joe Biden in the last presidential election and 209 won by Republican Donald Trump — only one more Biden district than in 2020. Likewise, the typical congressional district voted for Biden by about 2 percentage points, also almost identical to 2020.

“It’s almost perfect stasis,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard law professor who follows congressional redistricting. “If you compare the maps we had in 2020 to the maps we’re going to have in 2022, they’re almost identical” in terms of partisan advantage, he added.

The specific lines of congressional districts have, of course, changed, as some states added new ones — or lost old ones — to match population shifts recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2020.

That leaves the map tilted slightly to the right of the national electorate, since Biden won the presidency by more than 4 percentage points. In a typical year,