Beacon Hill

With the Texas redistricting debacle unfolding, where Trump pressured Texas to redraw its district map to flip congressional seats from Democrat to Republican, the nation has turned its eyes to the states with the most concentrated political strongholds for each party. Unsurprisingly, Massachusetts has found itself in the crosshairs, with nine Democrat representatives and zero Republicans.

In a Boston Herald letter to the editor, one reader added their steel-man to the conversation:

Gerrymandering has rendered the Republicans in Massachusetts to be without representation. In 1775 didn’t Bostonians demand independence from Great Britain due to Taxation Without Representation? If that was a legitimate argument and if the politicians in Massachusetts are authentic, Massachusetts Republicans would be exempt from taxation. If anyone thinks “0” is a legitimate number of US Representatives from Massachusetts, please remove “Preserving or Protecting Democracy” from your manifesto. The Socialist Democrat ruling class has zero tolerance for Republicans.

However, the response to this is actually incredibly simple: it’s impossible to draw a Massachusetts map with Republican districts. Massachusetts isn’t split into “blue areas” and “red areas” like most states; by and large, most districts are just varying flavors of blue majorities. According to a research paper from 2019:

The underperformance of Republicans in Massachusetts is not attributable to gerrymandering, nor to the failure of Republicans to field House candidates, but is a structural mathematical feature of the actual distribution of votes observable in some recent elections. Several of these elections have a remarkable property in their vote patterns: Republican votes clear 30%, but are distributed so uniformly that they are locked out of the possibility of representation. Though there are more ways of building a valid districting plan than there are particles in the galaxy, every single one of them would produce a 9–0 Democratic delegation.

As I’ve said before, the Republican platform as it stands is generally non-viable in Massachusetts, which regularly serves as the national GOP’s punching bag. The lack of Republican seats reflects that, not an anti-Republican conspiracy.