Massachusetts is the historical home of the gerrymander. A historical marker in downtown Boston commemorates the salamander-shaped district drawn in 1812 to give an advantage to then-Gov. Elbridge Gerry’s political party.
Today, the contours of Massachusetts’ electoral districts are again in the spotlight amid unusual mid-decade redistricting efforts first in Texas and then in California.
National GOP figures like former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vice President JD Vance have been pointing to the maps in Massachusetts and saying gerrymandering is the reason the Bay State hasn’t sent a Republican to Congress in decades.
“I kind of laugh when I hear that claim, because first of all, no Republican ever gave us any input into the redistricting process in Massachusetts, because they knew full well that it’s impossible to draw a Republican district in Massachusetts,” said state Senate President Pro Tempore Will Brownsberger, one of the main architects behind the current maps. “This was just never a thing. It was never discussed. Nobody pushed it. We didn’t deny it.”
In Massachusetts, congressional districts are drawn and approved every 10 years by the state Legislature, then signed into law by the governor. The two Democratic lawmakers who led the last round of redistricting, in 2021, say it’s math and geography, not partisan pursuits, that have kept the state’s nine congressional districts blue while President Donald Trump won 36% of the vote in last year’s election.
“There are plenty of Republicans in Massachusetts and there’s plenty of people who voted for Donald Trump, but they are a minority overall in the state and they’re distributed more or less evenly across the state,” Brownsberger told GBH News. “Not absolutely evenly, but evenly enough that any district that’s big enough to be a congressional district, it is going to be majority Democratic-leaning.”
Brownsberger pointed to a 2019 study from a Tufts mathematician, which found that, though Republicans often get between 30% and 40% of the vote in Massachusetts, their votes are scattered across the state so uniformly that they cannot be drawn into a majority district.
Massachusetts had two Republican congressmen for a period in the ’90s — Peter Torkildsen on the North Shore and Peter Blute representing the Worcester area.
The point person on redistricting in the Massachusetts House, Majority Leader Michael Moran, said the vote margins for a candidate running statewide don’t break down the same way across congressional districts.
“We have had multiple, multiple times where we’ve had Republican governors, and then in the same election cycle, every congressional seat went Democrat,” Moran told GBH News. “So making the assumption that because a president of whatever party got whatever percent, that that should transfer into that percent being the number of seats they serve in Congress is foolish. And quite frankly, it’s coming out of Washington, so they’re all talking points.”
Massachusetts adopted its current maps with bipartisan support.
Of 200 state lawmakers, 21 voted against the congressional districts, including one Republican senator and six Republican state representatives. One House Republican who dissented, GOP Rep. Paul Frost of Auburn, tried to amend the map to bring in more of what he called “regional sense” — moving Worcester suburbs into a Worcester-based district rather than the Springfield-based one.
Republican Gov. Charlie Baker signed the map into law, and the Republican candidate for governor at the time, Geoff Diehl, said he too would have signed them. The main concern map critics — including some of the Democrats running for governor and several Democratic governors — cited at the time was the division of Fall River and New Bedford into two districts.
Massachusetts’ current congressional maps are set to be in place through 2031, when lawmakers will draw a new set of districts, reflecting population shifts in the 2030 Census. The new Congress and state legislative maps will then be in place for the 2032 elections.
