I was looking for the same scale, but looking at this…I mean any person in the Chicago area will tell you that the gerrymandering of the districts is legendarily bad. We have one of the worst districts around, as I recall. That said, Chicago and the collar counties are overwhelmingly Democratic, as well as the same around every college town. One major exception being a NW burb that Jordan used to live in, which is VERY wealthy and leans hard Republican. I wonder why.
I don’t understand why re-election = gerrymandering and there isn’t supporting info to explain it. I do know from personal experience (had a family member run for office) that it is really hard to run against an incumbent. They will throw absolutely everything at you. They dropped out after the second lawsuit, because they simply couldn’t afford the time/money anymore. The lawsuits were simply keeping them busy, including multiple trips from Chicago to Springfield for mandatory in-person hearings, only to be dropped when facts came out. And, for the record, that was on the Dem side too, so you know that Repubs don’t have an exclusivity on jerkiness.
What is interesting is almost all the F ratings are on large states. It’s almost like it’s hard to be even on a giant geographical/population basis and trying to use simple stats to define isn’t the best idea. I mean, for Illinois, 2/3rds of the population lives in or within 1 hour of Chicago. Why should the southern part of the state get more than 1/3rd of the vote? They already get ~255% of the tax money!
