What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State

New Jersey’s redistricting process largely took place behind closed doors, with Democrats on the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission drawing a version of the map while the commission’s Republicans drew their own version. This meant that the commission’s tiebreaker, former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice John Wallace, wielded an enormous amount of power as the deciding, nonpartisan vote.

And on Dec. 22, after reviewing both Republicans’ and Democrats’ plans, Wallace voted in favor of the Democratic delegation’s congressional map, saying that he chose the Democratic plan because Republicans controlled the last redistricting process.

New Jersey’s map is pretty favorable to Democrats, too, featuring six solidly Democratic districts and three Democratic-leaning districts out of the state’s 12 districts. This marks a change of three more Democratic-leaning seats from the old map, one less Republican-leaning seat and two fewer highly competitive seats.

Most notably, Reps. Andy Kim, Josh Gottheimer and Mikie Sherrill all got significantly bluer districts under this map. (Case in point: Kim’s district experienced the most dramatic swing, moving from R+5 to D+9.) It’s not all good news for Democrats, though: Rep. Tom Malinowski’s district got a lot redder, moving from a competitive D+4 to R+3.

Republicans did lose one GOP-leaning district in this map, but the silver lining for them is that their two incumbents’ districts got a little safer, with Rep. Chris Smith’s district moving from R+15 to R+28 and Rep. Jeff Van Drew’s going from R+7 to R+9.

However, given the electoral environment in 2022, which looks to favor the GOP, it’s not impossible that this map might still have some vulnerabilities for Democrats. Just ask New Jersey Republicans, who lost four seats in 2018 even though they ran under GOP-drawn lines from the last redistricting cycle.

The Republican members of the redistricting commission filed a suit with the state Supreme Court requesting it to overturn the map, but on Feb. 3, the court dismissed the case.