what worries me about this is just how gerrymandered the house is for republicans. im sure the dems will blow out the gop in the nationwide popular vote next year
Ah, but that's the thing about gerrymandering. It hurts the party that's relying on gerrymandering to win if the margins against them are too high.
Look at it this way: To gerrymander properly, you take your strongest districts and carve them up so that each new district still gives you an advantage, but since you've carved your district up, the advantage is smaller. For example, take a R+25 district. The GOP will carve that up into four districts that are still mostly red and give them an R+6 advantage in each one. Then, they pack all the D voters into one district. As you'll see if you look at a map, that's what you get - a bunch of +4-6 R districts and a bunch of +15/+20/+25 D districts or whatever.
The problem is when you get a wave election that goes against you. Since you diluted all your voters to put them into different districts, you're prone to getting caught out if the popular vote goes +10 or more against you. I don't know the spread of those AL districts, but I'm guessing based on the shading that AL-1. AL-3, AL-5, and AL-6 are R+5 to R+10 or so.
If the Democrats win the popular vote by +15, which is Monmouth's numbers from earlier today, they would take all of those R+5 to R+10 districts.
That's how gerrymandering works against you. If the other side runs up the score in the popular vote, they take all those +5 to +10 districts that you divided your voters into in order to have your voters across so many districts.
This is why I'm pretty sure the Rs are losing the House in 2018. The Senate is another story. That map is horrible for Ds. Rs are probably fukked pretty hard as far as the House goes in 2018, though. If it's a D+10 year or better, Democrats will get the 25 or so seats they need to flip it.
I assume that we'll get a D+10 year or better for a number of reasons. First, history shows that POTUS's party pretty much always loses seats in the midterm elections. Second, Trump is deeply unpopular. Third, there are all sorts of harbingers of trouble for Rs. They got run out of the state in VA even worse than people thought that they would, they lost this seat in AL, and they've been losing local elections across the country, including in backwards places like OK. Tom Perez also seems to understand the concept of actually contesting every seat and spending money on a ground game. Why Hillary failed to do this in 2016 after she got her ass whipped out of seemingly nowhere by Obama's ground game in 2008, I do not know, but Tom Perez seems to be righting that wrong so far.
"DO SOMETHING!"
