Gerrymandering is not the act of making seats "more secure". This is profound misinformation, gerrymandering is only ever about disenfranchising a voting block by packing them together.
You may have missed point three, where I literally say that. Also, they are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are quite causal. Also, there is more to gerrymandering that packing a voting block together; you can split voting blocks up do more sophisticated things to ensure your goals are met (the primary objectives generally being "get re-elected"). My email is in the comment and my profile, happy to chat more.
They aren't "mutually exclusive". If your voters have been packed into a district, making your seat more secure, then you are a victim of gerrymandering. It's not simply an alternative type of gerrymandering.
The misunderstanding of who stands to benefit from redistricting has allowed republicans to propagate a narrative that "democrats do it too". In 2012, despite Republican house candidates receiving less of the popular vote they walked away with an extra 30 seats[1]. That's not a bipartisan effect.
You misunderstand my criticism. The reason they aren't "mutually exclusive" is because one of the things that you are calling gerrymandering isn't gerrymandering.
If you read the article, it says there are actually two types of gerrymandering. One is "packing" all of a voting block together, and the other is "cracking" a voting block into multiple districts so that it can't win in any of them.
A seat can be secure at 55% just as it can be at 95%. Packing and cracking both tend to yield secure seats - if nobody could confidently predict who would win the seats, how would it be gerrymandering?
Probability of victory is highly non-linear in the proportion of voters. It's so non-linear that it makes sense to treat it as a phase transition. A district is secure when the outcome is certain. There are two distinct phases where the outcome is "secure" and the border between these two phases is, because of the non-linearity, very small. That is what secure means to most people.
The specific language that the OC, and almost all journalism uses to describe the strategy is "making districts more secure". The only way to interpret that, in the context of the phase definition of security, is adding voter proportion to a district which is already secure. This is never in the interest of the party that it is happening to, so yes, it is dishonest to describe it this way.
As I just pointed out to you, it can never happen to one party without simultaneously happening to the other party. Packing Democrats into an already-secure Democratic district adds Democratic voter proportion to their district and adds Republican voter proportion to yours.
If you don't believe that this can be in the interest of either party (since it's happening "to" both of them), you don't have much left to complain about.
