The most common Republican refrain of the past five years has been that they were cheated in the last round of redistricting. Sen. Joe Balyeat raises the concern again, saying that the redistricting in which Republicans got short-changed caused them to become more partisan.
This allegation of gerrymandering is interesting, but the data just don't back up the claim. The most salient data point the right has raised is that Republicans won the vote by overwhelming margins in contested races in Montana in '06. What they don't note is that Democrats contested more races and actually underperformed in terms of victories compared to share of the vote in these contested races -- the opposite of what you'd expect with hard-core gerrymandering.
As I've noted before, the Tribune did an analysis of the new districts after the redistricting and found that the new maps had a high number of swing seats and a rough parity of safe seats for the two parties, creating a map, in other words, that should be highly responsive to changing views among the electorate.
