"How Maps Helped Republicans Keep an Edge in the House."

Headline at the NYT, where the first 2 paragraphs talk about Wisconsin. Is Wisconsin a clear majority-Democrat state rigged at the district level to elect Republicans?

It's hard to analyze exactly how bad or unfair this is. Either party, when it controls redistricting, takes advantage, and Democrats have the special problem that is referred to in the article as "“unintentional gerrymandering": "the natural geographic patterns that lead many Democrats to choose to live in dense, urban areas with very high concentrations of Democrats, effectively packing themselves into fewer districts." (Strangely worded, no?)

It's not hard to see that Democrats' majority in Wisconsin is caused by a concentration of Democrats in Milwaukee and Madison, and the representatives from these districts can lean way left without risking defeat in the next election. Is it necessarily evidence of a problem that elsewhere in the state, the elections are closer and Republicans can win?

In states where Republicans controlled the [redistricting] process, [a study] found, their candidates won roughly 53 percent of the vote — and 72 percent of the seats. And in the states where Democrats controlled the process, their candidates won about 56 percent of the vote and 71 percent of the seats.

That doesn't mean the Republicans are more advantage-taking than Democrats, though, because of the way the population is dispersed.

An analysis by The New York Times of states where courts, commissions or divided governments drew the maps found a much smaller disparity between the share of the popular vote and the number of seats won in Congress. In those states, the analysis found, Democrats won slightly more than half the vote and 56 percent of the seats, while Republicans won 46 percent of the vote and 44 percent of the seats.

Isn't this because the Democrats, when they control, choose not to cut up those urban districts? And which states ended up in that comparison group and why? I'd like to know more detail. Why is there no more detail? Articles like this clearly serve the political purposes of the Democratic party, stoking the belief that the Democrats really deserve much more power than is reflected in actual legislatures.