After the 1890 census, Democrats were able to redraw 148 House districts, compared with just 40 for Republicans. And they got greedy.
There wasn’t much margin for error. In those days, in contrast to today, large shares of districts remained competitive cycle after cycle. In the late 19th century, nearly 40 percent of House districts were decided by 5 percentage points or less. After the 1890 census, Democrats didn’t bulk up their more promising territories, instead maximizing the number of districts that were conceivably winnable.
But then came 1894, an especially tough year for the Democrats, who held the White House and both chambers of Congress.
The politics of that year in many ways resemble our own. The nation had a president, Democrat Grover Cleveland, who’d returned to power thanks largely to inflation, after having lost his first reelection bid. Congress was arguing about tariffs. And the president sent federal troops into Chicago over the objections of the governor of Illinois — in that case in response to a railroad strike. (As a conciliatory gesture, Cleveland signed a law that June creating the Labor Day holiday.)
As is so often the case, the overarching issue heading into the 1894 elections was the economy. The nation had suffered a severe recession, which was known retrospectively as the Panic of 1893 but at the time was called the Great Depression. The Democratic majorities in Congress were clearly in trouble. “The Democratic mortality will be so great next fall that their dead will be buried in trenches and marked ‘unknown’ — until the supply of trenches gives out,” said Maine Republican Rep. Thomas B. Reed, who stood to take the gavel when Democrats lost their House majority.
The maps Democrats had drawn in 1890 turned this setback into a bloodbath.
In Missouri, for example, Democrats had drawn maps that gave them 13 out of the state’s 15 House seats in 1892. After their share of the statewide vote in congressional races dropped by 6 percentage points in 1894, however, they lost eight of those seats. In New York, they lost 15 of their 20 seats that year. Throughout the Northeast, their total number of seats plunged from 44 to 7, while in the Midwest they lost 40 out of 44. They were reduced essentially to a regional rump party in the still solidly Democratic South.