The Washington Post

The Fix

California just proved how cracking down on gerrymandering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
By Aaron Blake

December 1 at 9:00 AM 

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) attends a news conference at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, on Aug. 4, 2015. (Olamikan Gbemiga/Associated Press)

On Monday, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa was declared the winner of a drawn-out reelection battle. And with his victory, California regained a distinction with which it is quite familiar.

For the fourth time in a decade, not a single one of the state’s 50-plus congressional districts switched parties. Just as in 2010, 2008 and 2006, every single seat returned to the party that previously controlled it.

And if you exclude the post-redistricting election of 2012, only two California districts have flipped parties since 2002. That’s two out of 314 individual races — 0.6 percent. (And one of the…