MICHAEL BARONE: All that you — and Justice Anthony Kennedy — need to know about redistricting and gerrymandering.

Does gerrymandering matter? Not as much as you might think. You’re sure to be wrong if you take at face value the rhetoric of liberals who seem to place most of the blame for Republican majorities in the House of Representatives on partisan map-making.

I have argued repeatedly — in December 2017, September 2017, July 2015, October 2014, September 2014, January 2014, and February 2013, that redistricting is less important in securing Republican congressional and legislative majorities than demographic clustering — the fact that Democratic voters are increasingly concentrated in black, Hispanic, gentry liberal and university areas.

That’s because Democrats’ huge majorities in districts dominated by such voters do nothing to elect Democrats in the remaining districts. A party with clustered constituencies is inevitably disadvantaged by a system of equal-population legislative districts. That conclusion is confirmed by the research of political scientists Jowei Chen (University of Michigan) and Jonathan Rodden (Stanford), as reported in the New York Times in 2014, and it was confirmed once again last week by the work of David Wasserman and three colleagues at FiveThirtyEight in their Atlas of Redistricting. . . .

Wasserman and his colleagues, FiveThirtyEight journalists Aaron Bycoffe, Ella Koeze and Julia Wolfe, have produced splendid work. It should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding redistricting, and for those — including Justice Anthony Kennedy — who hope there is or think there must be some easy answer, some computer algorithm or legal formula, which will guarantee fair, non-partisan redistricting. There isn’t.

The best solution, and one I have long advocated, is strict application of the equal-population standard adopted by the Supreme Court in 1964, which limits more stringently than most observers think the ability of redistricters to benefit their party or faction. This also has the advantage of being easily, ministerially (a legal term) enforced by the courts in a non-partisan manner.

All I know is that when gerrymandering benefited Democrats, it was just only of those hilarious political shenanigans that happen. It wasn’t until it looked like it might benefit Republicans that it became an Urgent Threat To The Republic.