Steve did an interesting segment showing the electoral breakdown in the 2012 election by county, and comparing it to the county electoral breakdown for the 1988 election. (Which George HW Bush won in a landslide over Michael Dukakis by 426-111 electoral votes.)
Here's the 2012 map:
Here's the 1988 map:
Just from eyeballing it, you can see there's nearly as much blue in the '88 Map as there is in the '12 map though one was a landslide Democratic defeat, and the other a health Democratic win...
In fact, Michael Dukakis carried significantly more counties then Obama did: 819 versus 690.
Kornacki's point about this (a point I agree with) is that because of the geographical distribution of the Republican and Democratic vote, and particularly the way the Dem vote is concentrated, even if you were to design congressional districts in the most objective ways imaginable you're still going to wind up with a significant number of heavily Republican districts and heavily Democratic districts. And again, because of the geography, overall this would tend to favor Republicans, creating more heavily GOP districts then heavily Dem districts....
So if you Democrats want to achieve a solid, stable majority in the House, I'm afraid you're going to have to spread out more...
