A separate statistical analysis conducted for the AP by the Princeton University Gerrymandering Project found that the extreme Republican advantages in some states were no fluke.
The nationwide study categorized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats, including Indiana's 100 House seats and nine congressional races up for election a year ago.
The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. But in the end, Maine's districts remained much the same as they had been even as gerrymandering produced odd-shaped districts in other states. The Old Dominion's off-year elections often serve as a bellwether for national trends. At the time, Democrats controlled the House while Republicans controlled the Senate.
Part of the reason may be a political climate of costly, negative campaigns that discourages potential candidates, said Beatty, the House minority leader.
"It's called Donald Trump", he said.
Yet there also were some districts that didn't appear to follow the Republican proposal, said former citizens' commission member Nick Myers, who now is secretary of the Missouri Republican State Committee.
"They feel very strongly that we have to put people on the field to give voters a choice, and that's the only way we're going to come back", he said. Republicans also had a geographical advantage because their voters were spread more widely across suburban and rural America instead of being highly concentrated, as Democrats generally are, in big cities.
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As a result, Schale said, districts seen as competitive still have a slight Republican edge: "Even the places that are competitive aren't truly like jump balls".
Cooperation carried over to legislative redistricting. Virginia is a swing state where Democrats have won, often by slim margins, every statewide office since 2009. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were almost three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts.
The analysis found Republicans won 56 percent of the votes in Ohio House races yet 66 percent of the seats. The judges - three of whom had originally been appointed to the bench by a Republican governor and three by a Democrat - reviewed proposed maps from the Republican and Democratic commissioners, as well as suggestions from individual lawmakers and residents.
Republicans controlled both MI legislative chambers and the governor's office when the maps were redrawn in 2011. Chris Jones testified in federal court he tried to accommodate requests from a large majority of delegates, both Republicans and Democrats, who sought to tweak lines, sometimes to draw out precincts where they had historically performed poorly.
Missouri's state House efficiency gap score favoring Republicans was close to the median of all states analyzed, resulting in about six additional GOP seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share Republicans received in the districts.
The methodology has been cited as "corroborative evidence" in a ruling that Wisconsin Republicans engaged in unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering for state Assembly districts. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal.
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