"Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their policy preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy."

  "Still, the researchers hold that gerrymandering harms our democracy. “Elections are a way to hold politicians accountable for what their constituency wants,” said Kosuke Imai, professor of government and of statistics as well as leader of the ALARM Project research team, which uses big data and computational algorithms to study redistricting. “But if many lawmakers are in safe seats, guaranteed to win by a relatively comfortable margin, there’s less incentive to respond to what voters want."

There are different kinds of results.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets my favored politicians into office” which apparently isn’t working out too well.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets politicians to give me favors at the expense of their constituents” which unfortunately works very well.

And, there’s “Money being spent on campaigns gets politicians to favor laws that encourage donatory competition between big donators even if it is at great expense to everyone including their constituents” which is also going just swimmingly.

All of this is because politicians know that if they don’t play the asshole here, their competition will and they’ll end up with a large multiple of their campaign budget. And, that will put them out of office. A small difference like 2x might not work so well, but 10x certainly does.

Without gerrymandering the Republican party would have last controlled the House in 2007.

Essentially, the likelihood of a particular bill being passed doesn't matter at all on how many average citizens want it to pass. It does matter greatly, almost 100%, on how much the economic elites want it to pass.

Gerrymandering absolutely has an effect, and this has been well documented. Here, for example: https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2024/01/analysis-of-pr...