Conor here: Perhaps I’m too jaded about our “greatest democracy in the history of the world” two-party system, but I have a hard time getting too worked up about gerrymandering and how it will increase political polarization when both parties are largely bought and paid for by the billionaire class.
As the Democrats push “Abundance,” the uniparty’s accelerationism differs mostly on matters of branding for war, climate and predatory capitalism in our burgeoning police state, so wake me when a state controlled by either party is doing something real on campaign finance.
Nevertheless, we can expect more of this gerrymandering circus, which if nothing else, should be entertaining.
By Gibbs Knotts, Professor of Political Science at Coastal Carolina University, and Christopher A. Cooper, Professor of Political Science & Public Affairs at Western Carolina University. Originally published at The Conversation.
Congressional redistricting – the process of drawing electoral districts to account for population changes – was conceived by the Founding Fathers as a once-per-decade redrawing of district lines following the decennial U.S. census. Today it has devolved into a near-constant feature of American politics – often in response to litigation, and frequently with the intent of maintaining or gaining partisan advantage.
Polls show widespread public disapproval of manipulating political boundaries to favor certain groups, a process known as gerrymandering. However, we currently see little hope of preventing a race to the bottom, where numerous states redraw their maps to benefit one party in response to other states drawing their maps to benefit another party.
The most recent round of tit-for-tat gerrymandering began in Texas. After drawing their post-census congressional maps in 2021, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, at President Donald Trump’s behest, are advancing a new set of maps designed to increase the number of Republican congressional seats in their state. The goal is to help Republicans retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections by converting five Democratic seats to ones that will likely result in a Republican victory.
In response, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing to redraw his state’s map. Under Newsom’s plan, Democrats could gain five House seats in California, offsetting Republican gains in Texas. The California Legislature approved the new maps on Aug. 21 and Gov. Newsom signed the bills that day. Next, the maps will be presented to California voters in a special election on Nov. 4, 2025 for approval.
Newsom vows that he isn’t trying to disband the independent redistricting process that California enacted in 2021. Rather, he proposes to shift to these partisan gerrymandered maps temporarily, then return to independent, nonpartisan redistricting in 2031.
Democrats in Illinois and New York, and Republicans in Indiana, Missouri and South Carolina, have signaled that they may follow Texas and California’s leads. Based on our research on politics and elections, we don’t expect that the wave will stop there.
Rules for Mapmakers
Redistricting has always been an inherently political process. But the advent of widespread, easily accessible computer technology, increasingly predictable voting patterns and tight partisan margins in Congress have turbocharged the process.
There are ways to tweak this gerrymandering run amok and perhaps block a bad map or two. But none of these approaches are likely to stop partisan actors entirely from drawing maps to benefit themselves and their parties.
The most obvious strategy would be to create guardrails for the legislators and commissions who draw the maps. Such guidelines often specify the types of data that could be used to draw the maps – for example, limiting partisan data.
Anti-gerrymandering rules could also limit the number of political boundaries, such as city or county lines, that would be split by new districts. And they could prioritize compactness, rather than allowing bizarrely shaped districts that link far-flung communities.
These proposals certainly won’t do any harm, and might even move the process in a more positive direction, but they are unlikely to end gerrymandering.
For example, North Carolina had an explicit limitation on using partisan data in its 2021 mapmaking process, as well as a requirement that lawmakers could only draw maps in the North Carolina State Legislative Building. It was later revealed that a legislator had used “concept maps” drawn by an aide outside of the normal mapmaking process.
In a world where anyone with an internet connection can log onto free websites like Dave’s Redistricting to draw maps using partisan data, it’s hard to prevent states from incorporating nonofficial proposals into their maps.
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Courts and Commissions
A second way to police gerrymandering is to use the courts aggressively to combat unfair or discriminatory maps. Some courts, particularly at the state level, have reined in egregious gerrymanders like Pennsylvania’s 2011 map, which was overturned in 2018.
At the national level, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering claims presented “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts” and ultimately were better suited to state courts. There are still likely to be claims in federal courts about racial dilution and other Voting Rights Act violations in gerrymanders, but the door to the federal courthouse for partisanship claims appears to be closed for the time being.
A third option is for states to hand map-drawing power to an independent body. Recent studies show that independent redistricting commissions produce maps that are more competitive and fairer. For example, a nonpartisan scholarly review of the 2021-2022 congressional and state legislative maps found that commissions “generally produce less biased and more competitive plans than when one party controls the process.”
Commissions are popular with the public. In a 2024 study with political scientists Seth McKee and Scott Huffmon, we found that both Democrats and Republicans in South Carolina preferred to assign redistricting to an independent commission rather than the state Legislature, which has been in Republican control since 2000.
Studies using national polling data have also found evidence that redistricting commissions are popular, and that people who live in states that use commissions view the redistricting process more positively than residents of states where legislators draw congressional lines.
I just signed the Election Rigging Response Act to put Proposition 50 up for a vote on November 4th.
The people of California will have the power to push back against Texas and any other state that obeys @realDonaldTrump‘s demand to rig the next election. pic.twitter.com/Lkb0DyWkXK
— Governor Gavin Newsom (@CAgovernor) August 21, 2025
A National Solution or Bust
While redistricting commissions are popular and effective in states that have adopted them, current actions in California show that this strategy can fail if it is embraced by some states but not others.
Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for tit-for-tat gerrymandering. Litigation can help at the margins, and independent redistricting can make a difference, but even the best intentions can fail under political pressure.
The only wholesale solution is national reform. But even here, we are not optimistic.
A proportional representation system, in which seats are divided by the portion of the vote that goes to each party, could solve the problem. However, removing single-member districts and successfully implementing proportional representation in the United States is about as likely as finding a hockey puck on Mars.
A national ban on gerrymandering might be more politically palatable. Even here, though, the odds of success are fairly low. After all, the people who benefit from the current system would have to vote to change it, and the filibuster rule in the Senate requires not just majority but supermajority support.
So, brace for what’s about to come. As James Madison famously observed, forming factions – groups of people united by a common interest that threatens the rights of others – is “sown in the nature of man.”
Gerrymandering helps factions acquire and retain power. If U.S. leaders aren’t willing to consider a national solution, it won’t disappear anytime soon.
Starting from the bottom of the article up, no national solution is possible, because the states run the elections: In fact, the elections are run at the county level. One would think that having the supervision of the elections at a level close to the populace would help. It turns out not to.
Why doesn’t it? Because redistricting is done by legislatures dominated the Party of Property and then supervised by boards of election / election commissions that also are partisan. This became thoroughly evident during the 2024 election, when the Democrats were suing the hell out of the Greens (blocking the Party of Socialism and Liberation as a side benefit). The lawfare also messed with the Libertarian Party.
So the only option is the third option. Nonpartisan special commissions do the redistricting. All election commissions / boards of election must be made nonpartisan. Decisions would have to be made without regard to preserving the current Twin Parties. (Like that’s going to happen.)
As we see from the wondrous labor law of the United States, and the many wonderlicious right-to-work states, the likelihood that either end of the Party of Property will be moved to do anything to benefit the populace is vanishingly small.
PS: Pie in the sky. There are many different kinds of proportional representation, so throwing out a proposal of PR as a solution doesn’t mean much. USanians might grasp strict proportional representation, but strict PR has its own problems — like the cutoff for minor parties to enter the legislature. Italy has mixed PR, with individuals on the ballot as well as a voting for the party.
The UK has 5 yr reviews by Boundary Commissions run by allegedly independent national government departments under the guidance of unbiassed civil servants.
Ostensibly, this limits gerrymandering, but there are still disputes when the draft reviews are published, and it is inevitably still a political process subject to the self interest of partisan groups, though fairly open.
The Boundary Appeals process though still rouses suspicion, and quite rightly too.
GIS ought to make the whole mapping process much easier in satisfying the more neutral spatial and demographic criteria.
Modern population dynamics probably means that ten year reviews are too long, but using party support metrics as a deciding seesaw for balancing in a 2 party system can only ossify, and restrict pluralism.
In the UK the rise of disruptors such as Reform on the right, and realignment away from centre left Labour towards Greens, nationalists and the more centrist LibDems make traditional 2 party divisions in increasingly meaningless UK wide, but we still have an archaic FPTP voting system – currently perverting representation such that a party with barely a third voter support has a large numeric Commons majority. That’s barely 1 in 5 of registered electors.
Gerrymandering is only one form of electoral abuse in self proclaimed representative democracies. But the US does seem to excel in partisan manipulation of its democratic processes along with voter registration and ID.
Any self respecting plutocrat only really has to buy influence from 2 potential sources of power in the US (and many other countriesh) and it has worked very well indeed for sectional and especially corporate interests.
Maybe one dollar really does represent one vote, as the aphorism goes, especially given US funding practices, and funding ought to be as much a reform issue as boundaries.
‘Modern population dynamics probably means that ten year reviews are too long’
I would guess that it is a ten-year review as you have the Census every ten years in the UK. After all the information was tabulated and the changes understood in the demography in the UK, then you could conduct a review based on hard figures. Of course you could switch over to a Census every five years and it is workable as that is what we have here in Oz but I am not sure that that is something the UK would look at.
UK parliamentary boundaries are subject to 5 year reviews.
The ten year census is not the only source of either demographic data or voter information as we have regional registration bodies that update the electoral register on an annual basis.
There is a legal duty for adults of voting age to register even though voting is voluntary.
Not sure what the English local government timescale is but local government boundary reviews are 15 yrs in Scotland.
Thinking about the Texas case, where the re-drawn maps are intended to increase the number of R-leaning districts, it appears to me that this goal requires making the redrawn districts more competitive (i.e., re-assigning R voters from “safely” R districts into more D-leaning districts, and D voters in the other direction.)
Two thoughts occur: this might backfire in the mid-terms and it would seem to give more power to independent voters and to small parties that make it onto the ballot, since their concerns might need to be satisfied to win in more nearly competitive districts.
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This is perhaps a naive and superficial thought, and I don’t mean to speak in defense of the Texas legislature, but it seems to me that in principle, a more competitive map (or “less uncompetitive”) is preferable to a map in which each district is permanently assigned to one or the other of the duopoly parties.
I do hope that the plan backfires next year, as a rebuke to the people behind the plan.
This is basically correct, a map with more seats for the majority party generally requires the majority to be spread thinner. Nate Silver looked at the Texas plan recently here.
It did backfire before: on the TX Dems back in 1990s, iirc, among many others. Partisan gerrymandering gets bad name undeservedly for this exact reason, IMHO.
If anything, if this helps break the evil CA gerrymandering system that currently (emphasis over safe seats over maximizing “partisan numerical advantage,”) I’m all for it.
Ps (while my prev comment seems stuck in mod buffer). One thing I think people forget (from the days people didn’t quite get mad over gerrymandering) is that this was one of the reasons why 1994 happened: especially in the South, Dems held on to state legs for a long time for various reasons and kept house district boundaries that gave Dems a numerical advantage at the cost of thin margins. When the partisan sentiments shifted just moderately across the country, it became an electoral massacre. I’m always amazed that this has been memory holed almost completely and people think gerrymandering is magic.
See also what happened in Canada fpin 1993 for what can happen very suddenly if you lose just some votes nationally under first past the post system. If the Prog Cons practiced gerrymandering like Americans, 1993 would have looked like a picnic (they did lose 99% of seats for losing about 20% of votes, iirc? With a well gerrymandered boundaries, I’ll bet you that 3% of votes would have cost you 99% of seats.)
Here in the South, with our much greater African American segment (about 30 percent in SC), there was traditionally a racial aspect to gerrymandering with blacks considered to be solid Democrats and the old Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond joining the Repubs. When Voting Rights came along majority black districts were arranged–with the connivance of the “black misleadership class”–to provide reliable districts for certain black politicians and an even greater Republican dominance elsewhere. And so with my state’s 7 representatives already being 6 R and one D (the notorious Jim Clyburn), the article’s link suggests the Repubs want to redistrict to take away even Clyburn’s seat.
Of course part of this bargain is that racial comity has improved and some blacks like our senator Tim Scott have even joined the Repubs. In my own town–50/50 racially–we have a black mayor and he seems to be popular.
But when it comes to the all important economic issues there’s not a lot of debate. Both sides are on the business Republican team even as the population itself is far more diverse. In the long ago defeated and dirt poor South the poor whites were in competition with the blacks for the crumbs of sustenance. The New South discarded that in favor of a business climate that could bring prosperity down from the unionized North.
So for those who wonder why SC is stuck with someone like Lindsey Graham there it is. The Democratic party now barely exists here.
From the partisan gerrymandering perspective, majority-minority districts are kinda stupid (why Reps generally go with them in more competitive states.). This implies that you create extra safe Dem districts by stuffing minority voters in a few districts. The rest, you can turn into moderately safe Rep districts (whole idea behind partisan gerrymandering!). The only reason you don’t like this, if you are GOP, is if you think you have such overwhelming advantage statewide that conceding even a seat or two is unnecessary.
I think they are just trying to suck up to Trump’s latest disruption. Unclear whether they will actually follow through.
Plus messing with Clyburn might be unpopular with that 30 percent and the comity Repubs depend upon to keep business humming.
North Carolina does have a more bipartisan scene although the persistent claims that it is “purple” may be exaggerated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state
Samuel Conner alludes to this above, but it’s worth more emphasis, I think. In addition to the extra redistricting between censuses, the GOP had super majorities for redistricting after the 2010 and 2020 censuses. (2022 was the 1st election conducted with their 2020 maps).
Point being that they had already stretched their advantage as far as they thought safe. By stretching even further, they give themselves some potential pickups, but the risk is that even a minor move toward the other party exposes far more seats to loss than before. So even from a purely partisan viewpoint, it’s very risky. I suspect this will hold true in California also, where there really aren’t that many seats to realistically gain.
I don’t make Newsom’s chances of even passing this ballot initiative better than 50-50, as the existing system is popular and it looks like the Arnold will be joining the campaign against it, to defend one of the more popular bits of his legacy. And you can be sure the no campaign will be quite well funded. Awfully embarrassing for Governor Goodhair if this crashes and burns.
Eh, the only reason this CA initiative won’t easily win is the 2/3 requirement. The DNC is going to be fully behind this; I expect they may even try to push this at the same type of level as a presidential race. And Newsome is making headway with his “anti-Trump” approach, even though I think it’s cringe.
To be honest, I think this will be Trump’s to lose, as odd as that sounds. If he keeps up the fascist tactics, it will most likely pass.
There are many reasons voter participation is so low in the US, gerrymandering being one, though probably the main cause is that a majority of the population believes (correctly*) that voting has no impact as they have too few dollars for their “vote,” aka position, to be considered on any matter of substance. I would say pass the popcorn, but I would rather watch Babylon 5 reruns, which I think is more relevant than US political theater (clown show?) whose purpose is to distract from how government actions might further benefit the oligarchy (one dollar! one vote!).
My SWAG is that voters show up for ballot initiatives and then randomly cast votes for D or R – it’s hard for me to understand other than stochastically why the national D vs R vote is so statistically close.
*https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
I can think of a simple and easy way to fix the gerrymander problem. Have permanent congressional districts, and weigh the elected politician’s voting strength to the population of their district.
The elected politician’s vote in Congress would be weighed to the population of his district. If congresscrittter A has 10,000 people in his district, his vote counts as 10,000., If congresscritter B has 25,000 constituents in his district, count their vote as 25,000. No more need for redistricting.
The same should be done for Senators. There is no good reason that Wyoming with 450,000 people should have the same number of votes as California with 30 million residents.
” There is no good reason that Wyoming with 450,000 people should have the same number of votes as California with 30 million residents.”
Well, had that rule been in effect there never would be a country to start with; whether you consider that good or not I suppose is in the eye of the beholder.
Citation needed. Was it specifically, in an empirically demonstrable way, the anti democracy Senate apportionment that convinced states into the union? Or is this just sort of a thing people say.
Most countries don’t annihilate the principle of one man one vote in this way, and yet all countries managed to form. Eg. Canadian confederation happened without promising New Brunswick a supervote.
This was the compromise noted by Madison (the de facto recordkeeper at the Convention, asno official minutes were kept) at the Constitutional Convention. It hasn’t been called the Great Compromise for past 200+ years for nothing.
Yes, the so-called Connecticut Compromise of 1787. It assuaged the fear of small population states losing power to the large population state. Again, holding democracy hostage to maintain leverage. This ‘compromise’ when melded with the power of the Senate to ‘advise and consent’ on Cabinet appointees and selection of SC Justices gives Wyoming way too much say in national politics. (Wyo. didn’t even exist in 1787.)
At the national level, we don’t have a democracy. I know this is a shock to so many people because Americans like to go on and on about democracy. This country is set up as a federation of individual states. Therefore, states are considered the foundational build blocks, not the citizens. States have a House in which they get proportional representation and a Senate in which they get equal representation. The individual people of those states are not considered important except to the extent that they are used to determine the House proportions. See, for example, the 3/5ths compromise. In which, the non-voting slave population gave 3/5ths more voting power to their state, but not to those people themselves. We have always been ruled by representatives from the land-owning class whose only argument is about how many votes THEY get, not how many WE get.
I’m not saying this is the way it should be, but it’s the situation we find ourselves in. Any changes would require constitutional amendments. Good luck with that.
Here in Hawaii we have a bi-partisan Elections Commission (4 D, 4 R and the 8 elect a 9th) that oversees the Office of Elections and Reapportionment Commission. Since HI is so heavily blue there isn’t as much of the D-R dynamic. Tends to be more ethnic. At the congressional level they pretty much draw a circle around Honolulu and size it to make the numbers equal. Since we went from at-large to districts in 1972 the boundary is always on Oahu Island, so one district is considered urban Honolulu and the other Neighbor Island (only recently has CD2 ever elected a rep who actually lived on one of the Neighbor Islands).
For state districts the division of Oahu seats vs Neighbor Island seats is always contentious. It’s compounded by an HI constitution provision that requires removing military and their families from the census numbers. They don’t have a good way to do this (DoD just provides a head count) so they kind of arbitrarily subtract from census tracts near the bases. Since almost all the military are on Oahu, Neighbor Islands see this as an advantage. For 2020 roughly 60k total were subtracted.
My community is roughly 1/3 Filipino, 1/3 Japanese and 1/3 Euro, but tends to be more red than average and has always been split into 2 or 3 districts. The neighboring communities are one that’s heavily Filipino and the other Japanese so they are always trying to assemble ethnic majorities using my community to get to the required number.
Since we have 2x reps as sens, in theory a sen district should be 2 house districts, but in practice this is never the case.
Tit for tat is exactly the wrong response to this. The real casualty of gerrymandering is electoral legitimacy and social license, which (if people haven’t noticed) is already severely under threat in the US. This sort of tactic looks an awful lot to me like bipartisan agreement on the legitimacy of stealing elections.
As it were, the effects of Gerrymandering are way too exaggerated anyways. Usual sort of gerrymandering buys you more seats at risk of electoral security and, if you ask me, makes for better “democracy” by making pols more vulnerable. More stupid gerrymandering, the better, I’d say.
Tbh, CA had the worse kind of gerrymandering: safe party seats all around. The rise of Trump messed with this for the past decade (Dems gained more votes than any other county in Orange Cty, CA, formerly GOP stronghold, in 2016 , and that threw the gerrymandering bargain into dumpster for good (granted, it’s been shaky for a while…)
But I haven’t seen any studies that would support your take on this. The number of house seats that are actually real contests in a general election has been steadily dropping as the partisan gerrymandering has become more effective. At this point it’s rare to see even 40 out of well over 400 seriously up for grabs.
The effects are hard to gauge: House elections in US have NEVER been very competitive, rwgardless of gerrymandering. What is different now from before is that, before, incumbents were safer even in districts that should have been competitive for “partisan” reasons–a lot of Dem incumbents were elected from districts that went Reagan or Bush I, for example, with big margins, too–while that hardly happens now. House elections are increasingly more “partisan” and in attempt to stretch advantage as much as possible by risky gerrymandering, they wind up creating a bunch of competitive districts, I’m actually all for it.
We are not going to see the effects very soon, if only for the fact that we have never actually had “full blown” gerrymandering yet. Political bargains between parties and judicial interventions prevented them from going “too far.” Personally, if all the tit-for-tatting breaks down the bargains and they really letthings rip, I’d love to see what happens to the parties over the decade thereafter or so.
gotta love politicians choosing their voters rather than the other way around. too bad it works. so much for democracy®.
As usual, the US – and any politicians response to corruption is more corruption. Gerrymandering is anti democratic, it tells the voter that they are not important, that the politician wants power not to carry out the wishes of the electorate. This Bill will not be overturned at the first opportunity, rather it will further divide the US; the response should have been a fair drawing of districts – using a computer model to determine population, district size, time to cover the district by the representatives. This gives districts the fairness of not knowing voter preference and making them of a shape and size suitable for politicians to tour their areas more effectively.
Newsom is showing he is open to corrupt practices for power instead of wining over the electorate, he is telling those who do not vote for ‘his side’ that they are irrelevant and he does not need to bother trying to convert them to his way of thinking .
I live in Silicon Valley CA, so far I’ve received 2 brochures in the mail warning about the special election and redistricting.
“Vote NO in the Special Election” from VotersFirstAct.org
“Alert: Politician Power Grab” from ProtectFairElections.org
Have not looked into who is behind these groups. Have not seen anything on TV yet, expect this will get lots of TV time