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.
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.
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.