The Gerrymandering Arms Race

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When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced his plan to redraw Texas’ congressional map back in July 2025, he likely had no idea that he was kicking off a national firestorm. Democrats, after all, were staunch opponents of exactly the kind of redistricting hijinks Abbott and his Republican legislature wanted to impose, so the odds of a coordinated Democratic response were slim.

Things didn’t turn out quite like Abbott planned. Texas’ new maps will likely hand Republicans 5 additional seats in the House, but those gains are likely to be washed away by a flood of blue state retaliation. California’s new congressional maps will likely hand 5 seats to Democratic lawmakers, while other states are prepared to tip the balance even further. A year later, Abbott’s ambitious gambit is looking like the GOP’s biggest bust.

In this week’s Truth About, we’re diving into the latest developments in the nation’s race to redistrict and unpacking the state of play ahead of this year’s crucial midterm elections. Representation has never been so confusing!

— Max Burns

Six states have already implemented new congressional maps ahead of the midterms. On Tuesday, Virginia became the seventh. Energized by Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s romping win in last year’s gubernatorial elections, Virginia’s Democrats pressed forward with a plan to redraw congressional districts in a way that will likely result in the Commonwealth returning only a single Republican lawmaker to the House next year. Virginia’s initiative narrowly passed yesterday by a vote of 51-48, though it could still face a GOP court challenge. 

Virginia’s vote now means Republicans’ redistricting effort has become a net-negative endeavor. Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio added a combined 9 Republican districts to this year’s midterm map, while California, Virginia and (surprisingly!) Utah added 10 additional Democratic seats — which seems like a whole lot of work for Democrats to gain a single seat. But the fun isn’t over, because multiple additional states are either considering redistricting or fighting to enforce their redistricting through lengthy court battles.

New York, Louisiana and Georgia are all locked in court fights over maps that decimate the opposing party. Maryland and Washington State have both introduced legislation to hammer Republican districts, while South Carolina is readying its own salvo against Democrats. If those three states move forward in time for this year’s elections, Democratic margins will likely increase by one or two seats.

And then there’s Florida. The Sunshine State’s Republican legislature is currently debating redrawing its maps, though some GOP leaders close to Gov. Ron DeSantis have warned that the effort could backfire. DeSantis normally isn’t one to take advice, but with Democrats running even with their GOP opponents in this year’s gubernatorial and senate races, few Republicans are eager to risk so many statewide offices for a redistricting plan that may ultimately be invalidated by the courts.

It’s a mess, folks!

Lost in the churn of mid-cycle redistricting is the simple fact that it hurts the voter representation that is supposed to be the core of America’s entire exercise in free and fair elections. Redistricting efforts in Louisiana, Texas and Florida have eliminated racially diverse districts in a way that openly violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Even in states where racial diversity is preserved, partisan redistricting by definition reduces the voting power of a state’s political minority in order to strengthen the party in power. 

No one is playing coy about the partisan nature of this year’s gerrymandering race. DeSantis delayed Florida’s legislative session in order to await a Supreme Court ruling that will likely gut additional portions of the Voting Rights Act and allow more extreme partisan redistricting. New York’s Democratic lawmakers won’t openly admit it, but they are hoping for a court ruling that also weakens laws designed to ensure districts accurately represent the will of voters. 

Gerrymandering is a nasty business in which there are no heroes, and any politician who says otherwise is either deceiving themselves or trying to deceive you.

We’ve known for a while that gerrymandering is poisonous to democracy. Research from the Brennan Center found that gerrymandered districts saw lower voter turnout and reduced voter enthusiasm — which isn’t surprising when a voter realizes their district is designed to ensure a specific outcome. 

Unrepresentative districts create a whole host of other problems, too, from lower voter registration levels to misallocation of government services. If gerrymandering renders certain voter groups politically invisible within a district, their elected representatives are significantly less likely to notice or respond to their needs. That turns the very idea of the House on its head, resulting in a representative body that isn’t quite sure who is actually being represented.

Election results become less representative as fewer voters turn out, and candidates running in extremely safe districts often tend to be more extreme than those who have to appeal to a sizable population of independent or moderate voters. If voters’ main concern with Congress is that it doesn’t know how to compromise, just wait until they elect a House full of lawmakers whose safe districts allow them to stake out the most extreme uncompromising positions. 

The Founding Fathers wrestled with these very ideas when drafting the Constitution, and clear answers were as elusive then as they are today. 250 years on from the founding of our country, the American people are about to find out if their legislature can function in a landscape warped by gerrymandered hyperpartisanship