Political Arms Race: Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering. If you’re not familiar with the term, Wikipedia defines it like this: “The political manipulation of electoral district boundaries to advantage a party, group, or socioeconomic class.” Close enough.

And it’s always been with us, at least since America’s infancy. The name comes from an 1812 redistricting of legislative seats in Massachusetts, led by Governor and future Vice President Elbridge Gerry. One particular district was made famous for looking like a salamander, thus the name.

But partisan redistricting goes back even further, to 1788, when Anti-Federalists in Virginia, led by Gov. Patrick Henry, carved a seat to keep James Madison, the father of our Constitution, out of Congress from the Commonwealth’s Fifth Congressional District. It didn’t work - Madison was elected anyway.

My first encounter with gerrymandering came in 1981, following the previous year’s decennial census. I was the press secretary to US Rep. John Hiler (R-IN), one of the freshman Republicans who unseated Democrats (in Hiler’s case, House Majority Whip John Brademas) in the Reagan landslide of 1980. The Republicans who controlled the Indiana State legislature set up a computer at the State Republican Party headquarters in Indianapolis with census track and other software developed by the late Tom Hofeller, the long-time GOP consultant who led the party’s national redistricting efforts. I remember Hiler familiarizing himself with the numbers on the computer and playing with possible district boundaries. Hofeller, the Claremont Colleges graduate and PhD, was a genius.

Hiler was narrowly elected from Indiana’s Third Congressional District, which at the time included three counties, LaPorte (Hiler’s home), St. Joseph (the largest, and home to South Bend and Notre Dame University), and Elkhart (home of the manufactured housing and recreational vehicle industry, and heavily GOP). Hiler was invited to suggest changes to his district lines by Hoosier state legislators.

Ultimately, legislators carved out heavily Democratic Michigan City in the far northwestern corner of the Third District and made it part of the industrial, Gary-based Democratic First District that bordered Chicago. They replaced it with three neighboring rural counties to the south - Starke (purplish), Marshall (light red), and heavily Republican Kosciusko.

And that came in handy less than two years later, when Hiler eeked out a roughly 3,000-vote reelection victory in the Democratic election of 1982, when 33 Republican incumbents were swept out of the US House. Dan Rather, then-CBS anchor, at 7 p.m. declared Hiler the first GOP incumbent to be unseated after the early returns saw him losing by more than 10,000 votes. Instead, the now-discredited Rather was proven wrong later in the evening when tallies from heavily Republican Elkhart and Kosciusko trickled in.

Republicans during Ronald Reagan’s first midterm election were being punished for a recession that wrung Jimmy Carter’s double-digit inflation out of the economy, led by Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker. That resulted in unemployment reaching double digits (10 percent) a month before the election. Ouch.

The “gerrymander” played a key role in preserving Hiler’s career, which would span the rest of the decade. Hofeller became a legend for helping manipulate House district maps in North Carolina and other states to bolster GOP numbers. He passed away in 2018, but not before helping inspire a Trump 45 effort to eliminate the counting of non-citizens in the decennial census of 2020 for reapportionment purposes. It was not successful, but watch this space as we approach the next decennial census in 2030, especially since at least 10 million illegal migrants were welcomed into the country by the Biden Administration’s open border policies.

The Constitution requires the decennial census, which includes counting every resident, regardless of citizenship or legal status. Those census numbers determine the apportioning of US House districts by state. As a result of the past few censuses, we’ve seen states like Texas, Arizona, and Florida experience rapid growth in both population and congressional districts, while stagnant, slow-growing states like New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania lose seats. Montana and South Dakota have also lost seats in recent decades, but Montana, thanks to expatriating Californians, has regained their second seat. But while most redistricting efforts happen in most states immediately after the decennial census, there’s nothing under federal law or precedent to prevent states from redrawing them almost anytime. Most recently, North Carolina Republicans successfully redrew congressional lines in 2023 after the 2022 election saw a partisan switch to the GOP in the state’s Supreme Court, which promptly overturned a decision that new maps were illegal. That said, several states, including California and New York, have state constitutional provisions against it, and other states have adopted reform laws and created “bipartisan” or “independent” commissions or other schemes to draw lines.

Texas, Florida, and a handful of other states don’t have such prohibitions. And staring at a 2026 election in which the House Republicans’ very narrow 5-seat majority is at risk, GOP strategists are eyeballing GOP-controlled states to conduct a mid-decade redrawing that could help them retain control of the US House. It may or may not work since the historical average loss of seats by the party in power during midterm elections is about 26.

That said, thanks to the evolution of gerrymandering across the nation, there are only about 20-25 House seats - about five percent of them - that appear truly competitive heading into the 2026 midterm elections. I don’t think that’s what the founders and framers had in mind when they crafted the Constitution, which gave state legislatures broad plenary power to draw congressional (and their own) districts. But a trip down memory lane helps us understand how we wound up in this situation.

Democrats, of course, are apoplectic and promise, with the help of their phalanx of interest groups, to challenge whatever the states come up with in court. You’re excused if you detect a strong whiff of hypocrisy from our Democratic friends. If they want to complain to someone about partisan gerrymandering, they should find a mirror.

When it comes to gerrymandering, they started the fire. And it was the late US Rep. Phil Burton (D-CA), a leader in the infamous Democratic political machine in San Francisco, who lit the match. Burton served in the House from 1964 until he died in 1983, but not before launching and overseeing two dramatic partisan gerrymanders in the Golden State that wiped out GOP congressional seats in the early 1970s and again in the early 1980s. “…it’s amusing to see Democrats, all the way up to former President Barack Obama, expressing outrage about gerrymandering,” editorialized the Sacramento Bee newspaper in 2017. “Republicans are merely doing what Democrats did for many decades, until the GOP figured out how to turn the tables. California is virtually a case study in the politics of gerrymandering.

“The late Congressman Phil Burton drew congressional maps so partisan and convoluted that he described them as ‘my contribution to modern art,’” the Bee added. California voters, led by then-GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (the last Republican to hold statewide office in California), enacted Proposition 11 in 2008 and Proposition 20 two years later to create an independent commission to draw state legislative and congressional district lines, and only once in a decade.

Right after the 1980 election, just before Burton crafted his contributions to modern art, California’s congressional delegation was split 23-20, with Democrats holding a slight edge despite Republicans winning 52 percent of the US House vote. Today, “independent” commissions, along with California's descent into a deep blue single-party state, the delegation has 9 Republicans and 43 Democrats. Republicans won 34 percent of the congressional vote in 2024, but hold about 18 percent of the seats. And California is hardly alone - there are plenty of states where Republicans win close to 40 percent of the congressional vote but hold zero to, maybe, two seats, including Rhode Island, Washington, Oregon, and New Mexico.

To be fair, Republican incumbents are partly to blame, too, for pushing for safe seats for themselves when spreading a few Republicans around might help make neighboring districts more competitive. And plenty of “red” states like Oklahoma and Utah have zero Democratic districts. The Sooner State’s Oklahoma City-based Fifth District wormed its way into neighboring GOP counties to the east to bolster the prospects of former state Senator and now GOP Rep. Stephanie Bice, who unseated Democrat Kendra Horn after one term in 2022. Many of Oklahoma County’s more Democratic precincts were apportioned to US Rep. Frank Lucas, dean of Oklahoma’s House delegation, whose expansive and heavily GOP rural district can accommodate them with no threat to his (or GOP) electoral prospects.

Republicans like my friend, New Jersey’s Tom Kean Jr., or New York’s Michael Lawler already represent largely compact marginal “purplish” districts, and don’t have many GOP voters to share if they want to hang on to their seats. And the GOP has its states, including Wisconsin, where they have a huge partisan advantage in Congress, well over their statewide share of the vote. Then again, neighboring Democratic incumbents are happy to pack as many GOP voters into their colleagues’ districts as possible. It’s a truly bipartisan game.

Several big-state Democratic governors, from New York’s Kathy Hochul to New Jersey’s Phil Murphy and California’s Gavin Newsom, have promised to respond in kind. Still, they’re hamstrung by constitutional limits or simple math - there are so few GOP seats to convert, if any. Republicans are catching up to what Democrats have done for decades.

Maryland Democrats, who have already gerrymandered GOP seats down to one, are looking to rid themselves of the last one, Dr. Andy Harris (R-MD), chair of the House Freedom Caucus, who represents the state’s GOP-leaning eastern shore. It’s hard to see how, but they did a masterful job of snaking heavily GOP western Maryland’s Sixth District deep enough into the swampy environs of Washington, DC’s uber-left Montgomery County suburbs to turn that into a purple-blue district (now-deputy FBI director Dan Bongino nearly won here in 2014 despite it). No wonder several western Maryland GOP leaders have proposed becoming part of West Virginia, with which they have much more in common, demographically and politically. Certainly more than crime-infested Baltimore.

Courts, including the Supreme Court, have struggled in recent years in determining what’s illegal and what’s not. The Court doesn’t like “extreme” racial gerrymandering, but is hesitant to interfere, given the plenary power granted by the Constitution to state legislatures to draw lines. Ultimately, the voters get to decide when parties and partisans have gone too far. And the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which empowered the Department of Justice to sign off on reapportionment plans in states with a history of racial discrimination, was struck down by the US Supreme Court.

It looks like the Texas map is going to be enacted. We’ll see if it results in a gain of five seats. And who knows what Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and his heavily GOP legislature will try to do, along with a few other states (e.g., Ohio). Currently, the GOP holds 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats. Democrats have about 40 percent of the seats while capturing 42 percent of the vote in 2024. The GOP might be able to squeeze two more seats through a mid-decade reapportionment, but we’ll see. In Texas, the GOP holds 25 or two-thirds of the state’s 38 congressional seats. Democrats have 34 percent of the seats (for now) while capturing 40 percent of the House vote in 2024. That’s way more “fair” than what California and many other blue states have done until now.

For all the complaining about GOP-controlled redistricting, in larger states, their districts have much more closely represented the partisan vote. At least until what Texas is about to do. Paybacks are hell.

I doubt the polling on mid-census reapportionment would be favorable, except among the most partisan Republicans (or Democrats, depending on whose oxen are being gored). Moving voters around into new districts will create confusion and frustration among many voters, many of whom already don’t know who represents them in Congress. Voters typically don’t like power grabs. But it’s also hard to imagine voters punishing Republicans or Democrats for their gerrymanders. They haven’t thus far, at least very often. It’s hard to make line-drawing a salient and compelling political issue. There are bigger issues, like affordability, jobs, schools, and crime.

And we’re all worse off for it with fewer and fewer competitive seats that genuinely reflect the popular will, which is what the House is designed to do. But until voters in these states step up as California tried to do in 2008 and again in 2010 to curb these practices, Democrats have only themselves to blame for starting this arms race.

In 2024, Republicans captured 49.8 percent of the popular vote for the House, resulting in holding 50.1 percent of the congressional districts. Democrats won 47.2 percent of the vote while capturing 49.9 percent of the seats.

You started the fire, Democrats. Enjoy the consequences, and maybe think through what the consequences of partisan electoral reform and eliminating the US Senate’s filibuster, two more of the Democratic wet dreams for expanding their power, would be. Fighting fire with fire is not always the best longer-term strategy. Some Democrats admit their open borders policy was designed to bolster their reapportionment designs. Many federal funding formulas are also based on census data. Follow the money, as they say, and Democrats can’t feed enough from the government trough.

Meanwhile, suppose the GOP wants to fix what’s wrong with reapportioning congressional districts, even though one study suggests the effect hasn’t been that great. However, we won’t know the impact of Biden’s open borders policies on reapportionment until 2030, and after the Trump Administration’s aggressive deportion strategies, which, despite wailing, nashing, and false reporting by the media, haven’t begun to put a dent in the flood of “undocumented immigrants” from 2021-2024.

Can the GOP figure out how to exclude non-resident aliens, especially the illegal variety, from being counted for redistricting purposes, short of a Constitutional amendment? It may require a constitutional amendment, and Trump has already tried the executive order route unsuccessfully, after President Biden quickly reversed it in early 2021. Bills have been introduced in Congress. Stay tuned, and whoever is elected president in 2028 and which party controls Congress - along with the Supreme Court - may ultimately decide, or not.

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