To Fight Trump, Democrats Must Embrace Gerrymandering

Yahoo

06-02-2025

The Trump-Musk administration's campaign to loot and pillage the federal government is going largely unchecked. Republicans narrowly control the House and the Senate, making them passive accomplices to the destruction. As the minority party in both chambers, Democrats have few options to staunch the bleeding. Whether the administration will follow court orders that curb their vaulting ambitions is, for now, an open question.
Democrats at the state level can do one thing in the medium term that might help: redrawing their state's congressional maps to favor Democrats as much as possible ahead of the 2026 midterms. Republicans only control the House by a handful of votes. Making it easier to retake that chamber next year will be the first, best opportunity to serve as a check on the White House.
Doing so will require Democrats to pivot away from almost two decades of campaigning against gerrymandering. In practical terms, this pivot means no longer losing the last war. Partisan gerrymandering is an unfortunate reality in modern American political life. Especially since 2010, Republican-led legislatures throughout the country have used it to maximize their legislative gains and minimize their losses in each election cycle.
That effort paid off tremendously in 2024 when it helped narrowly keep Republican control of the House. 'We made no bones about the fact that we're going to shore up incumbents, and where we had opportunities to go on offense, we were going to do that,' Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told The New York Times last month. 'So what that means is bringing a whole lot of Republican seats that were otherwise in jeopardy off the board.'
Democrats and voting-rights groups mostly responded to the explosion in partisan gerrymandering through litigation. While they scored some crucial victories in the 2010s, most famously in North Carolina and Wisconsin, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court put an end to it in 2019. In a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the court held that federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear partisan-gerrymandering cases.
'Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. 'But the fact that such gerrymandering is 'incompatible with democratic principles' does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary.' He concluded that the issue must be tackled by the democratic branches of government.
Efforts to challenge partisan gerrymandering in state courts in red states have been mixed at best. In North Carolina, where Republicans effectively gave themselves permanent control of the state legislature, victories over gerrymandering have been short-lived. The state supreme court tried to redraw the state's legislative maps to be more fair in 2022, but then reversed course after the 2022 election flipped the court back to Republican control. As the Times noted last month, that defeat effectively gave Republicans three House seats—and with it, control of the chamber.
Six states do not have enough people for multiple legislative districts, so gerrymandering is not an issue (or an option) there. Most of the remaining forty-four states are under partial or total GOP control. Another nine of them use independent redistricting commissions to draw their legislative maps. Only two of those nine states—Idaho and Montana—are 'red' states, for lack of a better term. The remaining seven states trend either purple or blue: Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, New Jersey, and Washington.
The commissions in California and New Jersey are particularly unfortunate. With large populations and reliable Democratic control of the state legislature and governor's mansion, the two states could have redrawn their maps more easily than others while complying with federal voting-rights laws. With nine Republican-favoring districts, California alone could tip the balance of power in the House if lawmakers could redraw their congressional maps at will.
California's experience is also a case study in the dangers of unilateral disarmament on gerrymandering. The state adopted an independent redistricting commission through ballot initiatives in 2008 and 2010, just before the 2010 census that Republicans in other states used to entrench themselves into effective one-party rule. The largest donor to the ballot initiatives was Charlie Munger, Jr., the wealthy son of the longtime Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman—and a longtime Republican donor.
Munger persuaded voting-rights groups and politicians from both sides of the aisle to back the reforms. 'I would've been very welcome in Republican circles if I decided to go chuck 10 million in a bunch of races up and down the state to fight for Republican control of Congress,' Munger told The New York Times in 2010. 'It isn't a worthy ambition compared to doing this.' While Munger has carved out a reputation as a good-governance activist, the net effect of the reforms was to entrench nearly a dozen GOP-friendly seats in the most progressive state in the Union.
So where could Democrats go instead to find a few seats? The best option would be Illinois, which currently has 14 Democrats and 3 Republicans in its state congressional delegation. Republicans there have long complained about the state's redistricting practices and their favorability towards Democrats.
Last month, a group of voters and the top Republican in the Illinois House filed a lawsuit in state court to challenge the state legislative map on partisan-gerrymandering grounds. If the Illinois Supreme Court rules against them, Governor J.B. Pritzker and his allies should take it as a green light to redraw the congressional map as well. Other viable states that might be able to squeeze out one or two more Democratic seats are Minnesota and Oregon.
In the long term, Democratic lawmakers in states like California, New Jersey, and New York—whose hybrid system allowed Republicans to make unusual gains in 2022—should also take steps to reverse their states' gerrymandering reforms. A notable irony, in fact, is that the abolition of gerrymandering first requires those who would end the practice to become more deft at it. I've argued, for instance, that congressional Democrats should ultimately pass a law requiring states to adopt some form of proportional representation, thereby ending gerrymandering forever. But they'll need to secure a House majority to pull this off. Until then, Democrats and blue states must be willing to use the same legal and constitutional tools as Republicans to protect American democracy.