Gerrymandering Is America's Dumbest Political Tradition

Newsweek

18 hours ago

Americans live with many oddities in our political system. We hand the White House to candidates who lost the election by popular vote count. We elect sheriffs and judges like it's still the Wild West. We tolerate Senate rules that allow 41 members to block the will of 59. But of the various artifacts of American political exceptionalism, none so reliably damages democracy as gerrymandering.
This weekend brought yet another illustration: Democratic lawmakers in Texas fled the state to prevent a vote on a Republican redistricting plan that would carve five new districts in ways that dilute minority and urban representation, effectively guaranteeing GOP congressional gains in 2026. Governor Greg Abbott responded with threats of arrest. Attorney General Ken Paxton floated declaring the seats vacant.
And most of the country barely reacted—because what should be an institutional crisis has become routine. Like frogs who grow accustomed to ever-more scalding water, Americans have come to accept that these are reasonable ways to behave. But viewed from abroad—where I have spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent—it looks like a mutation of politics.
Gerrymandering has existed in the United States since the early 19th century, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry approved a contorted district map, one segment of which resembled a salamander. The idea is to use district boundaries to minimize the other side's representation. In today's data-driven age, what began as crude, localized manipulation has become a mathematically precise tool for systematically distorting election results, sometimes cementing minority rule.
Both parties have used it, but Republicans in recent decades have elevated gerrymandering to an art form. After the 2010 census, the GOP launched Project REDMAP to target swing-state legislatures and redraw maps for maximum partisan advantage. In Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, the results were astonishing: in 2018, Democrats in Wisconsin won 53 percent of the vote but received only 36 of Wisconsin's 99 State Assembly seats.
In state after state—Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida—legislatures have engineered maps that ensure one-party dominance, often through racial gerrymandering techniques like "cracking" minority populations to dilute their votes across districts or "packing" them into as few as possible. After the 2020 census, Texas gained two new congressional seats thanks to population growth among Latino and Black residents. But rather than enhance those communities' representation, lawmakers redrew boundaries to minimize their political impact.
Even when courts intervene, legislatures delay action, ignore rulings, or revise maps just enough to skirt the edges of compliance.
The consequences are profound. Competitive elections become rarer. Incumbents grow unassailable, accountable only to low-turnout partisan primaries, which reward extremism and penalize compromise. Minority voices are marginalized. In this disgraceful landscape, public cynicism becomes rational.
AUSTIN, TEXAS - AUGUST 07: Attendees view a map during a Senate Special Committee on Congressional Redistricting public testimony hearing on August 07, 2025 in Austin, Texas.
AUSTIN, TEXAS - AUGUST 07: Attendees view a map during a Senate Special Committee on Congressional Redistricting public testimony hearing on August 07, 2025 in Austin, Texas.We see the results: basic gun reforms stall in Congress despite widespread public support. State legislatures pass book bans and restrict abortion access in defiance of majority sentiment. Fringe candidates win office on the backs of ideological activists, then shape national policy. And many Americans, correctly sensing the game is deeply flawed, give up on voting altogether. America's voter participation levels are rather low.
The U.S. is nearly alone in tolerating gerrymandering. The U.K. also uses district-based elections, but it relies on independent commissions—devoid of political input—to draw its maps based on geography and population. Canada and Australia follow similar models. Most European democracies use proportional representation, where seats are allocated according to vote share. That can come with other problems, like unstable government and unwieldy coalitions, but it does make the very idea of gerrymandering structurally impossible.
American politicians, by contrast, not only draw their own maps but do so under few constraints. Judicial oversight is minimal. Federal standards are nearly nonexistent. That we have normalized this madness is a measure of our democratic decline.
Gerrymandering is part of a broader pattern: a constellation of structurally anti-democratic mechanisms that Americans have come to accept.
The Electoral College has routinely awarded the presidency to the loser of the popular vote. In this system—consider this absurdity—presidential candidates have no reason to visit the nation's three most populous cities or its capital. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington are not in swing states, so the results there are pre-ordained. Indeed, until the 1964 election the residents of the capital could not even vote for president—the District of Columbia is not a state; it took a constitutional amendment to fix that nonsense.
The Senate filibuster blocks legislation backed by broad majorities. The election of law enforcement officials politicizes justice. Even the United States' measurement system—miles, pounds, gallons, with hardly anyone knowing how many inches there are in a mile—sets us at odds with scientific and global norms.
To me, this looks like dysfunction masquerading as heritage, and ossification passing itself off as tradition. It has real consequences for trust, governance, and national cohesion.
There is nothing in the Constitution requiring states to draw districts this way. Several—Arizona, California, Michigan, Colorado—already use independent commissions with obviously better outcomes (meaning: not partisan cheating). Congress could impose basic national standards for fairness, transparency, and timing. But that remedy, too, is blocked by the Senate's procedural choke points—and, essentially, by the Republicans, who at this point have no shame.
Ultimately, it will take a cultural shift: a refusal to accept gerrymandering as just another partisan tactic. It is, at its core, election-rigging. Parties that engage in it should be punished at the polls. Instead, they're rewarded with power.
A fix may require a breakup of the current political duopoly. What's needed is a grand centrist force—perhaps not a party but a movement—committed to democratic principles, to institutional reform, and to fair representation. Such a force must reject gerrymandering outright: not balance it between parties or trim around the edges, but end it completely.
No democracy can endure if its structures suppress majority rule. Outrages that seem entrenched are eventually swept aside, sometimes politely and sometimes with force. I have seen this happen again and again, around the world. At some point, the public says: enough.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor (also leading coverage from Iran) and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.