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Where did gerrymandering come from? You can thank — or blame — a former Mass. governor
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TODAY'S STARTING POINT
American democracy owes Massachusetts a lot. The first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired here and the state's constitution became a model for the nation's. But Massachusetts is also the home state of a more notorious political tradition: partisan gerrymandering.
The term refers to state legislatures drawing voting maps designed to advantage one political party. Gerrymandering has been in the headlines lately because the Republicans who control the Texas legislature are trying to redraw congressional districts to cost Democrats US House seats before next year's midterm elections. Their Democratic counterparts have fled the state in hopes of blocking the measure from passing.
But the term's origins might be less familiar to you — and say a lot about how American politics has and hasn't changed over time.
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Elbridge Gerry, former governor of Massachusetts.
Painting by James Bogle / Wikipedia
What's in a namesake
Elbridge Gerry was a staunch proponent of American democracy. Born in Marblehead in 1744, Gerry vocally opposed Britain's dominion over the colonies and used his merchantman's wealth to help supply the Revolution.
Yet after independence, as with other Founding Fathers, Gerry's partisan allegiances started to
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It was that partisan feeling that linked Gerry's name to the term we still use today. Gerry's victory brought his fellow Democratic-Republicans majorities in the state legislature. But in case future elections went poorly, the party wanted to make sure that its control would continue. So it drew a jigsaw of erratically shaped districts to dilute the opposing Federalists' power. The redrawn districts either 'packed' Federalist voters into fewer districts or 'cracked' Federalist strongholds into different ones.
Gerry signed his party's gerrymandering proposal into law, though the practice existed in the US
The cartoon's origins have been disputed. But
The March 26, 1812, edition of the Boston Gazette carried Tisdale's drawing (above) and merged it with the sitting governor's name. The term 'Gerry-mander' was born.
What's old is new
Gerrymandering is a reminder that many of the flaws of American democracy have been with us almost from the start. Federalist-aligned newspapers reprinted Tisdale's drawing, and observers immediately perceived Gerry's gerrymander as unfair. The term quickly entered the political lexicon and went national.
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Then as now, both dominant parties gerrymandered — and criticized each other for it. An 1878 article in the Globe
A new era
Yet the rest of Gerry's story also suggests how things have changed.
The redistricting plan he signed helped spur voters to throw him out in the next election. (He later served as James Madison's vice president.) Yet even as today's voters
Gerrymandering worked for Gerry — his party held the Massachusetts Senate in 1812 even as he lost the governorship — but tailoring districts to the results of the last election can be risky. Turnout, changing coalitions, and President Trump's deep unpopularity mean that 2026 may look very different than 2024. Still, after three consecutive House elections in which only a handful of seats determined control, it may be enough.
There is a solution: having independent commissions, rather than state legislators, draw maps. But in practice, large Democrat-controlled states have embraced such commissions more often, effectively tying the party's hands while most Republican-controlled states gerrymander unabated. In 2021, House Democrats proposed legislation that would have banned partisan redistricting for congressional districts nationwide;
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