Gerrymandering Again, Still

RIP VRA

What do you do when your party is so unpopular that you can’t win free and fair elections? You suppress registration and turnout, you cast aspersions on competitors, you claim fraud where none exists, and you gerrymander.

Even before the recent landmark evisceration of Part 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), only 61 of 435 Congressional seats were deemed competitive. That’s a paltry 14%. Eighty-six percent are the outcome not of voters picking their candidates, but of candidates picking their voters. That is what you get with partisan gerrymandering. A couple of years ago, the Supreme Court held that political gerrymandering, no matter how partisan, was kosher.

The remaining part of the VRA outlawed racial gerrymandering, and now that protection is dead too. There is a legislative fix, but there aren’t enough lawmakers brave enough to depoliticize the apportionment process and simply allow American voters their voice.

President Trump is all about one-party rule. He says, “Vote for me now, and you’ll never have to vote again, because we’re fixing it.”

The current ruling, Louisiana v. Callais, finds the six conservative justices in agreement with the wholly ridiculous notion that racism in the South is dead, so there’s no need monitor elections there.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, claimed that because Black voters participated in the Obama (2008 and 2012) elections at similar rates as Whites, racism must be over. To say turnout is a measure of racism tortures logic in ways that would make Torquemada blush.

As predictable as Elon Musk posting racist comments on X, Southern states have rushed to redistrict. A mid-cycle effort previously unthinkable. Louisiana halted primary elections—after voting was in process—to redraw their maps. Alabama promises to do the same. Get this: after the primary, they intend to rejigger the map and hold a second primary in three formerly Black-majority districts.

It gets worse: Tennessee dismantled its only Black-majority district, carving Memphis, which is 60% African American, into five Congressional districts, guaranteeing Blacks would have no representation at all. (FWIW, I’ve lived in Tennessee and Georgia; racism is alive and well there.)

Christopher Armitage is a public policy writer and researcher:

“There’s a particular kind of tragedy in watching intelligent people apply yesterday’s solutions to today’s crises. Across America, millions of well-meaning citizens are responding to the capture of our democratic institutions by participating harder in those same institutions.

“The federal democracy you learned about in school, where votes translate to representation, where representation shapes policy, where policy reflects majority will, has been replaced by something else entirely. Not through coup or revolution, but through methodical institutional capture.

“The Supreme Court didn’t suddenly become ideological; it was purposefully stacked through stolen seats and manufactured vacancies. Congress didn’t accidentally become unrepresentative; it was gerrymandered into minority rule with surgical precision. The feedback loops that democracy requires haven’t broken down; they’ve been deliberately severed.

“In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, and Florida, election results are functionally predetermined regardless of how people vote. In these five states, the Republican party has locked in power through cartographic precision and voter suppression, essentially creating systems where electoral competition has been engineered out of existence.

“In Wisconsin, Democrats won the statewide vote in 2022 and lost seats in the legislature. They’ve won every recent statewide election for governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and U.S. senator, yet Republicans hold near-supermajority control of both legislative chambers…Wisconsin requires Democrats to win 59% of the vote to achieve what Republicans get with 41%.”

Look at the structural destruction of fair practices:

•In North Carolina, the 2024 result: Democrats won 46% of votes and got 29% of seats, a 10-4 Republican delegation.

•Texas Republicans control 66% of congressional seats with 54% of the vote.

•In Ohio, Republicans won 53% of votes and took 67% of congressional seats.

•Florida went from multiple competitive races to zero.

Here’s a sampling of other thought leaders:

•Harold Jones II, Minority Leader in the Georgia House:

“Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.”

•Alabaman Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor: “Republicans have to gerrymander because they can’t win the hearts and minds of enough voters outright. This is the point we should be reinforcing when we talk with friends and family about this race to the bottom. None of this would be necessary if Republicans believed they could win the midterm elections on the merits. But they don’t, and they know it. That’s why we’re seeing all the gamesmanship.”

©2026 Jon Sinton