The Gerrymander

Long a political reality, it's now enhanced by precision software. There ought to be a law.

Aug 07, 2025

The term “gerrymander” was coined in 1812 at a Boston dinner party. Elbridge Gerry was the governor of Massachusetts at the time. He realized that by creating legislative districts molded to favor his desired outcomes, he could have a rubber-stamp legislature. The districts that used to be geographically and socio-economically contiguous were shaped not by politics, but by shared interests and geographic features like mountains and lakes, now they were meandering, taking all sorts of weird shapes. The most famous being that of a salamander, thus Gerry + Salamander = gerrymander.

The practice, while technically legal (unless driven by race), is undemocratic. The stuff of political bosses and machines. Nobody likes it, yet everybody does it.

The census takes place at the beginning of each decade and determines the distribution of government resources, and, importantly, the number of Congressional districts allocated to each state. While redistricting happens after each census, mid-decade redistricting is rare, and usually done to fix unfair districts to comply with court orders.

President Trump, for all his bluster, knows he’s in trouble in the coming mid-terms. He’s demanded that red states draw new lines now to ensure he keeps the House.

Sound vaguely undemocratic, maximally autocratic, or just plain un-American? Bingo! It’s all three. The most immediately serious threat is in Texas where governor Greg Abbott is ready redraw lines giving Republicans five new representatives, but can’t because Democrats have fled the state, denying him the quorum needed to pass enabling legislation. He says it’s a legal reapportionment, but because it is race-based, it is not legal. If Texas gets away with this, two things will happen: Other red states will follow, and big blue states like New York and California will have to redistrict in order to re-level the playing field. It’s an arms race, pure and simple.

The governor has threatened to fine them, arrest them (he’s asked the FBI to step in), and/or remove them from their seats so he can appoint replacements no one has voted for. That’s the stuff of banana republics.

In decades past, when honest bipartisan and nonpartisan people governed us, and yes, you have to go back a while, the system worked. It worked because state legislatures took redistricting as a serious duty to make sure the voting public got representation equal to their ranks. They didn’t want to be known as gerrymanderers.

The art of redistricting following the latest census report was considered an honorable task, and with few exceptions, those in authority sought to draw fair lines. By the 1980’s, with the Democrats owning a forty-year lock on the House and Senate, Republicans realized that the people would never willingly put them in power. They’d never be able to institute their favored policies, like a regressive tax where the rich were saved by the poor, where corporations had free reign to spoil the land, water, and air, without consequence, and where the United States could isolate itself from the world.

In an overt effort to overturn the will of the people, Donald Trump has demanded that the state of Texas engage in this highly unusual mid-decade redistricting. Hakeem Jeffries, the Minority Leader in the U.S. Congress, flew to Austin to sound the alarm: “Donald Trump and House Republicans clearly want to gerrymander the Texas congressional map so they can cheat their way to victory in the midterm elections.” He said, this demands “an all-hands-on-deck response.”

If Texas breaks with tradition, decency, and democracy gerrymanders Republicans into assured control of the House, blue states will inevitably do the same. But it will be harder because, in a show of integrity and goodwill, many blue states, including our most populace, California, created independent redistricting boards to blunt the political gerrymander. Those independent boards will be bypassed in order to redraw districts to keep Republicans from running roughshod over the electorate, the basic rules of democracy, and good governance itself.

Pundit Michelle Cottle recently wrote: “I reminded [a Texas Democrat] of Michelle Obama’s admonition that when Republicans go low, Democrats go high. ‘The high road’s not available to us anymore,’ he said. ‘The high road is just a cliff you’re walking off.’”

Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu called it un-American:

“If Donald Trump is allowed to do this, if he is allowed to once again cheat and get away with it, there's no stopping this. This will spread across the country, and…will occur everywhere. Because if one person's going to cheat and no one's going to stop it, why doesn't everyone just do it then? And that is not a society, that is not an America that works. Let's be clear, this is not just rigging the system in Texas. It's about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”