The gerrymandering wars are back. Perhaps they never really went away.
Extreme GOP gerrymanders have remade American politics over the last 15 years. They have locked Republicans into office in state legislatures nationwide, even in purple states when Democratic candidates win more votes. They have delivered a reliable and enduring edge to the GOP in the race for Congress.
Perhaps most importantly, they have entrenched hard-right lawmakers and insulated them from the ballot box, allowing them to enact conservative policies on reproductive rights and public education that are rejected by majorities of voters.
Now Texas Republicans, spurred by Donald Trump, have readied a brazen mid-decade power grab that would award them as many as five additional seats in Congress. This would be a dramatic boost heading into the midterms, since the GOP only holds a three-seat majority. California has threatened to retaliate with a mid-decade redraw of its own. Other blue state governors are talking tough as well. But Republicans have more targets. They won’t stop in Texas. They will probably redraw Ohio, Missouri, Indiana and Florida as well.
How did we get here? How did gerrymandered lines, rather than voters, gain the power to determine winners and losers?
While politicians have gerrymandered since the dawn of the American experiment – even before it got its name from then Massachusetts governor Eldridge Gerry’s party crafting state senate districts around Boston that looked like salamanders – the modern story really begins in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama and a blue wave that delivered Democrats trifecta power and even a US Senate supermajority.
On television that election night, even the sharpest Republican analysts spoke of unbreakable emerging coalitions and demographic changes that could provide Democrats with majorities for a generation. It didn’t exactly work that way. A handful of savvy Republican strategists recognized that while 2008 may have been historic, 2010 could be much more consequential. It would be a census year. And after every census, the nation redistricts every state legislature and US House seat.
A lightbulb went off at the Republican state leadership committee (RSLC). Executive director Chris Jankowski recognized the opportunity first: target states where the legislature controls redistricting. Pour millions into underfunded state legislative races. Drown Democratic incumbents. Flip as many chambers as possible. Redraw the lines. If Republicans could pull it off, they would go from demographically challenged to the catbird seat for a decade.
“We should do this,” Jankowski remembered, in an interview for my book Ratf**ked. “I think we can get millions – and you don’t have to do anything other than what you were going to do anyway.”
They called this Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. It transformed the nation.
Karl Rove laid out the plan in a March 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed that laid out the specific small towns in Indiana, Pennsylvania and Ohio where national Republicans would come gunning for small-town Democrats. His message: control redistricting, control Congress. “Republican strategists are focused on 107 seats in 16 states. Winning these seats would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats.”
Despite Rove’s announcement, Democrats never saw it coming. The 2010 Tea Party wave placed all those seats and more in the GOP column. Republicans took over in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Indiana, Alabama, Wisconsin and Ohio, among others, adding them to trifecta control in states like Texas and Florida. The following year, the RSLC paid master GOP mapmaker Thomas Hofeller to draw new lines in crucial states. New computer mapping software and voluminous new voter data turned redistricting into a video game. Republicans won, voters lost.
It all paid off with a high score in 2012. Obama won re-election by a slightly smaller margin than 2008, but Democrats added seats in the US Senate. Republicans, thanks to their new lines, held the House and it wasn’t close. They won 234 seats to the Democrats’ 201 – even though Democrats won 1.4m more votes nationwide. Or look at the impact this way. Obama carried Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Republicans drew congressional lines in those states and won 64 of 94 seats.
The modern, technologically enhanced gerrymanders held throughout 2014 and 2016. Even when Democratic candidates won more votes, they could not budge the state legislature in Michigan, for example, or an astounding 13-5 edge in Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation.
This futility and frustration at the ballot box turned into a national grassroots campaign to end gerrymandering. In 2018, grassroots movements in Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Utah and Colorado established citizen commissions or other nonpartisan processes to draw lines. Meanwhile, the same technology that allowed partisans to crack and pack voters with such precision also allowed data scientists and courts to see through extreme gerrymanders. Voters and public interest law firms won new maps in states including Florida (ahead of 2016) and Pennsylvania (2018), and won lower-court decisions in Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, North Carolina and Wisconsin that struck down extreme maps. This helped Democrats take back the House in 2018 without actually defeating the gerrymander: almost three-quarters of the seats they won were drawn by commissions or courts, or arose from new maps won via litigation.
In states such as Wisconsin, the gerrymanders held strong: in 2018, Democrats swept the US Senate, governor’s offices in every statewide race and 53% of the state assembly vote. Republicans won 64% of the seats with just 45% of the vote.
Polls showed that huge majorities of voters across party lines despised gerrymandering. Reform efforts won in red states and in blue states with big majorities. And in federal courts, judges appointed by presidents of both parties believed that they had all the tools they needed to strike down maps that decimated true political competition, and took aim at the radical outliers drawn by both parties. Reformers and voters had real momentum.
Enter John Roberts.
In 2019, the chief justice – whose antipathy to voting rights has been central to his life’s work ever since he arrived in Washington in 1982 as a young aide in Reagan’s Department of Justice – destroyed hopes that the federal courts would help defend voters and create a national standard.
In a case from North Carolina called Rucho v Common Cause, a 5-4 majority ruled that partisan gerrymandering was a nonjusticiable political issue. The decision, written by Roberts, closed the federal courts to future claims at the precise moment that they’d become the most important part of the solution. After all, politicians have long proven unwilling to reform the very process that elected them and helped entrench them in office. Roberts, however, said the federal courts could no longer be involved, because there was no clear and manageable standard. Multiple federal judges, of course, pointed to multiple clear standards. And even if Roberts didn’t find a standard to his liking, nothing required him to leap to making the issue nonjusticiable.
The decision signed the death warrant for reform. Without the threat of a national, court-enforced standard, states had no reason to behave themselves. In 2021, Democrats – now fully awakened to the problem – claimed seats in Illinois (14 of 17) and Maryland (seven of eight) and took extra seats in Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico. Republicans, already enjoying an edge, claimed four in Florida then worked the margins in Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, Georgia and Utah. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center, the GOP had a 16-seat advantage this decade thanks to gerrymandering. While some suggested that the national congressional map had become much more balanced, this is misleading: any balance in the national map arrived because many more state maps had been gerrymandered, harming more voters, everywhere.
Both parties knew increasingly partisan state courts were unlikely to block partisan power plays. In New York, a Democratic court allowed Democrats to remake the map before 2024. In North Carolina, the state supreme court upended a fair map and reversed a year-old decision banning partisan gerrymandering as soon as they took partisan control. Given free rein, the GOP drew themselves three extra seats and a 10-3 advantage. Those three seats, by the way, match the margin of the GOP House majority. That’s the power of one state map.
The absence of any federal deterrence also encouraged state lawmakers to defy courts, commissions and state constitutions. In Ohio, lawmakers stiff-armed the state supreme court when it attempted to enforce anti-gerrymandering provisions enacted decisively by 75% of voters in a 2018 initiative. In Arizona, Republicans gamed the independent commission by stacking the commission that selects the supposedly nonpartisan chair who controls the tie-breaking vote. Utah simply ignored the 2018 vote establishing a nonpartisan commission. They all got away with it.
Which brings us to the current moment. Trump kickstarted this new redistricting arms race when he demanded that Texas flip Democratic seats to the GOP. California and New York have talked tough about suspending their commissions and retaliating with gerrymanders of their own. That’s a long and complicated road, however: California voters would need to agree this fall. New York’s constitution couldn’t be amended before the 2028 cycle. Meanwhile, Democrats have few other likely targets, and Republicans look likely to continue their push into Ohio, Missouri, Indiana and Florida – and even Kansas, Kentucky and New Hampshire, if they choose.
Frustrated Democrats have few appealing options. Such are the ongoing consequences of falling asleep 15 years ago and failing to counter Redmap. It has done precisely what the Republicans said it would do – with greater success and a longer lifespan than they ever could have imagined.
