Op-ed by Joe Broadmeadow
Gerrymandering does not steal every election. It does something more subtle, and often more effective: it decides which elections are allowed to be competitive in the first place.
Neither party is innocent of this charge. What California is doing, Texas tried to do, and Louisiana and other states will attempt to do since the court emasculated the Voting Rights Act, is wrong. You cannot castigate one side and cheer on the other side.
There is no more diengenuous and childish argument than “the other side is doing it.”
A democracy should require voters to defeat candidates, not cartography.
Joe Broadmeadow
It is not how elections are supposed to run. Elections with balanced results representing the true will of the people are necessary for our democracy to survive. It fosters the art of compromise—something that has become an anathema in Congress—which is how the most successful legislation is derived, refined, and improved.
That is why the old defense of gerrymandering, “voters still choose,” misses the point. Yes, voters cast the ballots. But mapmakers decide whether those ballots will be gathered into fair contests or sorted into political storage bins. The genius of modern gerrymandering is not that it changes minds. It changes math.
The evidence is hard to ignore. In the 2024 House elections, Republicans held the chamber by a narrow 220–215 margin, while only 37 House districts were decided by five points or fewer, and more than four out of five districts were won by at least 10 points. That is not a portrait of a rambunctious democracy. It is a portrait of a democracy with many of its outcomes pre-sorted.
North Carolina offers the bluntest example. A court-drawn congressional map that could have produced a 7–7 split was replaced by a Republican-drawn map that produced a 10–4 GOP delegation in 2024. In a closely divided state, that is not political weather, that is political engineering.
Gerrymandering’s effectiveness is greatest when control of a legislature or Congress is already close. The Brennan Center estimated that current maps gave Republicans a net advantage of about 16 House seats heading into 2024, compared with maps drawn under proposed anti-gerrymandering standards. One does not need to believe that every seat in that estimate is beyond debate to see the larger truth: when a chamber is decided by a handful of seats, map manipulation can become the margin of power.
But gerrymandering is not magic. It cannot make an unpopular party popular. It cannot repeal demographic change. It cannot always survive a wave election. And scholars disagree on the size of its net national effect; one 2023 PNAS study found that partisan gerrymandering was widespread in the 2020 cycle but that much of its national bias canceled out, while still reducing electoral competition and making the House less responsive to shifts in the national vote.
That last point may be the most damaging. Even when gerrymandering does not flip control outright, it dulls accountability. Representatives in safe seats worry less about general-election voters and more about primary voters, donors, party activists, and ideological enforcers. The result is a Congress less responsive to persuasion and more responsive to fear.
The cure is not mysterious. Independent commissions, clearer legal standards, transparent map data, and judicial willingness to police extreme abuses can all help. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, for example, uses statistical analysis and public report cards to evaluate maps for partisan fairness, competitiveness, and minority representation.
The deeper question is whether we still believe elections should be contests rather than construction projects. Gerrymandering works because it turns representation into architecture: draw the walls correctly, and the occupants are almost guaranteed. That may be legal in many places. It may even be bipartisan in its temptations. But it is plainly corrosive.
A democracy should require voters to defeat candidates, not cartography.
Sources
Brennan Center for Justice, “How Gerrymandering and Fair Maps Affected the Battle for the House”: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-gerrymandering-and-fair-maps-affected-battle-house
Brennan Center for Justice, “How Gerrymandering Tilts the 2024 Race for the House”: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house
PNAS, “Widespread partisan gerrymandering mostly cancels nationally, but reduces electoral competition”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10288623/
Princeton Gerrymandering Project, Redistricting Report Card: https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/
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