ANALYSIS
Recently, Democratic members of the Texas legislature fled to Illinois and other states to deny the Republican-controlled chamber the quorum needed to pass a mid-decade redistricting plan, one that would wipe out several Democratic seats in the U.S. House.
In response, Democratic governors Gavin Newsom (California), Kathy Hochul (New York), and Illinois’ own JB Pritzker have threatened mid-decade redistricting in their states to eliminate numerous Republican seats. Not to be outdone, Republican-led states are now threatening retaliation for the retaliation… which will likely be followed by retaliation to the retaliation of the retaliation.
Does anyone else have a headache yet?
Hang on, I need some aspirin before we keep going.
This is all part of an escalating game of political warfare, where each party tries to stack the electoral deck in its favor when it has power, most often through gerrymandering. Both sides have done it, each justifying their maps as correcting the “wrongs” of the other. Gerrymandering is nothing new, but modern mapping technology has made it far more precise, and therefore far more potent, than in the past. Add to it increased polarization, which makes the stakes feel so much bigger for every little transfer of power, and it’s all a dangerous threat to our democracy.
The Damage Done
The consequences of this never-ending knife fight are significant. Gerrymandering, through the creation of “safe seats”, has been blamed on increasing polarization in Congress the (though some work suggests this isn’t the case, or may be limited to specific issues) and the state level, decreasing collaboration, increasing the incumbent advantage, harming democracy (including at the state level), increasing campaign costs, reducing voter turnout, decreasing voter access to representatives, impacting reproductive health policy, and biasing electoral results. It’s hard to argue that all of this is good for democracy. As with many issues I raise in these write-ups, this one ultimately leads to worse outcomes for America and the people who call it home.
Attempts to Fix It
Some states have turned to redistricting commissions, with varying degrees of independence. Primarily inn the Mountain West, several commissions are entirely independent of elected officials. California currently has one, though Gov. Newsom has floated asking voters to scrap it so the legislature could “offset” what’s happening in Texas.
According to Princeton’s Gerrymandering Project, independent commissions generally produce less partisan bias than legislature-drawn maps. Illinois, which earned an “F” from Princeton for both its congressional and state senate maps, has a bipartisan group, Fair Maps Illinois, pushing for its own independent commission in part due to this belief.
Beyond commissions, reformers have proposed overhauling how we vote: adopting ranked choice voting (RCV), creating multimember districts, or combining proportional representation with multimember districts (and sometimes RCV). RCV has gained some traction in cities and states (primarily for primaries), but momentum stalled in 2024. Multimember districts have actually been shrinking in use. Illinois ended them with the 1980 Cutback Amendment, and Congress is currently locked into single-member districts by the Uniform Congressional District Act. Currently, proportional representation is rare outside a few local races.
In 2021, a national ban on gerrymandering failed in Congress. Now, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA), whose seat could disappear if California redraws, plans to introduce a bill banning mid-decade redistricting nationwide and undoing changes made this year. Plus, Groups like Fix Our House continue to push for change, and other members of Congress are starting to kick the tires on possible changes. For example, the Uniform Congressional District Act could be replaced with a law allowing multimember seats and proportional representation nationally, but that would require significant political will to make the system better for everyone. I tend to be an optimist, but currently that idea seems just too much of a stretch even for me.
Why Change Is So Hard
But, I hear you saying, “AJ, my man, you’re forgetting about the rule of law! Surely, the courts would intervene to stop the shenanigans.” You’re right, America’s founders did create the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court, to stop these sorts of constitutional damaging crises.
However, in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the Supreme Court said partisan gerrymandering is “non-justiciable”, which I didn’t know was a word until UIS judicial politics expert Nick Waterbury taught me it. It means the courts can’t weigh in on it. So basically, only an act of Congress, or the parties suddenly deciding to disarm thanks to the power of friendship, I guess, can get us out of this mess.
The problem is simple: when both parties think they can win under the current rules, neither will change them. Disarm first, and you risk being wiped off the political map. With the courts stepping back, there’s no neutral referee. Instead, it’s just two heavily armed camps staring each other down.
So, we stay locked in a slow-motion civil conflict, trading missile strikes made of district lines. The battlefield isn’t a warzone, it’s the map room, but the damage to trust in our institutions is real.
You can shrug all this off as “just politics” if you want, but if those in power are finding ways to use the rules to defy the electoral will of the people and stack the electoral weapons of their own camp, this ain’t a democracy, it’s an arms race. And the longer it drags on, the more it costs all of us.
