Jun 8, 2026 By Kent James 5 min read

The most important aspect of good democratic government is that it reflects the “will of the people.” If people have a say in how they are governed, they will accept that governance. Constructing a system of government that reflects the will of the people can be challenging, because there are legitimate trade-offs that must be made between government efficiency and the voice of the people.

Gerrymandering is when a district is drawn to benefit a specific individual (or party). This allows some voices to be heard louder than their numbers would warrant, violating the goals of representative government. When people are left without a voice in how they are governed, they can lose respect for government, which does not end well.

Gerrymandering lets politicians choose their constituents, rather than constituents choosing their representative. In addition to distorting representation, gerrymandering creates other problems. When politicians are put in safe districts, minimizing the chance that the opposing party can defeat them in the general election, their biggest fear becomes being challenged in the primary by a more radical member of their own party. That is more likely if they have been willing to compromise with their political opponents (discouraging bipartisan cooperation). Gerrymandering makes both parties more extreme, increasing polarization and gridlock.

While defenders of the practice argue that both parties do it and it’s been done forever, that’s misleading. Gerrymandering became much more important in the 21st century as mapping programs and other computer software made creating districts to maximize the power of the party in charge much easier and more effective.

Traditionally, gerrymandering took place after each census, when district boundaries had to be redrawn to maintain uniform district sizes (in response to the “one person, one vote” standard set by the Supreme Court in the 1960s). President Trump, worried about Republicans losing the House in the mid-terms, violated that norm in 2025 when he told the Texas state legislature to redistrict to get five more Republican seats. The Texas legislature (with no input from Texas voters) complied.

Democrats had been moving away from gerrymandering because of the previously mentioned ill-effects. Some of the largest Democratically run states (California, New York, Virginia) passed legislation to eliminate gerrymandering. Nationally, Democrats supported a bill outlawing gerrymandering (which got no Republican votes and therefore failed). In response to Trump’s Texas gerrymander, Democrats realized if the states they controlled got rid of gerrymandering while Republican-run states doubled down, Republicans would control Congress for the foreseeable future. California Gov. Gavin Newsom started a movement to get blue states to gerrymander to counteract the gains Republican gerrymandering was giving red states. Unlike in Texas and Florida, where legislators gerrymandered without public input, both California and Virginia put the question to the voters, who passed the defensive gerrymander. This essentially neutralized the Republican efforts.

The Supreme Court disrupted that stalemate by issuing two decisions that benefitted Republicans. In Louisiana v. Callais (2025), the Supreme Court found that race had been used to create a second majority Black district (that was not required by the Voting Rights Act), which was an unconstitutional gerrymander (that hurt white voters). In Scott v. McDougle (2026), the Supreme Court claimed that because the Virginia referendum allowing the Democratic gerrymander had been proposed after mail-in voting had started in the previous election, it had not gone through two elections as the law required, and therefore could not be used. That provision was to make sure voters could vote for representatives who would reflect their will, ignoring that in this case, the voters will was expressed directly in the referendum.

One of the interesting aspects of gerrymandering is that after Supreme Court rulings in the 1980s that recognized states in the South were denying minority voters a chance for representation, it allowed (and in some cases, even required) states with a history of discrimination to create districts that would provide a chance for minority representation. And it worked. For the first time since Reconstruction, congressional delegations from southern states with large Black populations began to have Black representation.

Although Congress had accepted that the VRA was working (it was renewed by a lopsided bipartisan vote in 2006), the conservative majority on the Supreme Court essentially eviscerated it. First, Shelby County v. Holder (2013) said Section 5, which required that districts that historically had discriminated against minorities, needed supervision by the Department of Justice to make sure they didn’t do that, was unnecessary. Within hours, Republicans in some of the affected states showed how wrong that reasoning was by immediately working to limit minority representation. Then this year, in the Callais decision, the Supreme Court undermined Section 2 of the VRA, which was supposed to provide a back stop if Section 5 failed. Once again, the white Republicans in Southern states immediately began redrawing districts to eliminate Black incumbents.

Gerrymandering allows the majority party to ignore minority interests, prioritizing partisan advantage at the cost of increased polarization and dissatisfaction with government. But gerrymandering only rearranges voters; it doesn’t eliminate them. So a party that gerrymanders too extensively risks spreading its voters too thin, leaving the opportunity for a wave election to overwhelm their gerrymander (making it a “dummymander”). Democrats need such a wave to take back Congress and then pass national legislation to eliminate gerrymandering, to allow government to better represent the will of the people.

Kent James, of East Washington, has a doctorate in history and policy from Carnegie Mellon University.