On Friday, September 12, President Trump praised Missouri State Republicans via Truth Social for sending “A new, much fairer, and much improved, Congressional Map” to Gov. Mike Kehoe. Exactly two weeks earlier, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared in a video that he was signing the “One Big Beautiful Map” into law to make Texas “more red in the United States Congress” (five seats more red, to be exact). Under pressure from the White House, other Republican states are taking steps toward similar measures, as Indiana’s governor has said a special session for redistricting “probably will happen,” and Florida’s House has created a select committee to explore a new map. In response, blue states are threatening retaliation: California’s “Election Rigging Response Act” to overwrite the current, independently drawn districts in favor of flipping five seats of their own is officially on the ballot for a November 4 special election. And though more limited in their capacity to gain Democratic seats, Illinois, Maryland, and New York are not ruling out attempts as well. In the lead up to the 2026 midterms, our United States are engaged in an arms race to the bottom, at the expense of all Americans. Undoubtedly, each of these gerrymanders, which maximizes or minimizes the power of a voter depending on one’s party affiliation, brazenly violates our constitutional rights to participate equally in the political process, degrading our representative democracy.
Legislative districts should encapsulate cohesive communities that ought to have their collective interests and unique needs represented in Congress. Instead, the new Missouri map divides the 5th Congressional District in Kansas City between three districts that would span across wide swaths of rural land, cracking the urban constituency to dilute its influence. Now, a Kansas Citian who commutes to a downtown office every day will be haphazardly shoved into the same group as a tractor-riding farmer hundreds of miles away. No representative will advocate for the best interests of both these voters, and that is exactly why the drawers of the map lumped them together. If successful, the nefarious redistricting will effectively guarantee that Republican-leaning Missouri farmers will outnumber the Democratic-leaning Kansas Citians and outvote them every time. The same principle applies to the effort by California Democrats. For example, the rural, ruby-red Shasta County would be combined with just enough of San Francisco Bay Area’s Marin County—one of the most liberal regions in the United States—for Republicans to be certainly outnumbered. In both of these cases, the incorporated political minority will not be properly represented, and their local needs are less likely to be met.
In a similar vein, all five districts targeted by Texas are predominantly inhabited by urban, minority populations. While the Supreme Court ruled racial gerrymandering to be a violation of 14th Amendment Equal Protection in Miller v. Johnson (1995), the new Texas map dilutes Black and Hispanic votes, inadvertently or otherwise. This is because certain communities are packed into the fewest number of deeply blue, urban districts as possible (particularly in Houston and Dallas) while others are cracked by incorporating them into distant, rural regions to be outnumbered. Under the new map, Black and Latino voters will be concentrated into fewer districts, diminishing their representation. In reaction, a number of civil rights organizations have filed suit on the grounds that the map is racially biased, with the NAACP president claiming that the state’s intent “is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”
When will our government act in accordance with the wishes of the people it ostensibly represents?
Even if considered to be law-abiding, the new districts destroy competition throughout the nation by creating “safe seats,” in which victory is practically secured for one party or another. Back in April, months before the latest gerrymanders, FairVote estimated that 81% of 2026 elections for the House of Representatives had already been decided. Such a severe lack of competition is a detriment to our electoral system. For one, safe seats pave the way for more extreme congressmembers whose only hurdle to power is a victory in their own party’s primary. Without any potent challenge from another party, a congressional prospect is free to advocate for the most radical ideology that appeals to their loyal base but disregards the vast majority of their constituents. As a result, our Congress grows more polarized and bipartisanship more unimaginable. At a time when our national legislature has become so unproductive and gridlocked that it can hardly keep the government funded, increases in extreme members are a disservice to all.
Perhaps even worse, incumbents in safe seats are virtually immune from accountability, a key tenet of our form of government. In theory, an incumbent representative’s voters are the authority that regulates their political decisions to keep them in check, but what if reelection is essentially guaranteed? Then, corrupt or unfavorable policy making comes with little to no consequence, and constituents are disconnected from their government. As evidence of this disillusionment, Pew Research found in 2023 that 76% of Americans believe members of Congress do a bad job of listening to the concerns of people in their district, and 85% believe most elected officials “don’t care what people like me think.” Frankly, under a system of rampant gerrymandering and minimal competition, elected representatives do not have to care what their people think. And this issue only compounds, as citizens recognize their voices to be disempowered and feel discouraged from voting at all. (FairVote already ranked California and Texas as fifth and third worst in 2024 voter turnout, respectively.) Simply put, a democracy cannot be by the people and for the people if most of the people are effectively robbed of their electoral influence.
Now, it is time for both sides of the aisle to return to the issue and treat it as the crisis it is, outlawing partisan gerrymandering once and for all.
Much of the attention on this tug-of-war shortsightedly focuses on the increasingly blatant symptoms rather than the disease. While there is the possibility that any of these risky state actions informed by five-year-outdated census data could backfire and turn out to be “dummymanders” which lose rather than gain seats for the offending party, that is not the point. While the new Missouri map could be delayed or rejected if opponents succeed in forcing a citizen referendum vote by gathering over 100,000 petition signatures in 90 days, that is not the point. While the attorneys of the American Civil Liberties Union, National Democratic Redistricting Committee, and the like could thwart any of the current efforts, that is not the point. The point is that many of our political leaders have decided that they are the ones who choose who gets power and who does not. The point is that the rigging of elections by way of targeted suppression of certain constituencies is an affront to our democracy that must be recognized and dealt with. In 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause, five of nine Supreme Court justices showed that our judiciary is not up to the task of protecting voting rights when they declined to intervene in partisan gerrymandering. The majority opinion stated that it was strictly a political rather than legal question, deciding to leave federal courts out of the equation. With “respect but deep sadness,” Justice Elena Kagan dissented, saying that the practice “deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights,” and that it “may irreparably damage our system of government” if left unchecked. Therefore, Congress must act to impose federal standards on redistricting that guarantee fairness and proportional representation. It came close in 2021, as the Freedom to Vote Act, banning gerrymandering in part, could have passed the Senate with a 51st tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris had it not been for a Republican-led filibuster. Now, it is time for both sides of the aisle to return to the issue and treat it as the crisis it is, outlawing partisan gerrymandering once and for all.
The solution to gerrymandering is not to leave it up to the majority party in each state legislature to voluntarily take the high road and shoot itself in the foot by establishing independent commissions to draw their lines. No, the solution is for our profoundly polarized country to at the very least come together and agree that the formation of our government must occur on a level playing field. Importantly, common Americans are indeed coming together: according to a September survey commissioned by Common Cause, 78% support a boundary-drawing process that puts community interests ahead of political advantage. When will our government act in accordance with the wishes of the people it ostensibly represents?
Brazen mid-decade redistricting with explicitly partisan purposes opens a Pandora’s box of effective disenfranchisement, unmitigated corruption, and further polarization.
Although gerrymandering, a namesake of a Founding Father (who himself disapproved of the practice), has been ever-present in American politics, today’s showdown clearly represents an escalation in the degradation of our institutions. Powered by increasingly sophisticated data analytics technology, today’s legislators have more capacity than ever to rig the system in their favor. Their brazen mid-decade redistricting with explicitly partisan purposes opens a Pandora’s box of effective disenfranchisement, unmitigated corruption, and further polarization. If the outcomes of our elections are predetermined by incumbents, and voting is futile, then what does that make of our democracy?
Alden St. John ‘29 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at aldens@wustl.edu.