Measuring the Erosion of American Democracy

On May 7, 2026, state troopers cleared the gallery of the Tennessee House after protesters chanted “No Jim Crow 2.0.” KeShaun Pearson, brother of state Representative Justin Pearson, refused to leave and was arrested. In the Senate chamber, Democratic state senator Charlane Oliver climbed onto her desk with a banner reading “No Jim Crow 2.0, Stop the TN Steal” before being removed.

Inside both chambers, the Republican supermajority approved a new congressional map splitting Memphis—the state’s only majority-Black city—into three pieces, eliminating Democratic Representative Steve Cohen’s seat and making Tennessee’s delegation nine Republicans and zero Democrats.

Republican State Representative Jason Zachary said the rationale plainly: “It was absolutely drafted on politics.”

He continued, “This gives us a unique opportunity, for the first time in history, to have an all-Republican delegation sent from Tennessee to Washington, D.C.”

Unfortunately, this scene in Tennessee is not an anomaly, but rather a sign that American electoral politics has entered a new era of unprecedented gerrymandering. But to truly capture the erosion of American democracy, we need new tools.

This is precisely why I have created the Gerrymandering Partisan Index (GPI) to measure partisan distortion.

Creating the Gerrymandering Partisan Index

The GPI tracks how far seats deviate from the votes that produced them. Applied to every House election since 1976, the GPI tells a clear story: three decades of rough proportionality, a sustained upward turn after 2008, and in 2026 a single-cycle jump driven not by changes in how voters voted but by changes in how districts were drawn. The projection for the post-2030 redistricting cycle points to a country whose democracy no longer resembles the one Americans have known. The shift is no longer just qualitative. It is measurable, and the measurement is sobering.

The GPI counts seats won by the majority party beyond what closest-to-proportional rounding would award, summed across all states and expressed as a share of the maximum possible for each cycle on a 0-to-100 scale.

Imagine a state with 10 districts and a 61 to 39 vote split. In this scenario, proportional representation would deliver six or even seven seats to the majority party. Any other outcome would depart from the principle of proportional representation. The further the gap between how seats are distributed and how people voted, the larger the distortion. Importantly, distortion in either direction counts: a Republican-engineered Tennessee and a Democratic-engineered Maryland both add to the total amount of gerrymandering.

How the GPI has changed over time

Since 1976, the GPI has ranged from 5 in 1986 to 34 in 2024. In order to get a general baseline for how much distortion is “normal,” thresholds were set at one and four standard deviations above the average levels from 1976 to 2008, the period preceding the post-2010 rise in partisan gerrymandering. Then, I divided the scale into three tiers of escalating partisan distortion: proportional representation, partisan skew, and single-party dominance.

From 1976 through 2008, the GPI was low and stable, averaging 13, but the composition shifted markedly over time. In 1976, 97% of displaced seats over-represented Democrats, and in 1978 and 1988, 100% did. This is the historical asymmetry that today’s Republican rebalancing argument cites. The 1994 Republican Revolution offset that asymmetry through votes rather than maps: Republicans won the House for the first time in 40 years, taking 53% of the seats on 54% of the vote, a proportional outcome. That equilibrium was sustained not by the courts or the Voting Rights Act but by behavior. Both parties chose to operate within a tighter latitude than the formal rules required. The arrangement reflected a Madisonian premise: that legislative majorities should be checked and minority political interests deserve representation.

Then, things shifted in 2010. After Republicans won state legislative majorities in roughly a dozen states and used new precinct-level mapping technology, the 2012 GPI jumped to 28 and never returned to pre-2010 levels. Democrats followed with aggressive maps in Illinois, Maryland, and (until courts struck them down) New York. The partisan shares returned to near-parity, but the total stayed elevated. The system escalated symmetrically rather than rebalancing.

Now, the country is experiencing a significant increase in gerrymandering. The 2026 election cycle is projected to produce a GPI of 45, a 30% jump, driven entirely by new maps rather than any change in voter behavior. It is the largest one-cycle move in the modern record, the product of several developments converging in rapid succession.

Why gerrymandering levels are so high right now

Decades of data point to President Donald Trump as the trigger for the current increase in gerrymandering levels. The Trump Administration broke the once-per-decade norm, pressuring Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, and Tennessee into mid-decade redraws. Democrats ended their unilateral restraint: California’s Proposition 50, championed by Governor Gavin Newsom, suspended the state’s independent redistricting commission for one cycle to allow a counter-gerrymander. The Supreme Court, in Louisiana v. Callais, narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a way that expanded state-legislative discretion in jurisdictions with substantial Black voting populations. Tennessee’s 9-0 map followed eight days later, with similar redraws underway across the South.

National partisanship has made restraint feel like surrender: aggressive map-drawing now reads, on both sides, less as transgression than as obligation to maintain parity, if not to gain partisan advantage. Republicans argue that current rules structurally advantage Democratic-leaning states, for instance, by counting non-citizens in apportionment as is directed by the 14th Amendment. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats point to state-level voter-access restrictions pursued primarily in Republican-controlled states and to the elimination of majority Black districts across the South. For Black voters, this history can be clearly traced back through slavery, Jim Crow, and the long obstruction of civil rights enforcement.

Regardless of the facts, each side views itself as the aggrieved party and the other as the aggressor, sees the stakes as too high to step back unilaterally, and treats restraint as surrender.

The result: neither will be moved by the other’s stated grievances.

The future of gerrymandering

If 2026 is a single-cycle adjustment, I believe the post-2030 census redistricting cycle will be a structural one. By the time the 2030 census triggers the next redraw, virtually every state will redraw again, with partisan advantage as the primary goal. Depending on how aggressively partisan engineering escalates in the interim, the 2032 GPI is projected to range from 50 to 59, roughly four times the pre-2010 baseline and unprecedented in recent history. A projection at this level is no longer about which party gains a few additional seats. It describes a structural condition: a House of Representatives whose composition is largely settled before voters even enter the polls.

This projection rests on a single fact: the barriers that once held the system in check are themselves now contestable. Where one party controls the governorship and both legislative chambers, the playbook is known and executable: suspend or eliminate independent commissions, push through ballot initiatives that override redistricting reforms, reshape state supreme courts through judicial elections, amend state constitutions where they obstruct partisan engineering, and redraw maps to maximum advantage. As many as 40 states combine one-party control with institutional barriers weak enough to fall to political pressure. Only four or five states (with Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania the clearest examples) combine competitive electorates with barriers that have so far resisted it.

I fear that our opportunity to address the erosion of our democracy is closing. The worst-case scenario would be the path the United States is on, driven by powerful forces and unchecked by any realistic counterforce. The most direct counterforce is federal legislation, since Congress has the constitutional authority to set the rules under which House elections are run in all 50 states. But such action is also unlikely for one simple reason: House members elected from gerrymandered districts have little incentive to vote against the maps that elected them.

It is tempting to assign blame to one side or one stakeholder. In reality, all are responsible. Democrats engineered districts in the 1970s and 1980s. Republicans engineered districts in the 2010s. Democrats counter-engineered them in the 2020s. Then, President Trump broke the once-per-decade norm. The Supreme Court ended federal jurisdiction over partisan gerrymandering claims and narrowed the Voting Rights Act. And voters reinforce the cycle, rewarding the most partisan candidates and punishing moderates in primary after primary. The cycle persists because, at every link, those involved have had reasons that felt sufficient to them in the moment.

Left unchecked, the result is a country sharply divided into hard-red and hard-blue states, each governed by single-party supermajorities, each passing laws shaped by only one set of values, and each with a political minority living in a society it rejects. For many Americans, this means losing voice at every level of government: little or no House representation, no Senate voice, no influence in the state legislature, and no Madisonian protection from majorities empowered to legislate unchecked. If this occurs, American citizenship will mean something fundamentally different depending on the state one lives in. The United States will remain one country in name only.

My point here is not partisan. The American system held for two centuries because both sides held back from what they could have done. We are now in the first sustained period in which neither side appears to be holding back.

The choice to step back still exists. But the window is closing.

Tennessee did not decide the future of our democracy on May 7, 2026. The future was already decided. Tennessee just announced it.

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