If anyone has a reason to oppose gerrymandering, it’s U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa. For the past 12 years, LaMalfa, a Republican, has represented California’s first congressional district, a sprawling, mostly rural expanse in the northeast corner of the state. But thanks to Proposition 50—California’s counter to Republican gerrymandering efforts in Texas—LaMalfa’s home will soon lie in a new district that reaches from the Nevada border all the way to the affluent wine country of Sonoma, near the Pacific Ocean. Another successor district will connect the remote Oregon-California-Nevada vertex to the suburbs of San Francisco, an eight-hour drive away. It will be shaped almost exactly like the 19th-century political cartoon that coined the term Gerry-Mander.
LaMalfa can still run for Congress next year, taking his pick of either of those two new districts. This gives him the option of losing to a Democrat by perhaps 30 percentage points, based on last year’s results and current polling, or merely by about 15. Either way, he’s toast. “It’s a real dirty scheme,” LaMalfa told me.
So what does LaMalfa think Congress should do about gerrymandering? Nothing. “I don’t support the federal government trying to dictate to every state individually how they do things,” he said. Most Republicans seem to agree—even the ones who, like LaMalfa, are losing their seat as the redistricting wars heat up.
This is unfortunate, because at this point, the only effective solution to partisan gerrymandering would be federal legislation. All of the other factors that once constrained the practice are fast disappearing. Although nearly 6 million registered Republicans live in California, very little prevents the state from drawing a map that has no Republican seats at all—just as very little is stopping Republican-led states from drawing maps that have no Democratic seats. (Under Prop 50, California will go from 11 districts that voted for Donald Trump to five.) America is quickly moving toward a system in which tens of millions of blue-state Republicans and red-state Democrats effectively have no congressional representation at all.
In the states where one party controls the redistricting process, the incentives are simple: Draw the districts such that your party has the easiest path to winning the most seats. Give as little power to the other party as you possibly can.
Traditionally, however, there have been some limits. The first was the custom of drawing new districts only every 10 years, after a new census. The second is the court system. Because the electorate is racially polarized, many Republican efforts to secure more seats have effectively done so by disenfranchising Black or Latino voters, and have therefore been struck down for violating the Voting Rights Act. Federal courts can’t touch purely partisan gerrymanders, as the Supreme Court affirmed in 2019, but state courts sometimes strike down particularly egregious examples under their state constitution. This happened in North Carolina and Maryland in 2022. The self-interest of incumbents has also traditionally constrained gerrymandering. If you eliminate Republican districts, Democratic incumbents will suddenly have more Republican voters in their districts, making their reelection campaign harder to win. Representing a safe seat is a much easier job than holding a competitive one, and few people, in Congress or otherwise, readily sign up to do a harder job with no raise.
[Mark Leibovitch: Another moderate Republican opts out]
The specter of a “dummymander”—a backfiring gerrymander—also looms over redistricting efforts. Trump won North Carolina by three points in 2024, meaning the Republican state legislature could hypothetically draw all 14 of its districts to be Trump +3. But that wouldn’t be wise, because if the state shifted four points to the left in 2026, Republicans could lose all 14 seats.
Every one of these limitations is falling away. The norm of redistricting only every 10 years is the latest to be obliterated by Trump. In a currently pending case, the Supreme Court is all but certain to overturn or at least severely restrict Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has long served as a barrier to Republican gerrymanders in the South. (The VRA arguably constrained California’s most recent gerrymander too: In many parts of California, including San Diego and San Francisco, Latino voters voted for Trump at a higher rate than white voters did.) And what little power the courts have is being subordinated to the electoral system. In recent years, state-supreme-court elections in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Ohio have been dominated by concerns about whether a given candidate would or wouldn’t strike down a gerrymandered map. In North Carolina, the Democratic-controlled state supreme court struck down a gerrymander in 2022, only for two of the Democratic justices to be replaced by Republicans, who then reversed that decision.
Incumbents, meanwhile, have become team players, mostly willing to take on a tougher job in service of punishing the other team. For example, Prop 50 caused Ami Bera’s congressional district in California to absorb enough Republicans to go from a Kamala Harris +14 district to a +8 district. Mike Thompson’s went from +31 to +15. Both Bera and Thompson were proud supporters of Prop 50. One of the only things keeping California from gerrymandering even more aggressively was the opposition from progressive identity-based interest groups, which didn’t want to see the influence of their communities potentially diluted, Paul Mitchell, the Sacramento-based consultant who drew the new California map, told me.
State legislators are feeling national pressure to conform. In the Indiana Senate, Republican holdouts prevented the state from redrawing its map this year. This led to a reprimand from their governor and a Truth Social post from Trump calling out the group’s leaders by name and urging voters to “get them out of office, ASAP.” Some lawmakers’ houses have been swatted in the days since. In Maryland, Bill Ferguson, the president of the state Senate, has been one of the few bulwarks against re-gerrymandering a state that already has only one Republican district to Democrats’ seven. His argument isn’t especially high-minded; it’s primarily a worry that courts might rule the map illegal and force the state to draw a 6–2 or a 5–3. Even this pragmatic critique has been rejected by Maryland Governor Wes Moore, many of Ferguson’s senate colleagues, and prominent national Democrats including Hakeem Jeffries, Steny Hoyer, and Chris Murphy. Earlier this month, Ferguson drew a primary challenge, his first since 2014. The message to other would-be Bill Fergusons is clear.
Even the odds of a dummymander have decreased as fewer places are up for grabs from election to election, and as drawing perfect maps becomes easier and easier. Free user-friendly technology has democratized disenfranchisement, allowing election geeks across the country to propose ever more precise gerrymanders to their state legislators. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered Alabama to use a state legislative map made by a high schooler. (In that case, the citizen map replaces an illegal racial gerrymander.)
One of the only constraints left appears to be sloppiness. Last week, a federal district court struck down the Republican Texas gerrymander, citing a letter from Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, that instructed the state to “rectify” so-called coalition districts that are majority-minority. Dillon wrote that the districts were unconstitutional; the court, in an opinion by a Trump-appointed judge, called that belief “legally incorrect” and found that Texas’s reliance on Dhillon’s legal theory itself amounted to illegal race-based districting. If she had merely told the state to disenfranchise as many Democrats as possible, there would be no legal grounds to overturn the map in federal court. And even her clumsiness might not end up mattering. The Supreme Court has since stayed the ruling while it considers the matter, meaning the gerrymander is still in effect.
In a fun-house-mirror image, Democrats in California also managed to bring legal scrutiny to their own gerrymander by repeatedly talking about it in racial terms. Mike McGuire, a California state senator, wrote in a press release that the new map would “empower Latino voters.” The DOJ sued, citing McGuire’s statement; the case is now before a federal district court in California. The election-law scholar Richard Hasen has argued that the DOJ doesn’t have much of a case, both because the racial motivations would have to be “predominant” to strike down the map and because the state’s voters, not just the legislature, passed the map. Of course, the Texas ruling also came as a surprise. If Democrats had simply said, “We want poor, rural Californians to have no say in who represents them,” they might not even be in court.
With so few constraints left, the rhetoric on gerrymandering has heated up. L. Louise Lucas, a Democratic state senator in Virginia, has been posting multiple times a week about her desire to draw a map that leaves only one Republican district out of 11 in Virginia. In Florida, the biggest state still poised to redistrict, ambitions are perhaps even greater. The state’s Republican Party executive director recently told a Tallahassee political forum that, if called upon by the legislature, he’d “sit down over a weekend and draw a map where there’s not a single Democratic member of Congress from Florida.”
Thanks to Democratic efforts to retaliate, this war may wind up being a wash for the partisan makeup of the 120th Congress. But although Democratic gerrymandering is effective at canceling out Republican gerrymandering, it only doubles the number of voters being disenfranchised.
[Read: ‘None of this is good for Republicans’]
The way out of this spiral is clear: a federal ban on congressional gerrymandering. (Such a law would not address the practice of gerrymandering state legislative districts, however—a pernicious problem in its own right.) What has kept this from happening is that few Republicans are interested in passing one. In 2021, all but one House Democrat voted for a bill that required, among other things, independent redistricting commissions in every state. Not a single Republican voted for the bill, and no organized Republican effort to reform redistricting has emerged since. Some Republicans, such as Doug LaMalfa, have philosophical reasons for opposing redistricting reform. Others, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, argue that the GOP is positioned to come out ahead in a gerrymandering arms race.
One of the rare exceptions is Kevin Kiley, a second-term Republican congressman. In August, Kiley introduced a bill that would ban mid-decade redistricting and reverse the changes made to state maps this year. He also supports having independent redistricting commissions in every state. Nonstop gerrymandering, he told me, “really makes it a lot harder for people to represent their districts and for representative government to work properly.”
But Kiley is running out of time. His district is among those gerrymandered out of existence by Prop 50. After the midterms, he probably won’t be a congressman anymore—just another disenfranchised California Republican.
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