This was the week when America learned that there are no “good” arbitrary lines on a map indicating the boundaries of a congressional district. They are all instruments of politics and subject to change if the situation warrants. This is actually useful in thinking about the post-Trump world: A genuine “good government” action on district lines would not make them “fair,” but make them irrelevant.
The context for this revelation, of course, is the flight of legislative Democrats from Texas to safe houses across liberal America, in an effort to block a quorum and deny a vote on new congressional maps that are likely to cost Democrats up to five seats in the 2026 midterm elections. If you believe Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), there’s now an FBI manhunt under way for them, in addition to multiple attempts to expel the wayward Democrats from the Texas House. I don’t see how this necessarily helps Republicans, because it ties the whole matter up in the courts, where it will fester beyond the special session of the legislature that ends August 20, and maybe beyond Texas’s December deadline for filing for next March’s primaries, at which point district lines must be set.
As Christopher Hooks notes, Texas Democrats have tried this breaking quorum gambit before to deny votes they were sure to lose, and it has never fully succeeded. I do think things are different this time, however, in a couple of respects.
First, there is a new willingness among Democrats to challenge Donald Trump’s authoritarian maneuvering. It was the national party that encouraged Texas House members to leave Austin; Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL), a potential 2028 candidate, was encouraging the move for weeks. And second, the goal isn’t as much to deny a vote in Texas as it is to steel Democrats across the country for the fight ahead, one where the good-government approach of anti-gerrymandering efforts is dead and buried.
Though they face more hurdles in unwinding independent redistricting commissions and the impulse to produce “fair” maps, Democrats are now recognizing that they can’t win with unilateral disarmament, and the Texas situation has set off a chain reaction. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has already planned for new maps in California that would offset moves in Texas; this would involve a special election in just three months that would be “triggered” only if Texas moves forward with their plan. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is talking about the same thing in New York.
Ohio is actually required to change its maps legally, and expectations are for Republican pickups there. Even states with much narrower options are preparing. Missouri is “likely” to redraw maps to crack Kansas City and kill a Democratic seat; Vice President JD Vance is visiting Indiana to persuade them to draw Rep. Frank Mrvan (D-IN) out of Congress; Maryland has just one Republican in its congressional delegation and the legislature could eliminate that seat; the blue-dot seat in Omaha, Nebraska, which was likely to flip to Democrats this year, could also be obliterated.
Democrats are now recognizing that they can’t win the gerrymandering battle with unilateral disarmament.
The desires of voters in these states, needless to say, are not taken into account. All the rhetoric about communities of interest and compact district lines are gone. Trump has set off a hard-nosed war, and in that context it makes perfect sense for Democrats to engage the fight. Even stalwart advocates for nonpartisan redistricting like Eric Holder and Common Cause are changing their minds.
I think we can all recognize that there’s no end to this. The sophistication of digital cartography and the helping hand the public provides with ideological sorting into blue and red clusters makes gerrymandering incredibly simple. The endgame for all this is maps where a state trifecta automatically shifts all congressional districts into the party in control, so the only competitive districts happen to be seats in states with divided governments. It’s a congressional recapitulation of the small number of “swing states” in the presidential elections under the Electoral College.
In case you were wondering, such a system would guarantee 177 Republican seats, 164 Democratic seats, and the rest up for grabs. The current representatives in place in those “toss-up” states are 57 Republicans and 37 Democrats. The total-war scenario in gerrymandering is not a winning one for Democrats when taken to the logical extreme.
Now that the genie is out of the bottle, I don’t think there’s any going back to a “fair” map scenario; the temptation will be too great to force in a political advantage, as we’ve already seen, and the federal courts have sworn off political gerrymanders as something they can police. In fact, the Supreme Court is poised to allow racial gerrymanders, the last thing they’ve held up and the final bit of the Voting Rights Act that hasn’t been ruled out of existence.
What options does that leave us? A last-minute bill from Republicans in blue states seeks to ban mid-cycle redistricting. But Trump won’t sign that, and even if he did it would just defer this arms race to after the 2030 census. (Trump is allegedly ordering a new census—that’s nothing but bluster.) Congress could require independent redistricting commissions, as was part of a Democratic bill that came within two votes of passing in 2021. (Remember Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema?) But Republicans would presumably roll that back whenever they got into power.
More important, the idea that individuals removed from politics can whip up “perfect” maps is belied by the realities of place-based districts, particularly in a time of ideological clustering. The frequently used talking point from Democrats about Texas is that Republicans won 56 percent of the presidential vote in the 2024 elections but want 80 percent of the congressional delegation. But in California, Democrats hold 82.6 percent of the congressional delegation while winning 58.5 percent of the presidential vote—and that was an independent redistricting commission that drew the map with this presumed inequity.
The larger point is that ideological segregation makes “fair” maps nearly impossible, and larger districts enable the cracked cities and vote sinks that allow gerrymandering to thrive. So the only way to solve the problem is to attack the root causes. In the immediate term, Democrats are going to fight gerrymandering with gerrymandering, as appropriate. But the longer-term goals should be different.
First off, we need many more members of Congress. Distortions in gerrymandering get harder on an overall basis with more districts. We’ve been stuck at 435 House members since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and in that time the U.S. population has nearly tripled. At the absolute least, we can rise to the level of the British parliament and its 650 members of the House of Commons.
More important, winner-take-all elections for single seats are what make the district lines so high-stakes. Countries that had adopted winner-take-all elections, like Australia and New Zealand, abandoned them when they recognized the system’s perversities. Proportional representation is actually the more commonly practiced voting method, and it ought to be the end goal here. The only way to get a legislature that approximates the popular will is through divvying up the members in proportion to the total vote; you will never get a map to deliver this outcome, no matter how scrupulously fair. (Of course, proportional representation is impossible in the deeply malapportioned Senate; but also of course, we shouldn’t have a Senate with any voting power, and should devolve it into an American version of the House of Lords.)
We’re obviously not going to get to this goal tomorrow or in the next election or the one after that. But parties need to have goals that are not only in their best interest but in the public interest. The only way to enfranchise the whole population is by giving their votes equal representation. Otherwise, we’re just doing gerrymandering by some other name.
