The Greatest Threat to America’s Government is Gerrymandering

America’s democratic institutions have long been a beacon that we brag about to the rest of the world. Since our nation’s founding, our elections have resulted in new public servants and peaceful transitions of power. Lately, though, the democratic values we uphold are beginning to crumble. Among these values include voting rights and voter enfranchisement, which is being subjected to a Republican-led assault. There is another tool for our elections that most of us fail to focus on, but it is an issue as important or even more pressing than voting rights: redistricting and gerrymandering. 

Redistricting is a very bureaucratic subject that most of us tend to ignore, making this process of American elections incredibly enticing for political operatives looking to exploit our ignorance. To provide context, we need to outline what redistricting is and why this process should matter to more than the policy wonks of Washington. After all, if Washingtonians are so deeply invested in this process of American elections, there is value in understanding their interest. Next, we have to connect redistricting to gerrymandering, a concept politicians increasingly exploit to have elections favor their political party. Finally, I will attempt to explain why we need to care about this matter and what we can do to correct its injustices.

The process of America’s redistricting system goes back to the founding of the United States Congress. During the Second Constitutional Convention, a debate occurred over the balance of power in the Legislative Branch. Small states wanted equal representation to their larger siblings, while large states yearned for a representative process based on population. In the end, two branches of Congress resulted, the Senate, which would satisfy the wants of small states, and the House of Representatives, with its offices based on population. Each state in the House would have one or several districts proportional to its number of people. As a result, each district has, more or less, the same number of constituents. People, though constantly move in and out of localities, lopsiding the representation of many state delegations. Thus, every ten years, the Census Bureau conducts a tabulation. After a year of grueling counting, the Bureau releases the tally of people in each state and accordingly reapportions the 435 House seats. States that grew faster than average typically receive additional districts, while states with less growth or a decline in population usually lose seats. For example, between 2010 and 2020, Texas saw a 15.9% increase in population, which meant that Texas gained two seats. Meanwhile, because New York only grew 4.2% in the same decade, New York will lose a seat come 2022. As states constantly lose or gain seats decennially, they must draw new maps so that each district in their state will have around the same amount of constituents. 

The crucial step of drawing new maps based on reapportionment by the Census Bureau is the heart of redistricting and is why this process becomes an important political tool. While the initial purpose of redrawing Congressional districts only involved ensuring populations were equally split, and incumbents were intact, politicians have used redistricting for more nefarious reasons. Operatives found that they can draw maps in a way to favor their political party. This exploitation is the basis of gerrymandering, a tactic that can be armed to reduce the opposition party’s influence for a decade.

Gerrymandering is an issue that is very easy to see in Congressional maps but unbearably difficult to define. There are two main ways gerrymandering takes place, though, during redistricting. The first is cracking the opposition party. When map drawers crack a group, they can separate a block of voters. This step has become alarmingly efficient with increasing Democratic urban cores and Republican rural areas. By cracking a group into two districts, all of their votes are wasted since that group would not have a majority in each of their districts. The other method of gerrymandering is packing. Packing is incredibly effective in cities, where Republican drawers can put a Democratic city into one district, wasting half of the Democratic vote in that district. 

Those two actions, cracking and packing, are used in tandem to create wildly skewed results. For example, in South Carolina, 43% of voters in the 2020 election voted for a Democratic House candidate, but Democrats only represented 14% of South Carolina’s seven Congressional districts*. Republicans disproportionately took six of the seven districts by cracking Democrats in the two largest cities, Charleston and Columbia. South Carolina’s redistricting, though, is more than gerrymandering; it is racial gerrymandering. Republicans in South Carolina’s state legislature, which controls the map-drawing process, looked at race during the 2010 redistricting cycle to create South Carolina’s 6th district, which is 54% black, even though South Carolina is 27% black. Such disparities in both racial and partisan compositions have primarily adverse effects with few positive effects. There is an imbalance of Republicans and Democrats in the House, which fundamentally alters the priorities of South Carolina, including healthcare, labor, and agriculture.

While more likely to be done by Republicans, gerrymandering is promulgated by both the GOP and the Democratic party. Maryland, a state that voted for President Joe Biden by 65.4%, has one of the most gerrymandered maps in the nation. Even though 65% of Marylanders voted in the 2020 election voted for House Democrats, Democrats won in 88% of Maryland’s eight districts**. To achieve this extreme gerrymander, Democrats packed eastern Maryland Republicans into Maryland’s 1st district and diluted the influence of Republicans in western Maryland by adding votes from the Washington DC metro area, creating a district that voted in 2020 for Democrat David Trone by 18%. The shutout of western Marylanders ultimately means their desire for secured gun-rights, limited same-sex marriage, and closed border policy are being rejected by their own US representative, who would rather listen to the voices of Frederick and Rockville, Maryland. As gerrymandering extends nationwide, past Maryland and South Carolina, many more constituents are in districts with congresspeople who do not recognize their presence. Consequently, numerous policy improvements go unheeded in favor of partisan action.

The Congressional maps created in 2011 are still in use today, but with the 2021 redistricting cycle underway, we are approaching an impending crisis. State Supreme Courts and democratic institutions will undergo rigorous stress under partisan battles. We live in a representative democracy, in a system where we decide who should represent us. Part of what makes our government successful is the idea of compromise, where two opposing ideas come together to forge a middle ground. These compromises allow the United States to make small steps of progress towards long-term prosperity. America’s compromise relies on the individuals who conduct it, particularly those on the moderate side of politics. The goal of gerrymandering is in direct conflict with the success of America’s institutions. 

Political operatives assigned to gerrymander existing boundaries have no allegiance to upholding the values of moderation and compromise. Instead, their goal is to make more districts sway to their political party and make those districts uncompetitive and bitterly partisan. The rise of partisanship and polarization in the United States has demonstrated its adverse side effects. Collegiality between Republicans and Democrats is fading, pragmatism is fading, and bipartisanship is close to nonexistent. Meanwhile, rhetoric against the opposition takes over, public servants increasingly become celebrities, and populism becomes the new normal. 

Gerrymanders incentivize districts that are either incredibly Democratic or astronomically Republican. As a result, the politicians of both parties have less reason to cooperate with the other side if they are in a safe-D or safe-R seat. In addition, today’s primary elections produce more progressive and conservative candidates than moderates, furthering the divide between the two major American parties. Today’s Congressional members dump oil into the fiery chaos with their rhetoric. Most of the individuals fueling Congress’s anger are from heavily partisan districts, most of them gerrymandered from the 2010 redistricting cycle. 

The actions made by lobbyists looking to gerrymander America’s states will have consequences for the general public in the next ten years. As more districts become polarized, both in Democratic states like New York and Republican states like Texas, Congressional members find less incentive to work on deals, resulting in inaction. Five Congressional elections will occur under 2021’s drawn maps, and the impact of just five elections has massive repercussions for American politics, evidenced by the past decade of hyper-partisanship. Unlike voting disenfranchisement and corporate campaign donations, redistricting is an electoral issue that, once implemented, we, the people, cannot alter for the next decade. Voting bills that restrict can empower advocacy groups to conduct more voter registration and large campaign donations, while influenceable, do not determine an election’s destiny. In both initiatives, we have the power to correct the injustice, but in redistricting, the process is out of our hands for nine out of ten years.

Politicians are acutely aware of the implications behind redistricting and gerrymandering. Opponents in state legislatures looking to unseat those in the US House for the 2022 election are lining up with the money to ensure a map that skews in their favor. Consequently, many Democrats who risk being redistricted into a Republican-leaning district are calling for independent drawers that take control of redistricting away from partisan influences. California provides an example of an alternative to state-legislature drawn maps with independent commissions. Using randomly chosen non-political individuals, California’s 2021 redistricting commission is likely to reduce the Democratic delegation to near the percentage of Biden’s win in 2020 while adding new Latino-majority districts per California’s percentage of Latinos. California, though, is still in the minority of states that have implemented independent commissions. 245 of the 435 districts continue to give the power of redistricting to the state legislatures. 

With the US Census Bureau releasing the full population metrics, time is ticking for anti-gerrymander efforts. The initiatives to combat gerrymandering are tucked in present-day voting rights bills with badly needed mandates of independent commissions. Many of these pieces of legislation, though, like the For the People Act and John Lewis VRA, are deadlocked in the Senate. Bipartisan provisions of fair maps are laced with heavily controversial issues of mail-in voting and voter ID requirements. At the very least, though, Congress is beginning to acknowledge the dangers of gerrymandering. 

At the very least, there is still time, albeit minimal time, to halt the efforts of those wishing to benefit their party at the expense of our governmental process.