jacob geers

The national round of gerrymandering was very publicly and loudly kicked off by Donald Trump ordering the Texas Republicans to do an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting to give him more House seats, thus heading off what was always likely to be a bloodbath in the midterm election. The Right's general political calculus was that the Democrats would cry about it but not retaliate. In fairness, that was a reasonable gamble to take. After all, Democrats have unilaterally disarmed from the redistricting arms race. New York gave up theirs. No California lawmaker has drawn an election map in 15 years. Democrats and their allies forced their own side to give up the power to draw election districts in many states (Colorado, Michigan, Washington) - most recently in Virginia in 2019. Then, the Democrats tried to pass national anti-gerrymandering reform in 2021. Every single Republican U.S. Senator opposed it, joined by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, so it failed. But the Republicans' gamble failed, because they did not grasp that just as Donald Trump has changed the Right's politics, it has changed the Left's as well. Ironically, Democrats will now probably fight the mid-decade redistricting to a draw, if not a little bit ahead. Partisan gerrymandering is a noxious and corrosive practice on our democracy. But if only one side is interested in ending it, and the other is willing to maximally deploy it for their own ends, then unilateral disarmament doesn't work. It's awful that Donald Trump and the Texas Republicans put the nation in this position. But we've probably now seen the end of state-based attempts at ending partisan gerrymandering. The only answer is a national ban. Many Democrats now believe that the only way to get a national ban is to make the GOP feel a real penalty to gerrymandering. We'll see if it works.