Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled legislature have decided to play hardball by redrawing the state’s congressional map, with the aim of adding as many as five new Republican seats to a delegation that is presently 25–13, favoring the GOP. They may live to regret the overreach. The predictable Democratic hue and cry about gerrymandering, however, could hardly be more hypocritical.
Gerrymandering is often thought to reduce competitive elections and entrench incumbents. It is sometimes intended and effective at that — but not when parties bid to maximize partisan advantage. The danger with the most aggressive gerrymanders is that they trade safe seats for more competitive seats and thus risk bigger swings in years when the environment is unfavorable or after some realignment. Such a “dummymander” could easily happen here.
Entering the 2024 election, Republicans controlled the governorship and the state legislature in 23 states. Across those states, they won 59.3 percent of the popular House vote and 132 of the 176 House seats — 75 percent of the seats, or a 16-point advantage over purely proportional representation. (In our first-past-the-post, single-member-district system, representation is rarely precisely proportional.) In the ten states with divided government, Republicans won 52.3 percent of the popular House vote and 47 of the 75 House seats — 62.7 percent of the seats, or a 10.4-point advantage. In the 17 states run entirely by Democrats, the Dems won 56.7 percent of the popular House vote but 143 of the 185 House seats — 77.7 percent of the seats, or a 21-point advantage.
By this or any other metric, the blue states are already more favorable to Democrats maximizing their House delegations than red states are for Republicans. That’s why it rings so hollow to hear threats of retaliation from the governors of states such as California (with a 43–9 Democratic delegation from winning 58.4 percent of the vote) or Illinois (14 to 3 from winning 52.8 percent, with an egregious gerrymander that ran anti-Trump Republican Adam Kinzinger out of Congress). Only New York State’s highest court enforcing a voter-adopted state constitutional provision prevented that state’s Democrats from adopting a similarly one-sided map.
Moreover, Republican states such as Texas and Florida are currently underrepresented in the House because the 2020 Census undercounted them. And if Democrats are restrained from gerrymandering more aggressively to their advantage, it’s sometimes because they insist that the Voting Rights Act requires majority-minority districts — which benefits them in states such as Alabama and Louisiana, but elsewhere drains Democratic votes that could more profitably be spread across multiple districts. Live by racially segregating voters, die by racially segregating voters. The Supreme Court has just called for a briefing, in a case out of Louisiana that it held over from its last term, to consider whether racial gerrymanders are unconstitutional. The Court should do so, and it would be refreshing if Democrats joined the call for that salutary step instead of launching demagogic attacks against the justices.
A further irony in Texas is that Democrats are now crying crocodile tears over the threat to the current map even though Joe Biden’s Justice Department sued to overturn that very map. The Trump DOJ reversed that stance, and one of the arguments presented by Abbott for redrawing the map is that it contains districts that were racially gerrymandered to create VRA-compliant majority-minority districts, which may now be legally questionable.
Redistricting in between cycles without the pressure of a court order or a federal investigation is rare, though not unheard-of. Texas did the same thing in 2003. Then, the 2002 elections had delivered the first Republican majority in the Texas legislature in 130 years, and redistricting broke a Democratic gerrymander that had kept a majority of the Texas delegation Democratic since the end of Reconstruction. Then, as now, Democrats staged an ultimately futile walkout from the legislature in an effort to stop it. That tactic, too, is one both parties have used in states where they are in the minority and denounced when in the majority — with the extreme example of Oregon in 2024 declaring most of the Republicans in its state senate ineligible to run for reelection because of walkouts.
Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say, and gerrymandering is such an old trick that it is named for a signer of the Declaration of Independence. We would advise Texas Republicans to remember that pushing political norms to their absolute limit has a way of boomeranging. But Democrats are the last people on earth who ought to be crying foul.