In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.

Gerrymandering, the drawing of district lines to intentionally advantage one political party, is both traditional and constitutional. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, particularly now when political animosity is at historic heights.

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The current mid-decade redistricting wars put this point front and center. Republicans may gain a small advantage in the 2026 midterm elections if they use their raw political power to muscle through new House lines in states they control, such as Texas, Florida, and Ohio. But that merely creates a new normal, legitimizing the use of constant line redrawing as a means of keeping power regardless of what voters think.

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That cannot end well, for Republicans or the country. Eventually, Democrats will find their way back into office in most larger states and will use the new norm to punish the GOP. One can even imagine they will be willing to eliminate the filibuster for issues pertaining to elections and voting to push through a national bill that will outrage Republicans as much as the current drive to redraw congressional maps has outraged Democrats.

Ending gerrymandering in a way that disadvantages neither party is much easier said than done, however. Commissions that are said to be nonpartisan are often not, and it’s all too easy for a skilled practitioner of redistricting’s black arts to manipulate even apparently fair-looking lines.

The left’s preferred approach of declaring that partisan redistricting is unconstitutional is itself fraught with problems. The only reasonable standard that a court can apply to judge such cases would compare the partisan proclivities of the districts with statewide voting patterns, requiring a rough proportionality of opportunity regardless of the preferences of local communities.

It would be hard even to discover which statewide standard would be suitable to apply. In some states, the presidential results are good predictors of House voting, but they are not in places like California, where Republicans routinely do better than President Donald Trump in legislative races.

And what happens when large groups of voters shift their partisan allegiances, as has happened frequently in recent decades? When college-educated whites or Hispanics shift sharply mid-decade to one party over another, does that change invalidate the maps? The logic of court-ascertained partisan-balanced redistricting says yes; simple logic says no.

Adopting partisan proportional representation, as in most of Europe, would end gerrymandering by ending America’s traditional single-member district system. For most people in both parties, that’s a bridge too far.

Americans like their system of single-member districts, and for good reason. Making each representative responsible to the voters in one discrete region allows people direct access to someone who can share their particular, local concerns. It also reduces the power of national or statewide party bosses, who in other countries can dictate who represents their parties by placing their allies in privileged positions on party lists.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to end gerrymandering by adopting PR and keeping America’s single-member tradition. All we have to do is tweak a system that is used in Germany.

Germany awards seats in its national legislature, the Bundestag, according to the share of votes a party receives, provided it obtains at least 5% of the total. But it also has single-member districts where the person who wins the most votes, even if it is much less than a majority, wins a seat. 

It marries the American district system to the European PR system by giving each seat to the candidate who carries a district first, and awarding seats from a party-approved list only after a district representative first fills the party quota.

America could adopt this system and do away with party lists entirely with a simple adaptation: award seats to candidates from a party that wins more seats as a party than it has won in single-member districts when those candidates lose by narrow margins.

Here’s how it could work in practice, using California as an example.

Republicans regularly obtain around 35% to 40% of the vote in California, which would award them between 18 and 21 seats in Congress under proportional representation. Unfair district lines, however, meant they won only nine seats in the last election, a number that could fall to as few as four under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) gerrymander.

Under my proposed system, the GOP would get the number of seats its vote share entitles it to. You would simply total the votes won by Republican House candidates in the state and multiply that aggregate vote share by the state’s 52 seats. The actual seats would go first to the GOP candidates in the districts who won, and then be awarded to those who received the highest shares of the vote, even though they lost.

In 2024, that would have meant the GOP would have won 21 seats. The nine district winners would take their seats, and the remaining 12 would have gone to Republicans who lost by 15 points or less. The Democrats’ 31 seats would then be filled by the remaining 31 Democratic winners.

No party lists filled by bosses. Local representation is secured. No unfair partisan advantage because one unscrupulous party uses power to create legislative majorities out of political minorities.

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This also encourages both parties to campaign everywhere rather than just catering to their bases. Many seats in each election are not contested by one of the two major parties because they know they can’t win. In this system, Democrats have an incentive to campaign for white working-class votes, and Republicans have a reason to fight for inner-city and urban votes since even losing margins can contribute to seats awarded statewide.

This system would also be a partisan wash nationwide. Republicans regularly lose out on seats in heavily blue states because of gerrymandering and political demography. Massachusetts is an example of the latter case, as Republicans usually get around 35% of the statewide vote but never win a House seat because it’s almost impossible to draw a district where GOP voters would comprise a majority.