By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – August 4, 2025

Congress could limit the mutual assured political destruction as partisans move to redistrict more than once a decade.

Dozens of Texas Democrats skedaddled on Sunday, fleeing the state to prevent Republicans from passing a new U.S. House map that’s intended to net the GOP as many as five seats in the 2026 midterms. Denying a legislative quorum is an old tactic, yet it’s hard to maintain once absent legislators tire of hotel living. But there’s no doubt Texas Republicans are escalating the gerrymander wars.

Meantime, Democratic states are threatening to retaliate by redrawing their own House maps. Illinois’s delegation has 14 Democrats to three Republicans, but Mr. Pritzker says trying to squeeze out that GOP trio is on the table. Govs. Gavin Newsom in California and Kathy Hochul in New York are making similar threats. The legal and procedural hurdles vary by state, but the partisan pressure to bulldoze them will be hard to resist.

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Gerrymandering is an old story in the U.S. political system, since the word was coined in 1812, but today’s map-makers are much more proficient thanks to computers and granular data. Both sides do it. Massachusetts’s delegation to the House is 9-0 for Democrats, though President Trump won 36% of the vote last year. Nevada is 3-1, and that’s a state Mr. Trump won, 51% to 47%. After a GOP gerrymander, the swing state of North Carolina has 10 Republicans of 14 House seats.

This practice is bad for political competition, since each party draws itself “safe” seats where voters reward loud, loyal partisans. Nationwide, however, the gerrymanders in blue and red states are roughly balanced. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats nearly won the House, even as Republican candidates comfortably received more votes. A party that goes too far with gerrymandering, thinning out its margins in safe seats to try to win more overall, takes the risk of a wave election wipeout.

That’s especially true at the end of a redistricting cycle, as voters move and the political issues and coalitions evolve. A map drawn after the 2020 census might be a tight gerrymander two years later but chancier by decade’s end. States typically haven’t redistricted more often than that, except when under court order. What’s worrying is that if Texas and others have another go now, the new norm might be to re-gerrymander all the time.

The trick is figuring out how to limit this in a way that both sides can see as fair. Voters can amend state constitutions to prohibit partisan gerrymandering, which stopped a New York travesty in 2022.

Some states have tried to hand redistricting to an ostensibly independent commission. Yet then it’s a partisan proxy battle, and commissions that are evenly split can end up deadlocked. Commissions can also tilt one way or another with a gerrymander-like result: See California, with 43 Democratic seats out of 52; or New Jersey, 9 Democrats out of 12.

But there’s an element of mutual assured destruction here, and Democrats don’t want to limit their ability to gerrymander if Republicans aren’t going to quit, and vice versa. That’s why a federal standard might be useful. States run their own voting processes, but Congress has broad power under the Constitution to regulate the “manner” of House elections. One option might be a law telling states they can’t redistrict mid-decade.

One cause of more frequent gerrymanders is judicial intervention in response to partisan lawsuits challenging maps. The Supreme Court has been moving in a helpful direction here. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Justices said partisan gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable question for the political branches. A case next term, Louisiana v. Callais, is an opportunity to remove judges from the political thicket of racial gerrymanders.

Congress could also impose substantive restrictions on state map-makers, such as some kind of mathematical test for partisan fairness or district compactness. Such formulas can be gamed, though, and it’s hard to see Republicans and Democrats agreeing on the details. Ditto for bigger reforms, such as expanding the size of the House from the current 435, where it has been stuck since 1913.

But telling states they can only redistrict once per decade might de-escalate the gerrymander wars, and it would mainly ratify the status quo of recent years. Both parties could benefit from this kind of disarmament treaty, and voters most of all.

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Source: Texas Reopens the Gerrymander Wars – WSJ