Realistic Assessments of the Real-World Importance of Gerrymandering

I will offer below some updates on the ever-changing US situation regarding the effects of gerrymandering on the 2026 midterms.  Spoiler alert: It is still looking good for Democrats overall -- though definitely bad for Black Democratic officeholders, due to the recent dirty deeds of the Supreme Court.  Before I get there, however, it is worth looking back on some very recent history.

In late 2022, after the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in that year's midterm elections, I planned to write a series of columns under the blanket title "Gerrymandering is the Only Thing that Anyone Should be Talking About."  I never wrote those columns, because I had at that point begun a process that would completely disrupt my life for several years, but my intended point was a valid one.

Recall that in the first two years of the Biden presidency, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.  True, the toxic dyad of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema made the US Senate the place where attempts to save democracy went to die, but at least those two did not switch parties and hand control back to Mitch McConnell and his wrecking crew.

The House flipping in 2022 meant that the second half of Biden's term would be insane, most obviously because House Republicans would immediately hold the world hostage by contriving another debt ceiling crisis.  (They did.)  And this was especially infuriating, because the switch in party control was entirely explainable as a result of gerrymandering.  If the Republicans had picked up only four seats instead of nine (in an election that was supposedly going to be a "red wave"), Democrats would have held their majority, which would have kept the hapless Kevin McCarthy and then the odd-doesn't-begin-to-describe-him Mike Johnson out of the Speaker's chair.

In 2024, even as barely enough voters pulled the lever against the woman of color at the top of the ticket (while more than enough others stayed home entirely), the election that Donald Trump's people immediately claimed was a landslide saw Democrats actually pick up a seat in the House, which is why the Republicans' majority is so slim right now -- so slim that last year Trump ordered Elise Stefanik to stay in her seat rather than become UN Ambassador, after which he completely predictably turned against her and ended her political career.

This very recent history is worth revisiting for a number of reasons.  One is that New York State saw its Democratic leaders single-handedly make the negative difference, first by completely screwing up post-2020-census redistricting and then managing to lose winnable races against the likes of George "Would I Lie to You" Santos.  Earlier this year, I wrote about Mike Lawler, a supposedly moderate NY Republican who must surely have pulled a muscle after stretching for one of the most ridiculous bothsidesist claims ever, asserting in a NYT op-ed: "The loudest voices on each extreme have retreated to their usual corners. They have an interest in keeping our immigration problems unsolved and politically divisive."  In my column, I asked: "Who, pray tell, are the equivalents on the 'left extreme' who do not want to solve the US's immigration problems?"  The man is a pompous fraud, now trying to get Trump to save him.

And who did Lawler beat in 2022 to become part of Donald Trump's cult in the House?  Sean Patrick Maloney, who managed to lose to Lawler by 0.6 percent, even though Maloney was a five-term incumbent and the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee -- yes, the committee tasked with winning the House.  My point is that Democrats were definitely in a position to hold the House that year, even with all of the asymmetric gerrymandering that they had to overcome.  But my larger point, of course, is that there was all of that asymmetric gerrymandering to overcome.

The other thing to recall -- or, for most people, to learn for the first time -- is that gerrymandering going into the 2022 elections had in fact been litigated in several states, with the Republicans losing, but the gerrymandered seats were never un-gerrymandered.  As Democracy Docket later pointed out: "In 2022, voters in six states cast ballots in congressional districts that have been ruled in violation either of the 14th Amendment, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) or state constitutions."  In one of those states, Ohio, the illegal maps persisted into 2024, with Samantha Hendrickson of the Associated Press writing in 2023:

The legal dispute has been going on for two years, with the court rejecting two separate congressional maps and five sets of Statehouse maps — describing districts for the Ohio House and Senate in Columbus as gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.

Despite the maps being deemed unconstitutional before the 2022 elections, they continue to be used due to Republicans essentially letting the clock run out after refusing the court’s order to write up new, fairer maps by the prescribed deadline.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin (which is not one of the six states analyzed in that Democracy Docket piece), the state adopted "the original maps [that] the Republican controlled legislature passed.  Thus, despite [Democratic] Gov. Evers veto, the maps passed by the Republican controlled legislature were implemented for the 2022 elections."

Relying on the so-called Purcell Principle, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that Alabama's unconstitutional maps could not be redrawn because we were too close to Election Day, such that it supposedly would cause chaos and confusion to switch to ... you know ... maps that do not violate the Constitution.

I cannot wait to read the excuses that the Roberts Court will soon extrude to support Republicans' extreme reaction to last month's VRA-killing Callais decision, with Republicans around the country (especially in the Deep South) re-re-re-gerrymandering as we speak -- even as the 2026 elections are much closer in time than the previous situations in which it was supposedly too late to do anything.

In my recent writings about gerrymandering, however, I have argued that if elections to fill gerrymandered seats are still anything close to actual elections, it continues to be possible for wave elections to overcome all of the bad-faith redrawing of maps by anti-democratic Republicans and their appointed jurist-politicians.  (See, e.g., Hungary, 2026.)

In particular, my April 30 Dorf on Law column included a hypothetical example of a state with a voting history in which 52 percent of voters are Republican.  I showed that such a state could be gerrymandered such that 8 out of 10 districts are so solidly Republican that it would take 15 percent of the voters to switch from Republican to Democrat for Democrats to win any of those seats.  Republicans could even set themselves up with 9 out of 10 safe districts, which would still only be in danger if eight percent of voters switched parties.

But if the Republicans tried to go for the full sweep, they could lose everything -- that is, all ten seats -- if only 2+ percent of voters switched.  (I said three percent in that column, but I was rounding up.)  That is why some people are calling the Republicans' feeding frenzy this year a "dummy-mander," because it is certainly looking like voters are swinging toward Democrats in congressional races in large numbers.

All of my analysis there was, however, merely a stylized example to illustrate how this could play out in surprising ways.  In the real world, how close are we to seeing gerrymandering blow up in Republicans' faces?  As I noted above, in a very important sense this is not the most important question coming out of the Court's assassination of the VRA, because Black representation in Congress will almost completely disappear as states of the Confederacy push out their last majority-minority Democrats.  I am not in any way trying to ignore or diminish that historic injustice.  If there is to be a path forward that could involve reversing that injustice, however, it will not happen if Republicans retain control of Congress after this year.

In any case, Paul Krugman brought the pollster extraordinaire G. Elliott Morris back for a substack interview this past Sunday, and Morris drew on the most evidence-based estimates that he could find to answer the question of just how much harder the midterms will be for Democrats in light of recent setbacks.  Note especially that Morris offered his analysis after the Republicans on the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the ballot measure that would have allowed the Democrats to score a net pickup of four US House seats from the Commonwealth.

As an aside, Morris is the pollster who recently concluded that the entire notion of "moderate" voters is a myth, as I described in a column two months ago.  His analysis showed that the Biden/Schumer-style centrist Democrats' obsession with ideological moderation is based on a complete misunderstanding of how swing voters think.  That is not directly relevant here, but it is worth repeating as often as possible, because the Democratic Party as a whole is still run by people who are certain that American voters are ideologically conservative.  Still wrong, but still certain.

But back to the gerrymandering arithmetic.  Morris explains the apparent net effect of all of the gerrymandering efforts to date (including those setbacks for Democrats in Virginia and elsewhere): "If you add up all this, then Democrats are down about six seats [because of] the gerrymandering wars that Donald Trump started last year. And that could be potentially decisive in a close race."  He did, however, begin the interview by saying, "Big picture is: as long as Democrats are still winning the popular vote by four points, they’re still taking back the House of Representatives."  He eventually ran through the confusing thicket of changes in all of the relevant states, reaching this conclusion:

I think the 2026 election will be significantly pro-Democratic, and that the gerrymandering won’t matter. It won’t matter in terms of who wins the majority of the seats. Democrats will still be down six seats, at least, from where they should be. But if they’re gaining twelve, then, you know, they’re still managing to recapture the House because it was so close last time. Republicans only had three extra seats at the last election. So it’s a pretty easy wave election for the Democrats. But they’ll still be down seats, like they’re still deprived of representation in the South.

 In response to a question from Krugman about the supposed dummy-manders, Morris said this:

Republicans basically went after five districts in Texas. Maybe two or three of those are highly susceptible to a dummy-mander. In which case, if you do the math and Latinos move 20 points toward the Democrats, and everyone else only moves ten points to the Democrats—assuming Latinos are moving twice as much as everyone else, which is pretty close to what happened in the 2025 elections—then Republicans only gain two seats out of Texas, but they’re still gaining seats. So there is a possibility that they have drawn themselves too thin in the case of a big Latino backlash. But they’re just subtracting some seats that they could have otherwise gained. So it’s not the fact that they’re going to lose overall in terms of the overall gerrymandering. In other words, they’re still coming out ahead.

This is an important point, because Morris is careful not to say, "Well, Republicans' efforts to end democracy won't matter if they lose the House."  He is saying instead that they will succeed in stripping representation from many people, but possibly not as many as they thought they could.  And that is not merely a theoretical point, because he adds that "more importantly, in 2028, when we’re not expecting Democrats to have such a large wave[, t]hen we’re expecting a much closer election. And in that 2028 scenario, this gerrymandering could give Republicans the majority, even if Democrats win the popular vote."

So even if things go Democrats' way later this year -- and, as I must continue to emphasize, only if Trump and the Republicans actually allow a Democratic majority to be sworn in and take control of the chamber on January 3, 2027, which is unlikely -- the "People's House" will continue to elect enough candidates who do not represent the American people that they could again be in the position that they are in today, not propelled into power by the people's voice but by overcoming it.

The title of this column promised realism, and there we have it.  The House (and many, many state legislatures) have been gerrymandered for years, the Democrats have until recently failed to respond, and by now it might be too late, even if this year's elections go as the current polls seem to suggest.

- Neil H. Buchanan