Why Gerrymandering Poses a Real Danger to Fair Elections in 2026

“We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.” Those are the words of the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, in describing the Democrat's response to the plan of Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional district map in order to gain five more seats in the United States House of Representatives.

Knife fights are messy, and this one is no different.

The President of the United States of America brazenly and unabashedly, in the plain light of day and not in some smoke-filled back room, called for gerrymandering to retain the Republican majority.

Texas state Democratic legislators hid out in other states to prevent the quorum necessary to take up the issue of redistricting (or any other issue). The Texas governor threatened to arrest them for it. A U.S. Senator suggested the FBI get involved. Governors of Democrat-led states, like Newsom of California and Pritzker of Illinois, threatened to redraw their maps in retaliation. Welcome to another edition of politicians gone wild, ratcheting up the temperature instead of cooling passions. All indications are that we are entering an arms race – a race, as others have noted, to allow politicians to pick their voters instead of allowing voters to pick their representatives.

Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution, stained as it is with the three-fifths compromise and amended to remove that stain by the 14^th Amendment, makes clear that our representation will be adjusted once within every ten-year term by a count of the population. And because the number of members of the House of Representatives is capped at 435, a population shift between states can cause an individual state to gain or lose seats. That change, together with the need to be sure each seat represents roughly the same number of people (currently around 760,000), drives the need for redistricting.

Our Constitution, together with several of its Amendments, also attempts to ensure that no American citizen is disenfranchised. As a result, the right to vote may not be infringed upon because of race, gender, age, or financial means. I am not naive to the fact that there are still places in this country where race is considered in redistricting. And where that still exists, the courts must stamp it out. I am also not naive to the fact that there is a difference between being able to cast a ballot and having that ballot actually count. Note I didn’t say counted; I said count, meaning that your vote is not so outnumbered by other votes that it simply does not matter. Some states are so red or so blue that a voter of the minority political party in that state may feel discouraged that their vote doesn’t count. There isn’t anything a districting map can, or should, do about that so long as the map mirrors that state’s overall voter makeup.

There will always be people in a minority, whether that is a racial minority, ethnic minority, religious minority, or a minority viewpoint. And in a Democratic Republic, so long as that minority’s rights are protected, it is okay that the majority’s will be done.

But what of a deliberate carving up of congressional districts in such a manner as to also serve to disenfranchise. What of a deliberate carving up that either seeks to create more districts that lean toward a certain group’s worldview than would otherwise exist in that state or seeks to consolidate all those with an alternate worldview into as few districts as possible within that state to limit the seats they would control? Are not those also forms of disenfranchisement? And is not that a level of disenfranchisement that Congress or the federal courts should be called upon to address? After all, Section 4 of the Constitution, though it gives to state legislators the power to prescribe how elections are handled, does allow Congress to make laws to alter those regulations if necessary.

President Trump won Texas in 2024 with 56% of the popular vote. In that same election, Republicans won 25 of Texas’ 38 Congressional seats or 66% of them. The five additional seats the Republicans hope to gain by redistricting would give them 79% of the seats. That is a 23% improvement over the presidential result. Sounds a bit like disenfranchisement. Interestingly, this redistricting may cause Rep. Al Green to lose his seat. Green is the Democrat who was rightfully removed from President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress earlier this year. Political retribution or coincidence?

Many of our Founders were leery of political parties – or factions as they called them – and more still believed that regional interests were more important factors requiring representation than grand national ones.

They felt what bound a community together was important, whether it was an agricultural community or a merchant community. Because of that, they felt representation should be closest to the people, not in some far-off land across the sea, and taxation without representation was abominable. We now, as they did then, send people to our nation’s capital to represent our interests. We don’t send them there to represent the interests of a party. We don’t send them there so a certain person can keep a gavel.

Being an accountant and finance person by trade, I tend to want to see the numbers. So let’s look at numbers to see if we have an issue with gerrymandering in this country. To those who don’t like numbers and spreadsheets, I apologize for the next few paragraphs.

In 2024, we had an election with both a presidential contest and contests for each seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. So, I built a spreadsheet showing all 50 states, comparing for each of them the percentage that either President Trump or Vice President Harris won with to the percentage of congressional seats that went to that same political party. In all but one state (Nevada), the party that won at the top of the ticket also won the most congressional seats. I then looked at the disparity between those two percentages, much like I did for Texas earlier in this piece. But because we are talking about gaining or losing actual seats in Congress, I then multiplied that disparity percentage by the number of congressional seats available in that state to see just how many seats are potentially being gained by the way district maps are drawn.

The state with the largest disparity in seat count is California, the state whose governor threatened a tit for tat redistricting. Harris won with 59% of the popular vote, but 83% of the congressional races were won by Democrats. That disparity of 24% (83% less 59%) multiplied by available congressional seats in California (52) means that Democrats picked up 13 more seats than they would have had the district map matched the voters current bent. The next highest, with a total of 5, is the state where most of the Texas legislators are hiding out…Illinois. Tied for the next highest, with 4, is also a state where some of the Texas legislators went…New York. In fairness, New York is tied with Texas at that number. If Texas succeeds in its gerrymandering, and if the election results match the intent, their number will increase to 9, placing them in second place on the list. So as outrageous as Texas’ attempt to gerrymander is, it appears to me as if Governors Newsom and Pritzker may be living in glass houses.

The most fascinating thing about my analysis was the total net effect of the disparity across all 50 states.

If you add up California’s 13 in favor of Democrats, Texas’ 4 in favor of Republicans, and so on to net out all 50 states…it quite literally nets out to a pickup of 0.21 members for Democrats nationwide. In other words, there is literally no pickup for either party! And that makes sense because Congress as a whole already mirrors the national electoral makeup; Republicans currently have 51% of House seats and a recent national Gallup poll shows that Republicans have a 1% advantage over Democrats in party affiliation.

So if this tit for tat between state legislatures is unlikely to change the balance of power in Washington, what is the real effect of going to war over redistricting? The real danger is that because the individual districts drawn will be so slanted toward one particular party, the candidates will become more extreme and they will work more for their party than for their constituents. They will become more extreme because they can more easily ignore voters of the other party without repercussion. The only thing that will remove them from office is offending the party itself. To stay in office, then, they will likely need to vote with party leadership 100% of the time. The needs of the individual district will grow less important.

No one ever became a better leader or candidate by not having their views challenged. No one ever became a better leader by being surrounded by yes men. I would argue that the best candidate is one who has to campaign in a fairly evenly-divided district. Because you best be smart. You best be attentive to issues of that particular district. And you best remember that you can be gone tomorrow if you forget who you are serving.

If you don’t believe me when I speak of the dangers of redistricting on who or what is served by your representatives, I remind you the Texas legislature is doing nothing right now because of an unnecessary, made-up issue of national partisanship when they should be serving their constituents who are still reeling from the recent flooding.

Maybe we should gerrymander to 50/50 districts so that representatives have to serve all. Perhaps then we’ll get some stuff accomplished.