OPINION:
Team Trump, for reasons known only to themselves, decided a few weeks ago that reopening the redistricting of House districts in Texas would be a good idea, ostensibly because it would provide an extra five Republican votes in the always-close House of Representatives.
Leave aside the wisdom of weakening the support for some of the more reliable and sturdy members of the House Republican caucus. Leave aside the very questionable theory that Hispanics in Texas (especially in the Rio Grande Valley) have been voting for Republicans rather than President Trump. Ignore whether it is a good idea to ask members of Congress to run in new districts in the middle of a cycle.
Let’s instead focus on two very real pathologies associated with this sort of mid-cycle redistricting. First, once this particular genie is out of the bottle, everyone who can harvest extra seats through gerrymandering will do so, meaning the net result is that after wandering around for months, everyone winds up back where they started.
The second pathology is, of course, that these exercises further normalize gerrymandering, which has been around since the founding of the country and is today what it always has been: a mortal threat to representative government.
When elected officials get to pick their voters, they have a solid preference for those already inclined to vote for them. The value and purpose of elections is minimized and the value of incumbency is maximized. Gerrymandering inevitably results in a system where adherence to partisan norms – rather than interest in representing voters – becomes the most important focus and goal of the elected official.
Right now, 13 House Democrats represent districts Mr. Trump won in 2024, while three House Republicans represent districts carried by former Vice President Kamala Harris. As recently as 2000, there were 86 districts where voters voted for one party for president and a different one for their member of Congress.
While split tickets and split districts make politics more challenging, they tend to make governing easier, as those elected in such districts need to find to ways to appeal to a broader constituency.
In short, gerrymandering complicates and retards the possibility of good governance.
More importantly, gerrymandering leads to anti-democratic results. Consider California. The California House delegation consists of 43 Democrats and nine Republicans. Gov. Gavin Newsom has indicated that he can reduce the number of Republicans in the delegation to just four, making the new split 48-4. In the most recent elections in California, about 60% of voters voted for Democratic candidates in House races, and about 40% voted for Republican candidates. If you just split the delegation along those lines, it would have about 38 Democrats and 21 Republicans.
In Illinois, the House delegation consists of 14 Democrats and three Republicans, despite the fact that in 2024, about 47% of Illinois voters voted for Republican House candidates. That delegation should be split nine Democrats and eight Republicans.
It is not just the Democrats. Missouri’s House delegation is 75% Republican. In 2024, 58% of Missouri voters voted for Republicans. If the proposed map in Texas is adopted, Republicans will hold about 80% of the House seats from Texas, despite only winning 58% of the vote. In Florida, about 70% of the House delegation is Republicans; again, only 58% of the voters voted for Republican House candidates in 2024.
The good news is that most of this darkness cancels itself out a national basis. In 2024, a shade less than 50% of the voters (49.7%) nationally voted for Republican House candidates, compared to about 47% of voters who voted for Democratic House candidates.
A narrowly divided electorate gave us a narrowly divided House; that’s how it should be.
That should also lead everyone to a simple answer. Rather than allowing politicians to pick their voters (or worse yet, allowing “independent” commissions jammed with operatives to pick voters), we should simply require that states draw geographically coherent districts that result in delegations reflective of the partisan vote total in the state.
Or we can keep having elections whose contours are decided by cartographers, judges and elected officials.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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