The US has a census every decade and based on the population shifts, it allocates the 435 congressional seats among the states. This requires the congressional districts to be redrawn, especially if the total number of seats in a state changes. In most of the states the maps are drawn by the state legislatures and the party in power in a state can draw the districts is such a way as to maximize the chances of their party to win seats, which is why control of state legislatures is so critical, especially in the elections in the years that end with 10.
The restriction on what is allowable are few. As long as the districts are contiguous and have roughly the same number of voters, the maps are usually deemed acceptable. This can lead to the abuse known as gerrymandering in the following ways.
Gerrymandering defined in the contexts of representative electoral systems, is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries to advantage a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency.
…Wayne Dawkins, a professor at Morgan State University, describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.
…Cracking” involves spreading voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district.
…“Packing” is the practice of concentrating a large number of similar voters into a single district, thereby limiting their influence in other districts.
…“Hijacking” is a redistricting tactic that merges two districts, forcing two incumbents to compete for the same seat, ensuring that one of them loses.
…“Kidnapping” moves an incumbent’s home address into another district. Re-election can become more difficult when the incumbent no longer resides in the district or faces re-election in a new district with a new voter base.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to prevent maps being drawn to discriminate against racial groups but the current Supreme Court has eliminated many of its safeguards.
The re-drawing usually occurs in the first two years of each decade. Ideally, one would like the process to be done by an impartial body that draws maps that are compact and keeps local communities like towns and villages together rather than splitting them apart.
Since mid-term elections tend to lose seats for the party that has the presidency, Republicans feared losing control since they had only a three-seat majority in the House. Trump had the idea in 2025 to push those states that had Republican control to do a mid-decade gerrymandering of congressional maps to make them more favorable to Republicans and thus retain control.
At the urging of President Donald Trump, Republicans in eight states redrew the boundaries of dozens of congressional districts over the past year while angling for an edge that could help them hold onto a slim House majority in a tough midterm election.
Ultimately, it didn’t work.
Republicans lost most of the Democratic-held seats they had targeted to flip, lost others they had banked on retaining and got swept out of power by a Democratic surge fueled by voter dissatisfaction with Trump, the economy and the war with Iran.
The Republican redistricting plan fell flat in Alabama, Florida and Texas. It got scuttled by courts in Missouri and then firmly defeated by its voters Tuesday. And it got offset in California, where a retaliatory Democratic redistricting flipped all five of the Republican-held seats it targeted.
…In all but one of those revamped districts, Trump would have carried over 54% of the vote had they been in place for the 2024 election, according to Associated Press estimates.
But that strategy, which they must have thought was brilliant, was far less successful than they hoped, with a few Democratic states, especially California, responding in kind to counterbalance the Republican move. Republicans actually ended up losing most of the Democratic-held seats they had targeted to flip and others they had banked on winning. This shameless act also seemed to galvanize Democrats to vote.
Democrats won stunning victories on Tuesday in several districts that Republicans redrew over the last year and a half to benefit Republican candidates.
The victories came in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas. All four states were part of a nationwide effort by Trump and allies to reconfigure the boundaries of congressional districts in the middle of the decade. Typically, states redraw congressional districts just once, at the beginning of each decade.
…Democrats have won three of the four congressional seats in Florida that Republicans redrew this year in their favor, and are narrowly leading in the fourth. It’s a surprising result that underscores how strongly Democratic candidates are performing on election night.
…In Texas, the first state where Trump pushed for redistricting, Republicans were poised to gain anywhere from three to five seats. As votes were being counted, Democrats were favored Tuesday in many of those contests.
In addition to the districts in Florida, some of the new congressional districts in Texas and North Carolina appeared winnable for Democrats.
Ohio’s congressional districts had been highly gerrymandered for years by the Republican-controlled legislature who used all manner of delaying tactic shenanigans and defied court orders to change the maps to make them more equitable, so that from 2013-2023 only three of the 16 congresspeople were Democrats even though the popular votes was close to equal. But after Tuesday’s election, eight of the 15 seats will be held by by Democrats.
The North Carolina gerrymander also failed.
Democrats Cyril Jefferson, Paul Barringer and Lakesha Womack upset incumbent Republican Reps. Addison McDowell, Brad Knott and Tim Moore, respectively. Elsewhere in the state, two-term Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) defeated Republican Laurie Buckhout in the state’s redrawn 1st District. Democrats have now won eight House seats in North Carolina and could still win two more, despite an October 2025 map redraw that favored Republicans in 11 of the state’s 14 seats.
The Texas gerrymander also failed. GOP candidates lost four of five seats their new congressional map was designed to flip and lost two of their own.
In 2025, Texas Republicans, pushed by President Donald Trump, redrew the state’s congressional map before the midterms, converting five Democratic-held districts into ones Trump would have carried by at least 10 percentage points.
The move backfired: GOP candidates lost four of five seats their new congressional map was designed to flip and lost two of their own.
That means Texas Republicans will head to Washington in January with 24 U.S. House seats, one less than they had at the start of the current Congress. When the state Legislature in Austin pursued the controversial mid-decade gerrymander, Republicans had hoped for a 30-8 split in the delegation but will end up instead at 24-14.
Meanwhile, in California, Democrats have so far picked up three seats in their counter-gerrymandered map.
One risk of gerrymandering lies in simple arithmetic. If you try to take voters of the opposing party out of the districts in which they were the majority and distribute them in districts in which your party is the majority, you make your majorities smaller and it takes a smaller shift in voter preferences against you for you to lose your seat. This is what seems to have happened.
In all but one of those revamped districts, Trump would have carried over 54% of the vote had they been in place for the 2024 election, according to Associated Press estimates.
“In normal times, that sort of district is relatively safe,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who runs the “All About Redistricting” website.
But the presumed Republican districts got undercut by shifting viewpoints of Trump. The AP Voter Poll found about 6 in 10 disapprove of how Trump is handling the presidency. Views of Trump’s priorities also were mostly negative.
“If we look across the country, that entire mid-decade redistricting gambit was a complete bust for Republicans,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
While the gerrymander was meant to dilute the voting power of the Black community, it appears that there was a surge in Black voting in southern states that overwhelmed that effect. That surge may well have had some of its roots in anger at these attempts.
Black voter turnout surged across US southern states where Republicans were accused of redrawing electoral maps to “diminish Black political power” in the wake of a seismic supreme court ruling.
Democrats flipped or held seats in Alabama, Texas and Florida with the support of this voting bloc, building on a decades-long, dedicated movement to protect and build Black political power in the region.
The redistricting drive “blew up” in Republican lawmakers’ faces, said Ashley K Shelton, CEO and president of Power Coalition for Equality and Justice in Louisiana. “There’s nowhere to go but up from there,” she said. “We still have to fight to protect representation. We have to continue to fight for that representation.
“Let’s be clear: voters overcame unbelievable voter suppression across this country, and in particular in the south, to make sure that they were able to cast their vote in their voice.”
It comes after the supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in April with the Louisiana v Callais decision, rendering ineffective the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting.
But let’s be clear. If the districts had not been redrawn, Republicans would likely have lost more seats. So while the gerrymandering worked, sort of, it was not sufficient to overcome the massive shift in voter alignment against them. And since Republicans opened that door, it now appears that the new Democratic control of so many state legislatures could result in a spate of Democratic gerrymanders for the 2028 election.
What started as a Republican redistricting effort could become a Democratic redistricting movement ahead of the presidential election.
Maryland voters on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment that will make it easier for the state’s Democratic-led General Assembly to redraw districts to the party’s advantage. Democratic proponents, backed by former President Barack Obama, have touted it as a way to “stop Trump.”
Democrats who made gains in numerous state legislatures Tuesday also could use that power for redistricting — most notably in Wisconsin, where districts were tilted toward Republicans. And Democratic lawmakers in New York already have taken an initial step toward congressional redistricting before the 2028 elections.
The 2030 elections will be crucial since it is the party that gains power that will be in charge of the next regularly scheduled redistricting following the 2030 census.
This escalating cycle of gerrymandering is ridiculous. I hope that both parties realize that we need congressional maps to be drawn on a rational basis by an impartial body.
The above quote hides one of the primary limits to gerrymandering. There is an inherent conflict between favoring a party and favoring stable elections. Politicians in office often prefer to create a very stable map, where politicians in power will very rarely lose and they can stay in office for decades.
That would be nice. I am sceptical though whether it’s even possible to create such a thing in the US. Not even your Supreme Court can claim it’s impartial.
As I (and a few others) have pointed out, Canada has ‘Elections Canada’ (technically ‘the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer’) as an independent and militantly non-partisan office that reports directly to Parliament rather than to the Prime Minister. And it’s over a hundred years old, having been formed in 1920 after some changes to election rules during World War I led to worries about a lack of confidence in the election system.
(See How we began -- Elections Canada as part of a series they created for the 100th anniversary.)
As they note on that page, while Australia among other countries had a Chief Electoral Officer position, few countries had made that position explicitly separate from the government at that point in time, making Canada a trailblazer on that. It was also something with very broad bipartisan agreement at the time.
That said, I also agree (and have said in the past) that it would be very difficult to do something like that in the U.S. without a Constitutional Amendment. Too many of the details of the election rules are explicitly laid out in the Constitution as rules that mostly made sense 250 years ago when horses were the fastest way to send messages, and those that aren’t defined there are very explicitly set out as ‘the states run their own elections’.
And, sadly, you’d have a hard time getting bipartisan agreement on something like that in the U.S. these days.
I’d like to ban gerrymandering, but I don’t know if it’s feasible to write a law that would do that. Gerrymandering is like pornography -- you know it when you see it, but it’s really hard to define in an objective and rigorous way.
What would really stop gerrymandering, though it would require a more sweeping constitutional change, is something like New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional system. If a party wins, say, 60% of the vote but gets fewer than 60% of the legislative seats, they get extra members added to their delegation to make up the difference.