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By Newsweek EditorsShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberJohn S. Payne, one of Newsweek's valued members, was among those of you who wanted to know more about gerrymandering—its history and how it is used to solidify political power today. You asked; here, Newsweek offers one answer.
Last week in Montgomery, an 18-year-old University of Alabama freshman—working late nights in his dorm on a free website and fueled by sour gummy worms, according to The Alabama Reflector—saw a federal judge pick his map to govern elections for the Alabama Senate through 2030. U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco, a Donald Trump appointee, said Daniel DiDonato’s "race-blind" plan fixed illegal packing of Black voters in the Montgomery area and ordered it into effect for 2026.
That vignette—Redistricting by Dorm Lamp—landed as Texas’ Trump-backed mid-decade congressional map was blocked as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito then granted Texas a temporary pause.
Elsewhere, California voters have approved Proposition 50, suspending the state’s independent commission for U.S. House lines through 2030 and empowering lawmakers to enact new maps—Governor Gavin Newsom’s explicit "fight fire with fire."
All these fights bring a paradox into focus: decades of "fairness" rules—one-person-one-vote, the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority communities, and, more recently, independent commissions—has collided with a ruthless new era of non-contests and partisanship. For whatever reason—and there are many possibilities—the more America pursued lines that were legally correct and demographically representative, the more it seems to have drained actual competition from the map.
Common Knowledge
On the right, mid-decade redraws are framed as hardball but legitimate. "The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences—and for no other reason," Texas Governor Greg Abbott said, casting the trial court’s ruling as an affront to state authority. Legal commentators aligned with the Heritage Foundation have long argued there’s "no constitutional bar" to redistricting more than once a decade and that federal courts shouldn’t micromanage partisan decisions—a position that sits with the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is a "political question beyond the reach" of federal courts.
On the left, civil rights groups say Texas crossed the racial line. The NAACP blasted the state’s plan as brazen in a place where white residents are roughly 40 percent of the population but hold more than 70 percent of congressional seats—an imbalance Democratic lawyers cite as proof that minority voters are being disenfranchised.
California detonated the norm that Democrats had championed: independent commissions. Former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who midwifed the commission era, called the measure "insane" and warned it would "take the power away from the people." Voters sided with Newsom.
Uncommon Knowledge
Both sides, notably, speak the language of "fairness"—and both are willing to junk it when it produces the "wrong" outcome. But what does "fair" mean, anyway? And fairness for whom—parties, individuals, or voters as a group?
The places that have tried hardest to take politicians out of the process—independent-commission states—have produced the highest share of competitive districts, even as national competition has collapsed. In the last cycle, just 82 of 435 House seats were drawn by commissions. Yet those commission states produced 12 genuinely competitive races, while states where Republicans controlled redistricting produced just 8 competitive districts despite controlling far more seats. That’s one of several striking findings in the Brennan Center’s post-2024 analysis. Across the country there were an astonishing 55 blowouts (40–50-point margins) and only 37 races decided by 5 points or less—a House map that rarely asks voters to make a close choice.
"Fair lines" (lines drawn with neutral rules and public input) are where competition lives; the rest of the map has become a safety zone for incumbents. The paradox is that America’s most muscular fairness tool from the civil rights era—majority-minority districts mandated under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—often reduce competition by design, even as they increase representation. Scholars have been writing this for decades: majority-minority districts tend to be very safe seats. Bernard Grofman and Thomas Brunell, among others, showed that such districts elevate minority candidates’ chances while lowering overall electoral competition in surrounding districts. Later work by Lublin, Handley, Brunell and Grofman finds a 40–50 percent minority "sweet spot" where minority-preferred candidates can win without creating super-safe seats—evidence that representation and competition can sometimes be reconciled. You can see the modern version in Alabama: to remedy illegal packing in Montgomery, the court created another district where Black voters have a reliable chance to elect their choice—good for representation, but not necessarily a recipe for close races.
There are other factors behind the paradox. First, federal courts don’t police partisanship. Rucho took the federal judiciary out of the business of judging whether a map is "too partisan." (Racial gerrymanders remain illegal.) Against this, geography is destiny. Democrats are clustered in dense cities; Republicans are spread in suburbs and exurbs. That "spatial sorting," described most prominently by Stanford’s Jonathan Rodden in Why Cities Lose, creates a natural "winner’s bonus" in single-member districts—majorities can translate into outsized seat shares even without gerrymandering.
Look at the outcomes since World War II. From 1942 through 2024, the national House popular-vote winner failed to win the chamber only three times: 1942, 1996 and 2012. In other words, gerrymandering rarely flips control on its own. What it does—especially when layered on winner-take-all rules and residential sorting—is multiply non-contests, freezing political competition.
Some of the numbers from 2024 bring this into sharper focus. Genuine non-contests ballooned. Thirty-eight House districts featured only one major party on the general-election ballot—about 8.7 percent of races. In a representative democracy, nearly one in 10 voters never even saw a real choice.
So has the drive for fairness caused the drop in competition? Not exactly—and that’s the paradox. Fairness rules (equal population, VRA compliance) and fairness institutions (commissions) sometimes pull in different directions. The rules, especially Section 2 remedies, cluster like-minded voters to ensure historically excluded communities can elect preferred candidates; that tends to make districts safer. The institutions—independent commissions that prioritize community input, compactness, and avoiding undue partisan bias—uncluster where they can.
This also explains the current arms race. With federal courts sidelined on partisan claims, the fight moves to two fronts: racial gerrymandering law, where plaintiffs still win (see Allen v. Milligan, 2023), and state politics, where governors and legislatures can redraw—sometimes mid-decade—unless state constitutions or courts stop them. Texas leaned into the vacuum; California, once the poster child for neutral maps, decided neutrality was a luxury it could no longer afford.
There’s a deeper American story here. The winner-takes-all system (single-member districts, plurality wins) naturally rewards concentration and punishes dispersion. When you overlay race-conscious remedies and partisan non-interference, you can get a map with impeccable constitutional credentials—and far fewer swing seats. That is the gerrymander paradox: the pursuit of fairness can, and often does, produce safety, not competition.
Of course, fairness and competition aren’t synonyms. Section 2-required majority-minority districts are fairness in the VRA’s terms—remedies for decades of purposeful dilution—even though they make surrounding districts less competitive. Courts are right to say that an uncompetitive district can be the fairest one for a long-submerged community. (That’s why Manasco found illegal packing in Montgomery and ordered a fix.)
Some say 21st century technology could be the answer. So could an AI commission redraw the map to make it "fairer”?
In a word, yes—if you define "fair." Today’s open-source tool kits can generate millions of legally compliant plans and optimize for different fairness goals (compactness, competitiveness, minority opportunity, county splits, partisan bias). Princeton’s Redistricting Report Card, for example, grades plans on competitiveness, geography, and partisan fairness. In practice, you’d set constraints (such as qual population, and preserving VRA-compliant majority-minority districts) and then search for plans that maximize the number of competitive seats and respect VRA obligations.
Would that make the map "fairer”? If your fairness target is more competitive races, AI-assisted ensembles can find plans that trade some incumbent safety for more tossups without breaking the VRA. If your fairness target is more minority opportunity, the algorithm will cluster more like-minded voters—and you’ll likely get fewer contests. That’s the trade-off.
One last thing the dorm-room cartographer taught us this week: citizens armed with open tools can now beat the pros. That’s maybe the most genuinely democratic development in the whole messy fight.
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