First Texas, then Indiana and now Missouri — state after state is following the same playbook of redrawing Democrat-controlled congressional districts to secure more Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Missouri’s special legislative session, called just this week, aims to carve up a safe Democratic Kansas City district to help Republicans secure an additional seat prior to the 2026 midterm elections. Texas, the state leading the redistricting charge, has already pushed through a new congressional map targeting five seats currently held by Democrats, a move encouraged by U.S. President Donald Trump and signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this August. In response to the Republican redistricting, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to redraw California’s congressional districts, making it more likely Democrats win five additional seats. Redistricting is quickly becoming an arms race between the parties, where voters, especially minorities, stand to lose.
After years of conceding to Republicans and attempting to appeal to moderates, the Democrats’ decision to redraw maps may seem like an effort to finally fight back against the Trump administration — especially in light of Trump’s many actions undermining democracy, such as ignoring federal judge orders, deporting people without due process and sending the National Guard into cities. The Democrats’ tit-for-tat redistricting strategy, however, is only a temporary Band-Aid — a shaky solution that plays right into the GOP’s game, allowing Republicans to set a dangerous precedent of map manipulation. This not only risks normalizing partisan gerrymandering, which Democrats spent years condemning, but also silences the voices of millions of voters.
Partisan gerrymandering — the act of redrawing district lines to manipulate election results — has been practiced in the U.S for centuries. Strategies such as packing, which concentrates one demographic of voters into a few districts, and cracking, which spreads them out across many to take advantage of the all-or-nothing U.S. voting system, remain common tools for engineering election results. The evidence of gerrymandering can be seen in several states’ election maps today, including North Carolina, Wisconsin and even Georgia. Traditionally, the congressional districts are redrawn at the end of each decade following the U.S. Census to reflect population shifts. For this reason, Texas and Missouri’s mid-decade redistricting is highly unusual.
Following Newsom’s retaliation against Texas, we are now amid a partisan turf war. Several other states have also accelerated their redistricting efforts. Republicans are discussing ways to add more than a dozen Republican House seats by redrawing Florida, Ohio, Louisiana and Alabama’s congressional districts. Across the aisle, Democrat-led Maryland, Illinois and New York have begun redrawing maps to counter Republicans. As this situation escalates, the congressional map may soon reflect partisan engineering more than actual representation, leaving voters with districts designed purely for party advantage.
Politicians justify their back-and-forth seat snatching by claiming a congressional majority is the only way to advance their party’s policies, which they argue their voters want enacted. When legislators gerrymander districts, minority voters are silenced. In states like Texas, for example, lawmakers are cracking and packing majority-Latino neighborhoods, effectively eliminating districts where Latinos would be able to elect their candidates of choice. Latinos account for 50% of Texas’ population growth, and the new electoral maps blunt the impact of this growth.
Beyond disenfranchising minorities, noncompetitive districts also breed complacency. When a representative’s reelection is virtually guaranteed, the incentive for a politician to respond to their constituents’ needs diminishes. The Democrats fighting the Republicans’ fire with fire is not worth it — instead, it encourages all the issues that come with redistricting.
Politicians are so blinded by their focus on defeating their opponents that they ignore the harm they are inflicting on their own constituents. While this strategic impromptu redistricting may protect a few seats for Democrats in the short term, it erodes the principle that voters should choose their representatives — not the other way around. In light of the Trump administration’s authoritarian actions, Democrats undermine their credibility with their hypocrisy, breaking the same rules they accuse their opponents of violating. In California, redrawing districts to favor Democrats could end up silencing Republican and independent voices just as effectively. Gerrymandering is a threat to fair representation for everyone. In the end, ordinary Americans will pay the price when their voices are silenced in government.
While the Republican push for a fully gerrymandered map seems daunting to those who care about their representation, Republican legislators still face pushback. The redrawn Texas map is currently facing a wave of legal challenges from civil rights groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who argue that redistricting intentionally undermines the voting power of Black and Latino communities and violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, relying on lawsuits alone will not solve this problem, as courts can only address individual maps and not the redistricting agenda as a whole. Breaking this cycle of escalation will require our collective action.
We must put a stop to undemocratic redistricting before it spirals. That starts with civic engagement. I urge you to show up for state and local elections, where redistricting decisions are often made. This is especially the case for Georgia, which has faced repeated accusations of racial gerrymandering. Advocating for nonpartisan Independent Redistricting Commissions to draw state lines, especially in swing states like Georgia, will also help counteract the normalization of manipulative maps. Our collective action acts as a guardrail, preventing further retaliatory escalation between the parties. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will need to step in and end its neutrality on partisan gerrymandering. Until then, we need to do our part to stand up for our democracy to put an end to this redistricting race.
Contact Crystal Zhang at crystal.zhang2@emory.edu.
