A new year, a new moral panic about partisan gerrymandering. The practice—in which a party draws district lines to favor its own candidates in elections—is back in the news, but this time with a twist. Redistricting inevitably happens every ten years following the census (necessary because districts are legally required to be of equal population). After each decennial redistricting, a spate of litigation typically follows, challenging the fairness of the districts, including their partisan nature. This time, though, it’s a mid-cycle anomaly: Parties in a handful of states are redrawing their districts mid-census, apparently to buttress their hold on power prior to the 2026 electoral cycle.
Accompanying such districtings and the subsequent litigation are a set of now-familiar claims about partisan gerrymandering’s toxicity to democracy: Partisan districting is entrenchment-mongering by the party in power; it’s an affront to democratic fairness and in particular voter equality; it depresses political turnout and inspires political apathy; it renders your vote meaningless. Partisan gerrymandering is almost universally condemned. Even in the notorious decision declining to identify it as a constitutional wrong, the Supreme Court noted that partisan gerrymandering was “incompatible with democratic principles.” While noting it’s not unconstitutional, Justice Roberts remarked that it is probably unfair.
But partisan gerrymandering is best understood as a form of competition between political parties, and so a normal part of the democratic process. The knock on gerrymandering, of course, is that it isn’t voters picking the politicians, it’s politicians picking the voters. Standing behind this idea is the assumption that there is some neutral or ideal backdrop for drawing districts (or holding elections at all) that is true, pure, and morally favorable.