California falls into the gerrymander trap

The election is over and, barring any successful legal challenges, California will join the growing ranks of politically polarized states where Congressional Districts are grievously gerrymandered.

Gerrymandering has been around in the United States for more than 200 years and is almost as old as our earliest political parties. Drawing Congressional Districts is innately a political process, so a certain amount of bias is to be expected when one party controls the mechanisms of power in any given state. But lately the practice has become invidious.

In a landmark 2019 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that partisan gerrymandering is not unconstitutional per se. [Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019)]. Though the justices reached the correct conclusion based strictly on Constitutional law, this ruling opened the floodgates to the intense levels of gerrymandering we see today.

The rules for creating Congressional Districts vary widely across the country, though basic control of the procedure is usually vested in the 50 individual state legislatures. Some states have their own statutes, constitutional provisions, or Supreme Court decisions that curtail gerrymandering. Others have purportedly independent commissions tasked with conducting redistricting. But these safeguards are often limited in scope, and states provide ways to bypass them (as we have witnessed this year).

While Texas and California have received the most attention during the recent focus on gerrymandering, they are far from alone. Many states are absurdly gerrymandered and have been so for years. Their Congressional delegations are disproportionately lopsided in favor of the majority party within the state.

Hence, we have Democrat-imposed gerrymanders of Illinois (14 Democrats, 3 Republicans), Maryland (7-1 Democrat), and Massachusetts (9-0 Democrat); and Republican-imposed gerrymanders in North Carolina (10 Republicans, 4 Democrats), South Carolina (6-1 Republican) and Tennessee (8-1 Republican). This list is not exhaustive, and with the current spate of mid-decade redistricting in several states, the divisions are likely to become starker after the 2026 election cycle.

In these states and others, the dominant political party has manipulated the process to net representation far exceeding its proportional share of raw votes cast by the electorate. Moreover, deliberately packing districts with voters of one party ensures that the incumbent party within that district has virtually no chance of losing the general election. This, in turn, serves to essentially disenfranchise a sizable minority of voters within each district.

The diminishing number of competitive Congressional seats has had other consequences as well. With little chance of losing their positions, incumbents have less concern about being accountable to the public they serve. And since nearly all of the action shifts to the primary, there is no incentive for candidates to hew to the center of the political spectrum -- in fact, quite the opposite. The reduction of moderates in both parties, coupled with the election of many extreme candidates, has directly contributed to the escalating gridlock in Congress.

In order to enact an effective gerrymander, boundaries are drawn in haphazard fashion and without regard to cohesiveness. This often means dividing communities with shared regional interests, as random splotches of land located hundreds of miles apart are linked to each other by thin strips of territory. These distant areas tend to have little in common.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way out of this mess. Each new redistricting scheme continues to raise the political stakes. No one is backing down. And now, sadly, California has joined the fray.