America’s states are locked in partisan redistricting battles. After Texas’s gerrymander cut five Democratic House seats, California recently passed a map likely to cost Republicans the same number. This editorial followed the Texas move…

[Excerpts of editorial published under the heading “The Gerrymander Race to the Bottom” on The Wall Street Journal website on 21 August 2025]

The Gerrymander Race to the Bottom

The parties are at least admitting their raw partisan motives.

Texas Republicans this week passed a new Congressional district map to pick up five more seats, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to match and raise. Say this for the gerrymander wars, both parties are honest about their raw partisan motives.

President Trump started this latest gerrymander brawl by urging Lone Star Republicans to redraw their Congressional map to mitigate potential GOP losses in next year’s midterm elections. His Justice Department also threatened to challenge the state’s existing map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Texas’s gambit to redistrict mid-decade is dubious, but Democrats have long done the same. The difference is Democrats have been more aggressive in using courts rather than legislatures to redraw maps, all while pretending to defend democracy or fight racism.

One Democratic strategy was to challenge GOP-drawn maps in federal courts as unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. But the Supreme Court slammed that door shut in Rucho (2019) by holding that partisan gerrymanders are political disputes unreviewable by courts.

Democrats have also challenged maps in state courts under vague state constitutional provisions that guarantee free and fair elections. A state court-ordered map helped Democrats pick up three Pennsylvania seats in 2018. Judges in North Carolina ordered the state’s map to be redrawn in 2019, which helped Democrats pick up two seats in 2020.

Obama Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee has spent heavily to elect liberal judges to state supreme courts to redraw maps in the party’s favor.

Another Democratic favorite is challenging maps under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Judge-ordered maps adding majority-minority districts enabled Democrats to pick up a seat each in Alabama and Louisiana in the last redistricting round. Liberals have also challenged Texas’s current map under Section 2 with the goal of getting a more favorable map drawn mid-decade.

The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia noted in 2021 that “in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Republican-friendly maps were thrown out mid-decade in favor of plans that were more amenable to Democrats” and “if those pro-Republican maps were still in place, there’s a good chance that House Republicans would be in the majority now.”

It is at least more democratic for elected lawmakers to redraw maps than politically unaccountable judges. Politicians reduce political competition when they choose their voters, but it’s nothing new. Patrick Henry tried to gerrymander James Madison out of a Congressional seat in 1789.

Gerrymanders reduce political competition, and they’re getting worse over time. Congress could set limits on the practice, but incumbents want safer seats.

Gerrymanders seem to increase political polarization, but they are also a symptom of polarization, some of which stems from geographic sorting as Republicans migrate to red states and Democrats to blue.

Democratic voters have become more concentrated in big cities and on the coasts. Kamala Harris won 42% of the Texas vote, but only 12 of 254 counties. Barack Obama took 26 counties in 2012 with 41% of the vote. Donald Trump won a majority of California counties by sweeping inland and rural areas.

Such geographic sorting has made it easier for both parties to gerrymander. Texas Republicans hope their new map will give them 30 of 38 seats, though two new districts in south Texas look iffy. Mr. Newsom wants voters in November to approve a new map that would give Democrats 48 of 52 seats in California. He may succeed.

But gerrymandered gains are sometimes swept away with big election tides, as in 2006 and 2018. A large share of voters aren’t fiercely partisan. Texas Republicans also risk inviting a voter backlash that could flip a Senate seat if state Attorney General Ken Paxton defeats Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary.

Gerrymanders reduce political competition, and they’re getting worse over time. Congress could set limits on the practice, but incumbents want safer seats. Unless voters rebel, it will continue. At least the political cynicism is no longer hiding behind false flags.

An End to Gerrymandering? Why gerrymandering needs to be banned once and for all.