The August congressional recess is more than half over, and one issue has consumed both federal and state lawmakers. It’s not tariffs or trade, nor implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s (OBBBA) spending and tax cuts, however. The issue is redrawing U.S. congressional district lines — and along with it, the concept of gerrymandering.
We have already written about this issue, exploring where Republicans and Democrats stand on the matter and what they want from the current fight, and how what is going on now could affect the outcome in the 2026 midterm elections. We also alluded to an upcoming Supreme Court decision that could influence the outcome of any state redistricting plans that are written and approved in the coming months.
This week, we turn to history: what is gerrymandering and where did it originate, and where have federal courts stood on this matter in the past?
Let’s start with an explanation of gerrymandering.
FACT: Gerry Did Not Really Like the Idea of Gerrymandering
As the Library of Congress has explained, the term gerrymandering — originally coined as Gerry-mander — dates back to March 26, 1812, when Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed into law a bill reconfiguring Massachusetts state senate election districts.
The “mander” part of the term is a fun quirk of historical cartography: one of the resulting districts looked like a salamander. “The newly drawn state senate district in Essex County was lampooned in cartoons as a strange-winged dragon, clutching at the region,” the Library of Congress wrote.
While Gov. Gerry was a Democratic-Republican, and it was his party that rewrote the Senate district lines, Library of Congress researchers pointed out that Gov. Gerry actually found the bill “highly disagreeable.”
Gov. Gerry also was not a staunch partisan. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, “Gerry spent most of his political career as a moderate nonpartisan, viewing the growing political divide between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans with distaste and preferring to follow his own principles rather than those of either party.”
For his part in the establishment of gerrymandering, Gov. Gerry lost his reelection campaign and saw an otherwise notable career as a statesman recast. Though he “was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a two-term member of the House of Representatives, governor of Massachusetts, and U.S. vice president under James Madison. His name … was forever negatively linked to this form of political powerbroking …”
Which Party is Most Guilty Of Gerrymandering?
The answer is: both. As USA Today columnist Dace Potas wrote last week, “The truth is that both Republicans and Democrats are flagrant offenders in the arena of districting. Nobody has their hands clean when it comes to gerrymandering.”
Though, currently, the GOP may be slightly more guilty of implementing the practice.
As Potas noted, of the 13 states that have been given a failing grade by Princeton University’s nonpartisan Gerrymandering Project, nine give a partisan advantage toward Republicans and four toward Democrats. Republican strongholds like Texas and Florida both get failing grades for their congressional district lines, as does Illinois, where Democrats are the majority party. California has an A average, as does New York. (Both states have, in recent years, transitioned to having their district lines drawn by a nonpartisan commission, though that may change quite soon.) Some Republican-held states, like Alabama and Nebraska, actually give Democrats an advantage in their congressional district lines.
In 2023, Brookings Institution scholar William A. Galston concluded, “As of now, anyway, neither party enjoys a significant aggregate advantage in either districting or geographical efficiency of voter distribution.” He explained that a “a simple measure of a fair distribution of House seats in our two-party system” is to figure out whether “each party ends up with the number of seats that corresponds to its share of the two-party popular vote.” In the November 2022 midterm election, GOP House candidates received 50.6 percent of the national popular vote, which works out to 51.4 percent of the two-party vote.
“A strictly proportional allocation would have given Republicans 224 seats; they ended up with 222,” Galston noted.
While neither party may currently enjoy an advantage from gerrymandering, federal courts are not concerned with the political outcome of the practice. They are, of course, worried about whether or not the practice itself is constitutional.
The Supreme Court’s Stance On Gerrymandering
The Supreme Court issued its latest ruling regarding gerrymandering just last year.
As the Brennan Center for Justice explained, the case, Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, concerned a congressional district map drawn by Republican state lawmakers in South Carolina that, as opponents alleged, had “diminished the influence of Black voters in choosing a representative.” The policymakers “denied accusations of racial gerrymandering, which is still (theoretically) illegal” and instead argued the map represented “good old-fashioned partisan gerrymandering,” which is legal.
The nine justices on the Supreme Court had to determine whether the GOP lawmakers’ claim was true.
In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled in the South Carolina Republicans’ favor. According to the legal website Oyez, in doing so the justices “maintained that to prove unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, a plaintiff must show that race was the ‘predominant factor motivating the legislature’s decision to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district.’” Oyez also explained the majority maintained that “when partisanship and race correlate, a constitutionally permissible partisan gerrymandered map can look very similar to a racially gerrymandered map,” and so “district courts must presume that legislatures acted in good faith in drawing a districting map.”
In effect, this case made it easier for state legislatures, or whatever body within a state draws congressional district lines, to gerrymander.
The 2024 Alexander case followed one in 2019 that also made it easier to gerrymander. As the Brennan Center put it, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the court’s majority “declared partisan gerrymandering claims ‘nonjusticiable,’ meaning federal judges were barred from deciding them no matter how egregious the gerrymander.”
This recent history is a departure from where the Supreme Court stood on this matter several generations ago.
The Supreme Court’s first major case dealing with redistricting was 1962’s Baker v. Carr. In this legal proceeding, Tennessee voters challenged state policymakers’ 60-year failure to redraw state legislative districts even though Tennessee’s population was, as it tends to do over the span of three generations, growing. A district court dismissed that case, but eventually the Supreme Court ruled in the voters’ favor, making it easier to challenge legislative district configurations based on claims of gerrymandering.
In fact, while Baker v. Carr did not directly address partisan gerrymandering, it opened the door for future challenges to redistricting practices.
Take 1986’s Thornburg v. Gingles, for example, where the court also sided with voters, this time those who were challenging racial gerrymandering. As Democracy Docket explained, in this case, Black voters in North Carolina challenged the state legislative maps, arguing that they were purposefully drawn to dilute the voting power of their votes. These voters contended that the maps violated Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court agreed, establishing three criteria for proving a pattern of racial vote dilution:
- A minority group must be “sufficiently large and geographically compact” to elect a candidate of its choice;
- A minority group must be politically cohesive, or typically vote in a similar manner; and
- A majority group must be politically cohesive enough to defeat the minority group’s preferred candidate or candidates.
Democracy Docket noted “the court also held that voters do not need to show discriminatory causation or intent to prove vote dilution claims.”
Again, this case is no longer the precedent with which the Supreme Court is dealing. The precedent now is Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, decided just last year with the court’s current makeup.
Will the court reverse its thinking again based on what is happening in states like Texas now?
Time will tell.
Whatever happens in the Lone Star State — or Florida, or California, or New York, or any of the other states that have threatened to rewrite their congressional districts even though the latest Census was five years ago — any resulting maps are likely to be challenged in court. And it sounds like lawmakers are ready for the battle. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said recently that he is willing to drag out this fight for years.