Trump’s Gerrymandering Push Is a Form of Cheating

How often do Americans vote in competitive federal elections? In much of the United States, the answer is rarely. That is a strange fact in a nation split almost equally between Democrats and Republicans. The country has ended up here because Americans increasingly live in like-minded communities inside solidly blue or red states — and because House districts are often gerrymandered to guarantee a victory for one party.

Now, at President Trump’s urging, Republicans are moving to take gerrymandering to a new extreme. He has urged his party’s state legislators and governors to redraw congressional districts to maximize the number of Republican seats. In Texas, the Legislature has taken up his call and passed a new map to create five additional Republican-leaning seats to boost the party’s chance of maintaining control of the House in the 2026 midterms. Republicans in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio and South Carolina are considering similar steps. Democrats in California and elsewhere plan to strike back with their own redistricting, although Democrats probably will not be able to keep pace if the Republican effort expands beyond Texas.

Mr. Trump’s gerrymandering campaign is a cynical attempt to undermine the will of voters. Never before have a significant number of states simultaneously moved to redraw their congressional districts in the middle of a 10-year census cycle, which now seems possible. Their goal is blatant: allow Republicans to retain control of Congress regardless of majority opinion.

This effort is more alarming than many previous gerrymanders, sordid though they were. The typical pattern in modern American politics is for a president’s party to lose control of Congress after his first two years in office, as voters seek to restrain any one politician’s power. Polls suggest that this outcome could happen again next year. Mr. Trump’s approval rating is below 45 percent, and many Americans are unhappy with congressional Republicans for passing a bill that would cut Medicaid to finance tax cuts for the wealthy. In response, Mr. Trump is trying to change the rules so his party can remain in power regardless of what the public wants — and in Texas, Republicans are complying.

Before we lay out the potential solutions, we want to explain how the country has arrived at this point. Extreme gerrymandering was not inevitable. The Supreme Court has the ability to restrict it and long signaled that it might. In 2019, however, the court’s conservative majority changed course and said federal courts could never strike down a state’s map for being too partisan (though courts can still order maps to be redrawn because of racial gerrymandering). By a vote of 5 to 4, in a decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court said that because the Constitution did not provide a measure for determining fairness, federal courts could not come up with their own.

It was a shortsighted, needlessly narrow decision. Over American history, the court has often drawn on the Constitution’s promise of equal protection to safeguard democracy. To take one example, the 1960s decisions that outlawed grossly different-size congressional districts established a standard of “one person, one vote.”

By 2019, it was clear that extreme gerrymandering called for similar vigilance, and lower courts recognized that. Federal judges had begun to devise standards to limit the practice. When the Supreme Court nullified these worthy efforts, the result was predictable. In many states, legislators and governors became more aggressive about redistricting after the 2020 census. Last year, only 8 percent of congressional races were competitive, according to a Times analysis, down from 34 percent in 1996.

Technology does play a role here. Sophisticated software programs have made mapmaking vastly easier to manipulate than in 1812, when Gov. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed a bill drawing the first squiggly districts, forever lending his name to the practice. The party that controls the redistricting process today has the tools to distribute voters with grim efficiency, creating maps with maximal partisan advantage. Many districts do not even look misshapen to the untrained eye.

But technology and the Supreme Court are hardly the only factors. Congress has always had the power to end extreme gerrymandering. In 2021, congressional Democrats proposed the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have barred intentionally drawing lines to favor one party and would have set a standard for courts to assess new maps. Democratic leaders made tactical mistakes in pushing for the bill, also promoting progressive goals (such as limits on voter ID requirements) of questionable significance. But Democrats were not the reason the Freedom to Vote Act died. It passed the House in 2022, before Republicans killed it with a filibuster in the Senate.

The negative consequences of gerrymandering are broader than partisan unfairness. The more the outcome of a general election is predetermined, the more the real choice among candidates shifts to the primary. That puts the base of each party in control, rewarding candidates who play to extremes rather than to the views a majority of Americans hold. Gerrymandering disempowers voters, and it feeds grandstanding rather than bipartisan deal-making. It promises more of the dysfunction that has made Congress deeply unpopular.

More subtly, gerrymandering polarizes congressional delegations by state and region. The Senate is already divided in this way. Only four states have one senator from each party, a record low. Further gerrymandering will push the House in a similar direction, with shrinking numbers of blue-state Republicans and red-state Democrats.

If the proposed map in Texas has the expected effect in 2026, only eight out of the state’s 38 House members (or 21 percent) would be Democrats even though the party typically wins more than 40 percent of the statewide vote. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan would leave only four of 52 seats (or 8 percent) in Republican hands even though the party usually wins more than 35 percent of the statewide vote. The more than six million Californians who regularly vote Republican, along with the nearly five million Texans who vote Democratic, would have vanishingly little representation in Washington.

When a state relies almost entirely on one party to represent its interests, it sharpens the country’s partisan divide. Bipartisan coalitions that reflect shared regional priorities become harder to form because the minority party in one part of the country shrinks to a tiny nub. When there are few Republicans to represent the Northeast in Washington and few Democrats to represent the South, national cohesion suffers.

What can be done? In the short term, Republican legislators in other states should show more backbone than their counterparts in Texas and reject new gerrymandering plans. A few, in Indiana and elsewhere, have rightly expressed concern. They can take inspiration from Mike McDonnell, who, as a state senator in Nebraska last year, blocked a cynical plan to benefit the Trump campaign by altering how that state awarded its electoral votes. Some politicians still know how to display independence and courage.

The choice facing Democratic lawmakers is tougher. This editorial board has consistently supported drawing nonpartisan districts and criticized members of both parties who gerrymandered. Our broader view remains unchanged. Still, we understand why Mr. Newsom is pursuing his plan. It would make possible a redistricting map that would very likely hand five more seats to Democrats but, crucially, only if Texas went ahead with its own plan. If Texas stands down, California will, too.

It would be naïve for Democrats to stand by while Republicans squeeze every drop of partisan advantage to retain power. It would be especially damaging for Democrats to do so before the 2026 midterms, which offer the opportunity to check Mr. Trump’s challenge to America’s constitutional order.

In the long term, the appropriate solution is no mystery. It involves independent commissions — bipartisan or nonpartisan, not made up of active politicians — which do their best to draw fair districts. Fairness means striving for congressional delegations and state legislatures that reflect the people they represent. Almost 20 states have moved in this direction, either through legislation establishing commissions or state court decisions barring extreme gerrymandering. Unfortunately, these limits are in place largely in blue and purple states, which means one party has a freer hand to draw lines as it pleases.

If the states will not use their collective power to level the playing field, Congress can still do so. As Democrats plan their post-Trump agenda, they should resuscitate the gerrymandering limits in the Freedom to Vote Act. Polls show that many Americans abhor partisan gerrymandering, and Democrats should make the case that they are the party that favors fairness.

Gerrymandering can sometimes seem like an unavoidable quirk in American democracy. The practice is more than 200 years old, after all, and both parties have engaged in it. Ultimately, though, gerrymandering is a form of cheating — an attempt to disconnect political power from the will of voters. And it is preventable.