A few months ago, Texas made waves after its Republican government revealed that they were planning to redistrict the state’s congressional seats. The reason: to make Texas districts more conservative, by either packing many liberal areas into one district, or cracking a heavily liberal area among multiple districts. In this, the GOP legislature’s goal is to reduce the number of Democratic seats in Texas from 13 to around 5, and therefore help the Republicans retain the house. This process is called gerrymandering, and it in itself is not unheard of. Both parties do in many states, and it has been happening since at least 1812. However, what is unprecedented is Texas attempting to gerrymander mid-decade (usually house maps are redrawn every 10 years, when the new census comes in). This move has been met with fury from many Democrats including (and perhaps most notably) California governor Gavin Newsom, who is threatening to redraw and gerrymander California’s house map so that there would then only be 3 Republican seats (currently, there are 43 Democratic seats and 9 Republican seats). These moves and threats have caused an escalation, as the governments of many other states are at least floating plans for a partisan redraw and gerrymander. While gerrymandering is a tool that has been leveraged and used by both parties, it has been decried by many professors, experts, and activists as un-democratic. In fact, in the 2024 election cycle, courts forced Louisiana and Alabama to redraw their maps on the grounds that those states gerrymanders disenfranchised black voters. This caused both Louisiana and Alabama to have to draw a second majority black district. Since African American voters tend to overwhelmingly vote Democrat, this effectively netted the Democrats two more seats in the house. From this we can see that at least on the federal level, currently, only explicit racial gerrymandering, or gerrymandering that breaks the voting rights act, is illegal. While many states have created their own laws or commissions that prohibit gerrymandering, they have often been obscured, undermined, or pushed to the side. However, there are some solutions that have not been tried so far. One could be a federal law that mandates an independent redistricting committee for the entire nation. This would ideally make house districts across the nation fairer, and would only need to be passed through congress and signed by the President, like any other bill. This solution would also be less likely to get undermined, since unlike many state governments, federal control changes relatively quickly between Democrats and Republicans. Another more extreme solution would be to uncap the House of Representatives. Since 1911, the number of house seats has been capped at 435, a change that was made for purely logistical reasons, and was never meant to be permanent. However, now, in 2025, there are more states, the population has grown, and still there are only 435 representatives. This has drawbacks because population growth is not reflected, and there are also representational disparities. For example, a house district in Montana represents around 550,000 people, while a district in California usually has around 760,000 people. This means someone from Montana would likely have a more powerful vote than someone in California. While not exactly gerrymandering, this issue leads to the same issues that gerrymandering does. The most popular solution for this problem is by using the cube root rule. The cube root rule is an observation from political scientists that says that ideally, the most representative legislature should have the number of representatives that is the cube root of the total population. Based on the last US census, this means that there would be around 692 representatives. While this change could also be passed into law like any other bill, it is less likely because corporations, lobbyists, and congressional leadership wouldn’t want to deal with more and more members.
So is real change possible? Well, going back to the recent Texas gerrymandering at the start, I think that a solution is becoming more and more possible. While it might seem counterintuitive, if more and more Republican and Democratic states start to gerrymander their own districts, a cooling point could eventually be reached where politicians realize that it would be less of a headache to just create an independent committee. However, it seems that in this political climate, that is probably not feasible. At least for right now, we will see states continue to desperately gerrymander in order to tip the scales on their party’s side.