Gerrymandering is a unique means of upholding American democracy
Believe It or Not! | Weekly Column
Welcome to Believe It or Not!, the only opinion column that completely ignores the opinion of the author. Today I’ll be exploring the issue of gerrymandering from the perspective of “The Establishment”.
[For more info, head to my Mission Page for this brand new weekly column.]
Let’s get straight into my gerrymandering argument, based on a very interesting perspective. Curious to see if I walk away convinced of my own points…
Political Sin!
Gerrymandering appears like the ultimate political sin. The naysayers and self-indulgent independents see it as a means to squash the votes of ordinary people and entrench incumbent governments.
It’s been described as uniquely insidious and takes many forms, including:
Packing — concentrating many ‘enemy’ voters into a single electorate, sacrificing that seat in order to limit their potential to influence other races
Cracking — spreading enemy voters thinly across different electorates, ensuring they don’t emerge as a powerful bloc in any of them
Hijacking — redrawing two districts to force a race between two incumbents, thus eliminating one
Kidnapping — shifting the boundary so a politician’s home address is in another district, making them an outsider in their new electorate
Critics consider this to be eliminating people’s power to vote for change. But all they have to offer are bad ideas for changing an already beautiful system.
Bad Idea #1
The most common alternative critics propose is proportional member-based districts.
Look, it’s been done to death in Europe and leads to political dysfunction, coalition breakdowns, and amplified extremists.
How many more headlines about France’s political meltdown or Germany’s legislative implosion will it take to end these disproportionately idiotic suggestions?
Bad Idea #2
Then these repulsively proud independents suggest some kind of non-partisan redistricting body.
They want to task a group of tax-funded individuals with doing the redistricting separate from *shiver* politics.
Well, apolitical groups are inevitably corrupted, or at the very least, seen as corrupt. After all, if the government of the day selects members of this body, then we’re right back where we started.
Equally dangerous is attempting to estrange our new body from government departments because you lose all the checks and balances of government departments.
Bad Idea #3
Fine, then, critics say, we’ll allow the government to do the redistricting, but they’ll be banned from any acts of intentional gerrymandering.
Sure, let’s enact a ban on government power to be enforced by a judiciary that is either selected by the government or by the same voters that chose the government.
Genius.
No, it’s impossible to eliminate gerrymandering without some outrageous overhaul of the whole system. Fortunately, gerrymandering might just solve one of our most pressing political issues.
End Flyover States
An increasing issue in American politics is the lack of genuinely competitive races. It’s infuriating, as Tennessee or Colorado, to see Pennsylvania flush with promises and cash every election cycle.
The same thing occurs at a state or local level. If you’re already a tally on the chalkboard, you get the bare minimum from elected officials.
Gerrymandering changes that.
It shifts the focus, rejigs political maps, and breathes new life into ‘flyover land’.
Governments use gerrymandering as a means to fix the odds on a competitive seat, to cut off demographics, and to bring in supporting votes (e.g., roping in a richer area or a majority Vietnamese neighborhood).
In the short term, this might allow for a seemingly unfair win for one side. But there is a long-term benefit.
New Battlegrounds
Gerrymandering makes it really hard for the opposition party to win with their current voters because they’ve all been shuffled around and ‘diluted’.
This forces politicians to get creative. They have to engage new voting groups, target different battlegrounds, and bring the fight to other areas of the state.
Independent bodies don’t have the same effect because their goal is to maintain the same distribution of people, thus creating the same battlegrounds as always.
That’s why the independent redistricting body in California has only exacerbated the issue of limited competitive seats. It can do nothing to fix it. That would break its own anti-gerrymandering rules.
Democratic Gift!
Gerrymandering is a gift to democracy, not some kind of political sin. It is a virtuous way to re-ignite electorates and force politicians to engage with new areas of the state each election.
It’s also impossible to stop. And why would you even try when it does a world of good for American democracy?
I implore each and every one of you to contact your local representative and ask them to strategically divide your local community based on demographics. After all, only through gerrymandering can we rediscover true political competition.
Yours sincerely,
Leonard
The Biased Journalist
(on behalf of “The Establishment”)
P.S. Feel free to share any ideas for future Believe It or Not! articles in the comments section. Shout out to a long-term supporter, TYB, for sparking this week’s topic!
Hope you enjoyed a fresh look at gerrymandering from the perspective of "The Establishment". Let me know what ideas you have for future articles in this series!
Some perceived gerrymandering may be impossible to stop, but independent commissions in which civil servants or professional demographers rather than hyperpartisan politicians design districts has got to be better and fairer. NC, a purple state with normally 7 Democratic and 7 Republican members of Congress, after the 2024 election, is now represented in Congress by 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats, though Democrat Josh Stein won the governorship in a landslide. The four gerrymandered D seats that flipped to R are just enough to maintain Republican control of Congress. How is that fair? Gerrymandering's intent is to deprive voters of adequate representation. Two years ago, I got a "new" GOP Congressman who did not bother to campaign nor even live in the district. He won automatically due to party label alone. I daresay not even 10% of the voters know anything about him.