What most people get wrong about gerrymandering

Divorced from the context of a map, Texas' congressional districts might just look like a collection of funny shapes. 

District 33 resembles a slightly malformed butterfly. If you squint and tilt your head, District 9 looks like Pearl Krabs, the whale from SpongeBob SquarePants. And the oblong District 32 recalls an old tobacco pipe. 

Like snowflakes, no two district shapes are identical. Every state in the country has to draw congressional maps. That may sound like a boring task, but it's often full of drama. 

You've probably heard that gerrymandering is politicians rigging the map. But it's actually a lot more complicated than that.

What's a gerrymander?

Gerrymandering's namesake is one of the lesser-known founding fathers: Elbridge Gerry.

Back in 1812, when Gerry was Governor of Massachusetts, he signed a bill that created a sprawling, funny-looking state senate district that reminded some of a salamander.

In response to the new district's creation, a Boston newspaper a political cartoon that added claws, teeth and wings to the district's shape, turning it into a creature dubbed "the gerrymander." 

"The point is not to draw beautiful districts that look neat and nice," said SMU political science professor Matthew Wilson. "The point increasingly has become to draw districts that advantage particular political interests. Democrats try to do it. Republicans try to do it."

Recent battles

Gerrymandering goes back hundreds of years. But in the past year, it has been the subject of dramatic fights and legal battles. 

The recent battles started in the summer of 2025 with a request from President Donald Trump. He wanted Texas to redraw its map to give Republicans up to five more congressional seats. 

Redrawing the map in the middle of a decade is unusual. States typically only do it once a decade, after a new census is completed. It helps them account for any migration patterns and population shifts.

But the President had his eye on the 2026 midterm elections, which are typically tough for the party that occupies the White House. He wanted to give Republicans a better chance to retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives, as a Democratic majority was sure to derail his agenda.

Shortly after Mr. Trump's request, Gov. Greg Abbott told state lawmakers to get back to Austin and make it happen. Weeks later, the Texas House had unveiled a new map designed to flip five seats from blue to red.

Democrats responded by fleeing the state in an attempt to block a vote to approve the new maps. Texas lawmakers can only vote on a bill if there are at least 100 of 150 members present. The legal term for that is a quorum. By leaving the state, Democrats broke quorum and delayed a vote. 

After a few weeks away, Democrats returned to Austin and the new map was voted into law.

What happened in Texas set off a chain reaction. 

"It became a partisan tit for tat around the country," Wilson said. "Texas acted, and then other states acted in response, like California. And then it was a cascade of Democrat and Republican states going back and forth with each other."

Mapmakers 101

There are a few ways to gerrymander. The most commonly used and easiest to understand are known as cracking and packing. 

Cracking is when mapmakers try to divide a group of voters, breaking them up into multiple districts to dilute their voting power. 

Packing is basically the opposite. It's when mapmakers try to pack a particular group into the smallest amount of districts possible, making it so that the group has overwhelming majorities in a limited number of districts, and can't compete anywhere else.

Is this legal?

Clearly there's an art to gerrymandering. But is it legal? The short answer is yes.

In fact, in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that even if excessive gerrymandering is "incompatible with democratic principles," it isn't unconstitutional, and federal courts don't have the authority to say whether it goes too far. 

"You can disadvantage your partisan opponents as much as you want," Wilson said. "A political party is not a protected class constitutionally. What they cannot do is use as their intention the disenfranchisement of a racial or ethnic group."

Do voters care? 

It's legal, but is it popular? Are voters okay with these increasingly partisan political maps? 

Most Americans say they're not. Seventy-one percent of Americans said states should not be allowed to draw congressional districts that intentionally favor one party, according to a recent YouGov poll. 

But it's one thing to answer a poll question. Wilson said he thinks most Americans are probably preoccupied with other issues and haven't given this one much thought.

"People who closely follow politics understood that the national stakes of these dueling redistricting battles were quite high," said Wilson. "I think most voters just going about living their lives, they vaguely heard this was going on, it wasn't a big priority to them one way or the other."

There is also another possibility: this could all backfire. There's a chance these partisan efforts won't pay off the way lawmakers were banking on. That is known as a dummymander.

"I think voters would like more competitive elections," Wilson said. "They would like more districts that could legitimately go either way, and it would be healthier for democracy. Because as it is, if a district is overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democratic, it means that all the real action was in the primary back in March."