I have to say, as a Democrat in Texas, I kind of feel Virginia Republicans' pain. It's arguably much worse in their case. They've seen plenty of wins there and its blue tilt is very recent. Us Texas Democrats haven't seen a statewide win in 30 years. I may feel their pain, but I have no sympathy. The mid-decade redistricting battle was started here by Trump. The Republican professional class is in a strong position to start arguing for non-partisan redistricting in some form. I bet Democrats would be very eager to engage with them. I doubt that will happen, but one can always dream.
I think Virginia has gotten bluer because of Trump. Democrats weren't really so energized to get out the vote before the debacle of 2016 and how negative Trump has been. Normie Republican candidates would not have generated the level of local organization Democrats have today.
That’s exactly what happened. He drove away a whole lot of educated voters who had been Republicans. It’s happened in Texas, too, but not nearly to that degree.
Here, Barbara Comstock, for example, would not have lost her seat in Congress (as a Republican) if it weren't for Trump. She quickly joined the Never Trump coalition and supports voting Democratic across the board in order to get MAGA out.
I get the impression that Texas Republicans were fairly ruthless and powerful before Trump and that issues of guns, immigration, and climate would make Texas more Republican on average. I never thought Beto could win with his strong anti-gun stance. It's a real uphill battle there -- good luck!
I wouldn't be so down. It's been frustrating on the federal level, but Democrats have a whole bunch of state-level offices and Roy Cooper is likely to be the next senator. With enough of a wave in November, maybe, just maybe Democrats will surprise in the state legislature.
Curious about the idea of just expanding the house of representatives so that gerrymandering becomes less effective. That seems like best solution - better representation of constituents, and expansion of the house has more staying power than legislatively mandated fair maps. But I just know the immediate response will be whinging about how we have too many politicians as is.
My point being, I suspect framed in the right way increasing the House of the Representatives could actually be a popular cause. You can accurately frame it as actually keeping with tradition and what the Framers would have expected to happen as the population increased. You could also frame it as a way for your elected rep to be closer to the people; by representing less people it's more likely you'll have a personal connection with your Rep. (not sure how likely this would actually be in practice or how important this really is, but I think it's a good applause line and something "normies" might actually like to hear). Combine with gerrymander reform, would be dare I say cause that's both "Popularist" and correct on the merits.
Cards on the table too..I think we seriously underrate how damaging gerrymandering really. I think there were studies done a long time ago indicating that gerrymandering wasn't much of a problem. But those studies would have been done a) prior to when modern computers were used to create districts b) when there was A LOT more cross party voting behavior. As has been kind of amply demonstrated, the period from 1965* to 1994 should be seen as aberration and not the norm. But point being, I think we underrate how much gerrymandering has led to politicians feeling like they need to take more extreme positions to remain in power.
* I'm personally under the belief that we should treat pre and post 1965 politics in America as almost two different countries. I think we also underrate how utterly distorting it was to have a giant section of the country under the rule of a one-party dictatorship (we don't like to call it that, because that sounds like how things work "over there", but let's be real, my description is accurate) and how much that scrambled political coalitions and political outcomes generally.
Small correction that actually strengthens your point: the 1911 Act set 435 temporarily, with the explicit expectation it would grow at the next census. The cap became permanent with the Reapportionment Act of 1929, when Congress couldn't agree on a new number because urbanization was scrambling the urban/rural balance and nobody wanted to take the political hit. So the 435 freeze isn't continuity with tradition — it's the moment Congress broke with tradition because they couldn't handle the demographic shift. The Framers absolutely expected continued expansion. The 1789 ratio was 1:30,000, which would yield 11,000 reps today.
You're right that the framing is the whole game. "Closer to your rep" is the popularist applause line. The international comparison is the wonk hammer — every peer democracy represents its citizens more directly than we do. The UK is at ~103K per rep, Germany 116K, France 116K, even Japan is at 270K. The US at 770K per rep is the developed-world outlier by a wide margin. Even doubling the House to 870 only gets us to Japan's ratio.
Your 1965 point is the deeper cut and I'd take it further: the post-1965 realignment is what exposed gerrymandering as the structural problem it always was. Pre-VRA, Southern Democrats were running de facto one-party rule across an entire region — gerrymandering didn't matter because the outcome was fixed by the franchise itself. Once Black voters could actually vote, the maps had to start doing the work of suppression that the literacy test had been doing. That's why Shelby County in 2013 and Callais last week were both inevitable: the conservative legal project has been quietly rebuilding the pre-1965 settlement piece by piece for forty years. Treating American politics as two different countries before and after 1965 is the right frame.
Strongest structural fix on the table. The "too many politicians" pushback is actually a feature — more reps means each one is less individually powerful, which is what you want. The current 435 is a de facto House of Lords with elections.
The Founders' ratio (1 rep per 30K) would yield ~11,000 today. The cube root rule that most modern democracies use puts it around 695. Even getting to 2,000 — which sounds radical — only brings the US to roughly Japan's representation density. Every peer democracy represents its citizens more directly than we do.
The gerrymandering fix is almost a bonus. Real prize is forcing the structural reforms that actually make Congress functional — committee restructuring, hybrid chambers, lobbyist dilution. And it pairs cleanly with the brand-rebrand argument I've been making: 1,500 new districts means a lot of seats in places where the Democratic brand is dead, which is exactly where you'd run state-specific affiliates that caucus Democratic but don't carry the toxic national label.
Political viability is the hard part — neither party benefits short-term, which is why nobody pushes it. But it's the right answer.
There is another big benefit to the electorate overall of federal action on this, which is stopping state races from being about federal politics.
As things stand now, you can plausibly say that any election for State Rep/Senator/Governor will impact who is elected to Congress, since they set the boundaries. And making state politics a referendum on federal politics further weakens accountability for those officials.
This was one of the major reasons they brought in the direct election of senators last century, because state races were turning into referendums on Senate appointments. So here's hoping they nip this one in the bud before it keeps spiralling.
Amen. I'm in the odd position of feeling guilty if I make out-of-state political contributions and feeling guilty if I don't. I'm sure I'm not the only one. When I get calls from around the country (and I do - occasionally even from Republicans who are either severely mistaken or overly optimistic (I _am_ a lifetime subscriber to The Dispatch)) we nearly always end up talking about the every local race is national now. And it sucks. Big time.
Republicans don't want to negotiate because they feel entitled to power regardless of the will of the voting public. Unless and until Republicans accept that everyone must play by a uniform set of rules (and here we are living in the Trump era, so that won't be happening anytime soon), there will be no negotiated solution.
Agreed. It's not like there's one right answer to this, but you can't act in good faith when they won't. Candidly I think the GOP just needs to be broken (at least in it's current form).
I get the impression that, particularly before Trump, Virginia had a fairly collegial approach to governing at the state level. There was a lot of effort put into developing its anti-Gerrymander law and gaining public support. Democrats were sad to set it aside temporarily with this latest vote. I haven't looked for polling, but my hypothesis is that this vote was closer than other recent elections in the state at least in part because of Democrats feeling conflicted about it.
Of course, it simply could be that Republicans were very energized by Trump's push to block the temporary Gerrymander, and there was a lot of confusing and deceptive messaging around it from GOP aligned groups.
I believe there are ways to test for Gerrymandered maps objectively. I have a mathematician friend who works for tech companies who told me he had read about a mathematical model that basically "rolls the dice" on proposed maps based on detailed precinct-level voting. It calculates how far the outcomes of the Gerrymandered map are from a perfectly neutral mean of some sort. (I forget what that was based on but it sounded completely logical.) Your idea of a federal law could be realized objectively when there is sufficient political will.
The real issue is that existing politicians and parties in power are there because of the district and system that put them there. California has a reasonable fair system, which you can tell because when the California legislator brought the redistricting to the voters, the could easily add several seats without a map that doesn't look too bad. This is because the district maps are drawn by an independent commission with some simple principles. That system was opposed by both Republicans and Democrats (both law makers and parties), and only became law through the initiative process.
This whole frackus allowed Democrats to override commission drawn maps with a popular vote, promising to return to them in the next redraw. I believe the same thing happened in Virginia (since redistricting seemed to require a vote from the electorate.
I don't know how we can get by that log jam at the national level, however. Perhaps doing something simple like passing a federal law that prevents states from redrawing maps mid-period. That at least puts the gerymandering arguments on the ever decade level, and would have prevented the whole Texas redraw thing which kicked off all the responses.
"I actually think it’s a sign of progress that we’ve started to see Virginia-based Republicans make specific complaints about specific Democratic proposals to restrict gerrymandering."
If zero Republicans were willing to support the legislation the Carney mentions in that Washington Examiner article then the response from Democrats should've been, "ok, let's get a Gang together and hammer this out." But that's not what happened because Democrats weren't serious about a bipartisan piece legislation to ban gerrymandering.
You can't claim to be the party that says it wants to ban gerrymandering when the legislation it produces are a complete non-starter for the other party.
I have to say, as a Democrat in Texas, I kind of feel Virginia Republicans' pain. It's arguably much worse in their case. They've seen plenty of wins there and its blue tilt is very recent. Us Texas Democrats haven't seen a statewide win in 30 years. I may feel their pain, but I have no sympathy. The mid-decade redistricting battle was started here by Trump. The Republican professional class is in a strong position to start arguing for non-partisan redistricting in some form. I bet Democrats would be very eager to engage with them. I doubt that will happen, but one can always dream.
I think Virginia has gotten bluer because of Trump. Democrats weren't really so energized to get out the vote before the debacle of 2016 and how negative Trump has been. Normie Republican candidates would not have generated the level of local organization Democrats have today.
That’s exactly what happened. He drove away a whole lot of educated voters who had been Republicans. It’s happened in Texas, too, but not nearly to that degree.
Here, Barbara Comstock, for example, would not have lost her seat in Congress (as a Republican) if it weren't for Trump. She quickly joined the Never Trump coalition and supports voting Democratic across the board in order to get MAGA out.
I get the impression that Texas Republicans were fairly ruthless and powerful before Trump and that issues of guns, immigration, and climate would make Texas more Republican on average. I never thought Beto could win with his strong anti-gun stance. It's a real uphill battle there -- good luck!
As a North Carolina Democrat, similar feelings.
I wouldn't be so down. It's been frustrating on the federal level, but Democrats have a whole bunch of state-level offices and Roy Cooper is likely to be the next senator. With enough of a wave in November, maybe, just maybe Democrats will surprise in the state legislature.
Since you seem interested I'll plug kenmccool dot com to help de-Cotham the state house.
Curious about the idea of just expanding the house of representatives so that gerrymandering becomes less effective. That seems like best solution - better representation of constituents, and expansion of the house has more staying power than legislatively mandated fair maps. But I just know the immediate response will be whinging about how we have too many politicians as is.
I'm going to guess very few people are aware that the number of House Representatives was fixed at 435 by the Apportion Act of 1911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_Act_of_1911.
My point being, I suspect framed in the right way increasing the House of the Representatives could actually be a popular cause. You can accurately frame it as actually keeping with tradition and what the Framers would have expected to happen as the population increased. You could also frame it as a way for your elected rep to be closer to the people; by representing less people it's more likely you'll have a personal connection with your Rep. (not sure how likely this would actually be in practice or how important this really is, but I think it's a good applause line and something "normies" might actually like to hear). Combine with gerrymander reform, would be dare I say cause that's both "Popularist" and correct on the merits.
Cards on the table too..I think we seriously underrate how damaging gerrymandering really. I think there were studies done a long time ago indicating that gerrymandering wasn't much of a problem. But those studies would have been done a) prior to when modern computers were used to create districts b) when there was A LOT more cross party voting behavior. As has been kind of amply demonstrated, the period from 1965* to 1994 should be seen as aberration and not the norm. But point being, I think we underrate how much gerrymandering has led to politicians feeling like they need to take more extreme positions to remain in power.
* I'm personally under the belief that we should treat pre and post 1965 politics in America as almost two different countries. I think we also underrate how utterly distorting it was to have a giant section of the country under the rule of a one-party dictatorship (we don't like to call it that, because that sounds like how things work "over there", but let's be real, my description is accurate) and how much that scrambled political coalitions and political outcomes generally.
Small correction that actually strengthens your point: the 1911 Act set 435 temporarily, with the explicit expectation it would grow at the next census. The cap became permanent with the Reapportionment Act of 1929, when Congress couldn't agree on a new number because urbanization was scrambling the urban/rural balance and nobody wanted to take the political hit. So the 435 freeze isn't continuity with tradition — it's the moment Congress broke with tradition because they couldn't handle the demographic shift. The Framers absolutely expected continued expansion. The 1789 ratio was 1:30,000, which would yield 11,000 reps today.
You're right that the framing is the whole game. "Closer to your rep" is the popularist applause line. The international comparison is the wonk hammer — every peer democracy represents its citizens more directly than we do. The UK is at ~103K per rep, Germany 116K, France 116K, even Japan is at 270K. The US at 770K per rep is the developed-world outlier by a wide margin. Even doubling the House to 870 only gets us to Japan's ratio.
Your 1965 point is the deeper cut and I'd take it further: the post-1965 realignment is what exposed gerrymandering as the structural problem it always was. Pre-VRA, Southern Democrats were running de facto one-party rule across an entire region — gerrymandering didn't matter because the outcome was fixed by the franchise itself. Once Black voters could actually vote, the maps had to start doing the work of suppression that the literacy test had been doing. That's why Shelby County in 2013 and Callais last week were both inevitable: the conservative legal project has been quietly rebuilding the pre-1965 settlement piece by piece for forty years. Treating American politics as two different countries before and after 1965 is the right frame.
Strongest structural fix on the table. The "too many politicians" pushback is actually a feature — more reps means each one is less individually powerful, which is what you want. The current 435 is a de facto House of Lords with elections.
The Founders' ratio (1 rep per 30K) would yield ~11,000 today. The cube root rule that most modern democracies use puts it around 695. Even getting to 2,000 — which sounds radical — only brings the US to roughly Japan's representation density. Every peer democracy represents its citizens more directly than we do.
The gerrymandering fix is almost a bonus. Real prize is forcing the structural reforms that actually make Congress functional — committee restructuring, hybrid chambers, lobbyist dilution. And it pairs cleanly with the brand-rebrand argument I've been making: 1,500 new districts means a lot of seats in places where the Democratic brand is dead, which is exactly where you'd run state-specific affiliates that caucus Democratic but don't carry the toxic national label.
Political viability is the hard part — neither party benefits short-term, which is why nobody pushes it. But it's the right answer.
There is another big benefit to the electorate overall of federal action on this, which is stopping state races from being about federal politics.
As things stand now, you can plausibly say that any election for State Rep/Senator/Governor will impact who is elected to Congress, since they set the boundaries. And making state politics a referendum on federal politics further weakens accountability for those officials.
This was one of the major reasons they brought in the direct election of senators last century, because state races were turning into referendums on Senate appointments. So here's hoping they nip this one in the bud before it keeps spiralling.
Amen. I'm in the odd position of feeling guilty if I make out-of-state political contributions and feeling guilty if I don't. I'm sure I'm not the only one. When I get calls from around the country (and I do - occasionally even from Republicans who are either severely mistaken or overly optimistic (I _am_ a lifetime subscriber to The Dispatch)) we nearly always end up talking about the every local race is national now. And it sucks. Big time.
Republicans don't want to negotiate because they feel entitled to power regardless of the will of the voting public. Unless and until Republicans accept that everyone must play by a uniform set of rules (and here we are living in the Trump era, so that won't be happening anytime soon), there will be no negotiated solution.
Agreed. It's not like there's one right answer to this, but you can't act in good faith when they won't. Candidly I think the GOP just needs to be broken (at least in it's current form).
I get the impression that, particularly before Trump, Virginia had a fairly collegial approach to governing at the state level. There was a lot of effort put into developing its anti-Gerrymander law and gaining public support. Democrats were sad to set it aside temporarily with this latest vote. I haven't looked for polling, but my hypothesis is that this vote was closer than other recent elections in the state at least in part because of Democrats feeling conflicted about it.
Of course, it simply could be that Republicans were very energized by Trump's push to block the temporary Gerrymander, and there was a lot of confusing and deceptive messaging around it from GOP aligned groups.
I believe there are ways to test for Gerrymandered maps objectively. I have a mathematician friend who works for tech companies who told me he had read about a mathematical model that basically "rolls the dice" on proposed maps based on detailed precinct-level voting. It calculates how far the outcomes of the Gerrymandered map are from a perfectly neutral mean of some sort. (I forget what that was based on but it sounded completely logical.) Your idea of a federal law could be realized objectively when there is sufficient political will.
The real issue is that existing politicians and parties in power are there because of the district and system that put them there. California has a reasonable fair system, which you can tell because when the California legislator brought the redistricting to the voters, the could easily add several seats without a map that doesn't look too bad. This is because the district maps are drawn by an independent commission with some simple principles. That system was opposed by both Republicans and Democrats (both law makers and parties), and only became law through the initiative process.
This whole frackus allowed Democrats to override commission drawn maps with a popular vote, promising to return to them in the next redraw. I believe the same thing happened in Virginia (since redistricting seemed to require a vote from the electorate.
I don't know how we can get by that log jam at the national level, however. Perhaps doing something simple like passing a federal law that prevents states from redrawing maps mid-period. That at least puts the gerymandering arguments on the ever decade level, and would have prevented the whole Texas redraw thing which kicked off all the responses.
Seems to me that this gerrymandering fight has been going on for awhile. Massachusetts
made Republican Representatives into dinosaurs - extinct. Illinois is heading in the same
direction and Wisconsin back in the Scott Walker years reduced Democrats to 2 seats.
It is only since Trump went public in attempts to gerrymander that it has hit the headlines.
If Trump had just kept his mouth shut and worked behind the scenes this national uproar
would have never happened.
"I actually think it’s a sign of progress that we’ve started to see Virginia-based Republicans make specific complaints about specific Democratic proposals to restrict gerrymandering."
If zero Republicans were willing to support the legislation the Carney mentions in that Washington Examiner article then the response from Democrats should've been, "ok, let's get a Gang together and hammer this out." But that's not what happened because Democrats weren't serious about a bipartisan piece legislation to ban gerrymandering.
You can't claim to be the party that says it wants to ban gerrymandering when the legislation it produces are a complete non-starter for the other party.