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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Redistricting fight

It's been in the news that Trump is pushing for mid-decade redistricting. Yesterday, the Texas house approved a new map(https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/) which nets the GOP five seats- while not a done deal de jure, in Texas politics when something the republican party wants passes the house, it's as good as done. Texas has only in-person filibustering(that is, a filibuster in the Senate needs to talk the entire time), so democrats can't delay the map for weeks in the upper chamber.

Separately, Gavin Newsom is pushing for redistricting California to gain more seats for democrats(https://apnews.com/article/california-texas-redistricting-congressional-map-4c22e21d5d4022d33a257045693b6fd4). One problem: California law doesn't allow the legislature to unilaterally do this. They need voter approval to override their independent redistricting commission. As gerrymandering tends to be unpopular with actual voters, their odds are a lot worse than Texas'. Other solidly blue states like Colorado have the same issue that they can't actually gerrymander on short notice due to their 'independent' redistricting commissions.

Trump is going beyond Texas as he tries to ensure Republicans maintain their House majority. He’s pushed Republican leaders in states such as Indiana and Missouri to pursue redistricting. Ohio Republicans were already revising their map before Texas moved. Democrats, meanwhile, are mulling reopening Maryland’s and New York’s maps.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against. Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions and it's pretty clear that democrats will lose in an all-out war of redistricting.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?

From my perspective, gerrymandered districts are an insult to the idea of representative democracy. I hope CA fails in its shenanigans. I hope we Texans find a spine. Failing that, it would be nice if our leadership could pander to anyone other than Trump.

But I know how much those hopes are worth.

Texas being gerrymandered isn't exactly new. Trump et al. just want to make it more gerrymandered.

Prior to the mid 2000s there was gerrymandering in both Red and Blue states, but it was piecemeal and wasn't that impactful because it was largely aimed at protecting state-level incumbents (and, in the South, keeping the wrong people out of power), not generating national political advantage (also it was harder without computers). Still not great, but not a hugely pressing issue.

In the mid 2000s the GOP put together a national strategy for gerrymandering their way to success. They largely succeeded, which is also why they've repeatedly refused offers of mutual disarmament. (That and the tribal mindset of the many conservative struggles with the idea of independent redistricting - a process which isn't biased in their favor must necessarily be biased against them).

Two critical problems with gerrymandering reform: 1) virtually nobody prioritizes it highly enough to mobilize voters against it, and even if they did, gerrymandering makes it extraordinarily difficult for electoral reform to win 2) even when the electorate avails themselves of means to override state governments, it is not uncommon for the state government to simply ignore them.

Texas wasn’t that gerrymandered before this. In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.

In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.

That's not an especially good metric (though people understandably like to focus on it because it's legible); crucially, it is also not correct. MA, for example, saw Republicans get a little over a third of presidential votes* but precisely zero seats. In Iowa, Democrats got 43% of the presidential vote, but zero seats. Astute observers will note that neither of these states are actually gerrymandered, which perhaps illustrates why that metric is suboptimal.

The metric people who study gerrymandering have converged on for measuring partisan bias is performance relative to other maps that could have been drawn. In MA, for example, it would be very difficult to draw a map where the GOP got a third of the seats simply because of how Republican voters are distributed around the state. Iowa could potentially be better, but not by much.

By those standards, Texas is on-par to a little worse than Illinois.

And, of course, none of this addresses the elephant in the room, which is how the parties have, on the whole, tried to resolve the problem of gerrymandering. Democrats have repeatedly sought a nationwide solution, while Republicans have preferred a "gerrymandering for me but not for thee" approach.

*Using presidential votes as a proxy for general support is imperfect but better than statewide tally of legislative races because many House races are unopposed.