Too many congressional races are over before they start. Here’s a remedy
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- The House Problem Solvers Caucus is pushing for national redistricting standards that could end the worst abuses.
- Odds are long, but the coast-to-coast gerrymandering fight could boost the push for reform.
Imagine if Sunday’s World Cup final were played under rules that blatantly favored one side over the other. Let’s say Argentina was spotted four goals against Spain.
Spain could, conceivably, overcome that 4-0 deficit. But it would be awfully hard and something of a miracle if the Spanish team prevailed.
Fans the world over would be rightly outraged. Why bother holding the tournament? What’s the point if one team is saddled with near-insurmountable odds?
Increasingly, that’s what elections for the House of Representatives look like.
As recently as the late 1990s, around 4 in 10 congressional districts were considered competitive, meaning Democratic and Republican candidates each had a plausible shot at winning. Today, per the nonpartisan handicappers at the Cook Political Report, only 18 of 435 House districts are considered toss-ups.
Another 20 districts are rated as either leaning Democratic or Republican, meaning candidates from one party or the other enjoy a noteworthy advantage, but aren’t necessarily a lock to win in November.
In sum, that means fewer than a tenth of all House seats are even somewhat competitive.
That’s hardly an accident, as lawmakers have increasingly manipulated the election process to suit themselves, rejiggering congressional districts to sideline voters and boost their political parties.
It’s undemocratic, and it stinks.
Stifling competition, rewarding extremes
“Every voter has a stake in making sure that these elections are fair and that the process is transparent,” said Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican who represents a large, mostly rural swath of western and southern Colorado. “Gerrymandering undermines representative democracy ... by preventing voters and communities from having cohesive representation.
“It unfortunately rewards political extremes,” he went on. “It reduces competition and contributes to the polarization and dysfunction that prevents Congress from effectively addressing the issues that our constituents care about.”
Hurd is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of 44 House members dedicated to working through their ideological and political differences to — lordy! — try to get stuff done.
Recently, to mark Independence Day, the caucus announced a framework for legislation aimed at bringing competition back to many congressional races, in part by limiting the redrawing of political maps to once every 10 years, following the census. Among other reforms, the bipartisan group also called for establishing a uniform, national standard requiring that congressional districts be drawn “using clear, objective criteria while rejecting partisan advantage and incumbent protection as legitimate goals.”
The effort is, of course, too late for this election. The hope is Congress will enact the changes in time for the next scheduled round of redistricting, which is due to take place after the 2030 census. The rules would be in place starting in 2032.
The chances of passage are not strong. As Hurd noted: “Any reform that asks politicians to give up political leverage is going to be challenging.” But if ever there was a time for a badly needed systemic fix, it’s now.
A race to the bottom
Gerrymandering has been around for more than 200 years. The term derives from the efforts of Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry to skew state Senate races in the election of 1812. The portmanteau, which appeared in the Boston Gazette, described one politically engineered, misshapen district that resembled a salamander.
The practice reached new heights of creativity (or deviousness, depending on your perspective) in the modern age, when ever-more sophisticated computers allowed for ever-finer slicing and dicing of the electorate.
In 2019, the Supreme Court effectively greenlighted the practice in a 5-4 decision by the conservative majority, decreeing that partisan gerrymandering was beyond the purview of federal courts. In other words, have at it! And lawmakers did.
But this last year, in particular, has broken new, insidious ground.
Pressured by President Trump — who fears losing the GOP’s whisper-thin House majority — lawmakers in Texas tore up their political map mid-decade and redrew the state’s congressional districts in hopes of nabbing five additional seats this November. California responded in kind, with passage of Proposition 50, a measure that shelved the work of a nonpartisan redistricting commission in favor of a map aimed at handing Democrats five additional seats.
More than half a dozen other states — most of them Republican-run — have jumped into the fight, gerrymandering their congressional districts to gain a partisan edge. Lawmakers in several Democratic-run states are now looking at the prospect of retaliatory gerrymandering ahead of the 2028 election.
There’s not much upside to all this self-dealing — if, that is, you care about political competition and allowing the electorate a genuine say. But all that manipulation and maneuvering has, at least, made voters much more aware of the once-obscure practice of congressional line drawing. And that offers reformers a flicker of hope.
One ally, improbable though it may seem, is Paul Mitchell. He’s the Sacramento political guru who drew the gerrymandered map that California voters approved with passage of Proposition 50. (California, he said, was left no choice but to respond after Texas made its move.)
Mitchell said he has long favored a national redistricting standard that would apply to all 50 states and put the much-abused process on an even footing. “I really believe that redistricting should ... serve the public, not serve the politicians,” Mitchell said.
Still looking on that bright side, he suggested perhaps the current redistricting war will prove so odious and have “done so much harm” that combatants will reach a point where they “put down [their] arms and embrace a kind of nonpartisan, non-politicized, public-oriented redistricting.”
It seems far-fetched. But miracles do happen.
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Until next time,
mzb
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article contends that House elections have become increasingly noncompetitive, noting that only a small fraction of congressional districts are true toss-ups and drawing on nonpartisan ratings showing that most seats are now effectively safe for one party, leaving many voters without a meaningful choice in November.[5][8][13]
It argues that this lack of competition is largely intentional, driven by aggressive partisan gerrymandering and, more recently, mid-decade redistricting in multiple states, where newly drawn maps are designed to cement partisan advantage rather than reflect voter preferences.[6][12][14][15]
In this telling, gerrymandering is described as fundamentally undemocratic: the piece suggests it sidelines voters, undermines representative democracy, rewards ideological extremes, and contributes to polarization and congressional dysfunction by creating safe seats where incumbents fear primaries more than general elections.[3][10][13]
Moreover, the article highlights the 2019 Supreme Court decision removing partisan gerrymandering from federal court review as a turning point that effectively invited state legislatures to “have at it,” accelerating what is characterized as a race to the bottom in which both parties now feel compelled to gerrymander aggressively whenever they hold power.
Against that backdrop, the piece presents the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus’ new framework as a promising remedy, emphasizing its call to limit redistricting to once a decade following the census, to adopt nationwide uniform standards rejecting partisan advantage and incumbent protection, and to increase transparency and public confidence in map-drawing.[2][7]
Additionally, the article underscores that these ideas echo broader federal efforts, such as proposals like the Redistricting Reform Act and similar bills, which would require clear, ranked criteria for maps, prohibit plans that intentionally favor a party, and ban mid-decade redistricting, thereby imposing a consistent national floor for fairness.[1][7][9][11]
The piece further stresses the importance of independent or nonpartisan structures and objective criteria, pointing to growing reform movements that seek to move line-drawing away from self-interested legislators and toward commissions or other mechanisms designed to reduce partisan influence.[2][3][9][10][20][22]
At the same time, the article acknowledges the political difficulty of passing such reforms—since they ask incumbents to surrender leverage—but suggests that heightened public awareness of mid-decade gerrymanders in states like Texas and California, and bipartisan voices such as members of the Problem Solvers Caucus and seasoned mapmakers who now support national standards, create a rare opening for systemic change.[2][6][9][12][15]
Finally, it suggests that the current “redistricting war” may become so toxic and visibly harmful to public faith in elections that both parties could eventually be driven, out of self-interest and public pressure, to accept nonpartisan, national rules as the only sustainable way to restore competition and legitimacy to House races.[2][3][9][22]
Different views on the topic
Some political scientists and governance researchers caution that independent commissions and other process-focused reforms have produced only modest improvements in partisan and racial fairness and competitiveness, noting that in several states commission-drawn plans still exhibit substantial partisan bias and that the sweeping changes many advocates predicted have not yet materialized.[23]
Additionally, legal and redistricting experts argue that making the map-drawing body independent addresses the narrow problem of legislators protecting themselves but does not by itself fix deeper structural issues—such as how single-member, winner-take-all districts can distort representation, weaken proportionality between votes and seats, and leave many communities underrepresented even under formally neutral rules.[16][23]
Reform advocates backing alternatives like the Fair Representation Act and related proposals contend that the more fundamental solution is to change the electoral system itself—by creating larger, multi-member House districts and using ranked-choice voting—so that voters across the ideological spectrum can elect representatives in every region, reducing the number of “safe” seats without relying solely on tighter redistricting standards.[4][16][18]
Moreover, empirical and design-focused analyses of independent redistricting commissions emphasize how complex these bodies are to construct and oversee: experts note that commissions must juggle multiple, sometimes competing criteria—compactness, equal population, compliance with the Voting Rights Act, protection of communities of interest, and, in some states, competitiveness—so even well-designed commissions cannot guarantee numerous swing districts in every state.[10][17][19][20][23]
In addition, some policy analyses highlight that strong competitiveness mandates or rigid national formulas could trade off against other values, such as preserving minority voting strength or keeping local governments and communities intact, and therefore suggest that a mix of carefully balanced criteria and state-level experimentation may be preferable to a single, one-size-fits-all national model focused primarily on competition.[17][21][23][24]
