The WSJ report, “Gerrymandering by Both Parties Is Deepening America’s Political Divide,” by longtime political reporter Aaron Zitner, is both illuminating and frustrating. It simultaneously points to a real problem in our politics and confuses effect for cause.
America’s identity as a unified nation is eroding, with Republican- and Democratic-led states dividing into separate spheres, each with its own policies governing the economic, social and political rules of life.
Offhand, we might call that Federalism. But it’s much more than that.
The bitter fight over redrawing U.S. House maps, triggered by President Trump’s effort to protect his party’s majority in the 2026 midterm elections, is the latest example of how the dominant party in many states is making extraordinary efforts to impose its will.
In 40 states, a single party controls the House, Senate and governor’s office—a so-called trifecta—or else has enough power to block vetoes from a governor of the other party. That leaves less than 20% of Americans living in a state where the minority party has a meaningful voice in governance.
The result has been a deepening of differences in red and blue America. Abortion is now banned or heavily restricted in about one-third of states, all of them controlled by Republicans, while abortion access is protected or allowed in every Democratic trifecta state. Every GOP trifecta state has passed bans or limits on gender-affirming care for minors.
Red and blue states have moved in sharply different directions on employment law, gun regulation, immigration enforcement and other policies. When Louisiana passed a law last year that required the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, later struck down by courts, 18 GOP-trifecta states filed a legal brief in support.
It has long, if not always, been the case that states have been dominated by one political party. What’s relatively new is the degree to which the parties have been nationalized. I’m old enough to remember when Montana Republicans were wildly different in their political preferences from Alabama Republicans. Hell, I’m old enough to remember when Alabama was so solidly Democratic at the local level that the party primary was effectively the election for governor. But Alabama Democrats were much more conservative than, say, New Hampshire Republicans.
“You’re seeing this divide—trifecta blue states and trifecta red—and it’s creating this remarkable contrast in which you’ve got radically different policies from state to state,” said Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who tracks legislation regarding gender, marriage and religious liberty.
Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with different states having politics that reflect their cultures. Even decades ago when it was Republican-leaning, California has always had different politics and policies than Mississippi or Utah. But nowadays the disputes are over fundamental rights and beliefs in a way we haven’t seen at least the 1960s, if not the 1860s.
And, when the stakes are seen as existential, the acceptable means change. When you can’t afford to lose, cheating becomes not only acceptable but necessary. The divide isn’t caused by gerrymandering; rather, gerrymandering is incentivized by the divide.
The television images of Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas for sanctuary in Democratic-led Illinois, New York and Massachusetts show that these differences reflect not just policy preferences, but are facets of a hostile confrontation. Red and blue states are threatening to use the maximum legal and political tools available to limit the power of the other party.
Texas Republicans, at Trump’s insistence, are undertaking an out-of-cycle effort to redraw their House districts to give the Republican Party more seats. They have also issued civil-arrest warrants to force quorum-breaking Democrats to return to the state so that the redistricting process can move forward. In return, lawmakers in Democratic-led California, Illinois and other states are looking at redrawing their own maps to give Democrats a stronger hand in House elections.
“This is a war. We are at war,” said Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, as she appeared this past week in Albany with fleeing Texas lawmakers. “And that’s why the gloves are off. And I say: Bring it on.”
Democrats have disadvantaged themselves in this process. Most of the truly “blue” states have implemented policies that take the drawing of Congressional districts out of the hands of partisan legislators, assigning the task to impartial bodies tasked with drawing lines according to strict rules. That’s true even in my home state of Virginia, which has shifted from a solid Red to a solid Blue state on the national level, but where Republicans are competitive for the governorship and control of the state legislature. The redistricting commission, created in 2021 when Democrats controlled the governor’s mansion and both houses of the assembly, has strict guidelines that include population equality, voting rights, contiguity, compactness, consideration of communities of interest, and political neutrality.
Again, though, gerrymandering to make it more likely that the dominant party in the state is disproportionately represented in the US House of Representatives only tangentially impacts the divide Zitner’s piece highlights. Unless we nationalize laws on abortion access, LGBTQ rights, employment policy, drug use, immigration enforcement, and the like, Republican-dominant states are going to have wildly different policies than those dominated by Democrats.
To the extent the ways each state’s governor and state legislature election processes are democratic, one can argue that this is a good thing. Different polities have different preferences, cultures, and mores. It’s perfectly reasonable that they have laws and policies reflecting those differences.
But, taking the 2024 presidential election as a proxy, there’s not really such a thing as a Red state or Blue state, despite those terms having been fixed in our political vocabulary since the 2000 election. Leaving aside the District of Columbia, which Harris won by an astonishing 85.9% margin, the bluest state was Vermont, which went Democrat by a 31.8% margin. That still means a third of those who voted in the Green Mountain State are Republicans. The reddest state was Wyoming, which went to Trump by a 46.2% margin. Still, over a quarter of Wyoming voters went for Harris.
Looking at the three large states that are either in the process of or threatening to further gerrymander their House delegations, we see how wildly unrepresentative the winner-take-all mentality is.
Texas, which some analysts foolishly hoped would actually go blue in 2020 (Trump won by a 52-46 margin), went for Trump by a 13.7% margin in 2024. But that leaves a whopping 42.5% who preferred the Democrat.
California, Harris’ home state, went for her by a 20.1% margin. But more than a third of Californians (38.33%) voted for Trump. (The margin was actually wider with Biden on the ticket in 2020, 63.48-34.32).
New York was almost the mirror image of Texas, going blue by a 12.7% margin in 2024. Meaning, 43.3% voted Republican. (Once again, the margin was considerably higher in 2020, with Biden winning 61-38.)
That the lines would get drawn in such a way to minimize the voting impact of the minority party in those instances is obviously problematic from a democratic theory standpoint. But, again, the greater problem is that their day-to-day lives are governed by policies wildly out of step with their revealed preferences.
