Gerrymandering? Meh

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

 

I’ll confess that I don’t have especially strong views on Texas’s current gerrymandering attempt. I don’t like gerrymandering — even if I accept that, if we want to keep local representation, which I do, it will remain inevitable in some sense — but, insofar as there exists a neutral case against it, that case simply cannot be made by the same Democrats who have spent the last few decades gerrymandering the heck out of their own states. Add into the mix that the 2020 Census was a disaster that badly screwed over the Republicans — an actual problem for “Our Democracy” — and the most I am able to muster in response is, “yeah, I wish we didn’t do that.”

 

What I do have strong views on here is the media — which, once again, seems to have decided that when the Democrats gerrymander “their” states that’s just politics, but when Republicans do it it’s the end of the republic. In essence, the line that the press has been happy to launder is akin to the one we heard after Roe was overturned: “Hey, how dare you! We stole that fair and square!” I’m sorry, but that won’t fly. If gerrymandering is bad, it’s bad; but it can’t only be bad in Texas.

 

When Donald Trump says something untrue or ridiculous, the media is quite prepared to note in headlines or chyrons that he’s lying or stretching the truth. So it should be here. Instead of Democratic Governor Threatens to Retaliate if Texas Republicans Gerrymander State, the line ought to be, Democratic Governor Who Already Gerrymandered His State — and Didn’t Care When Other Democrats Followed Suit — Threatens to ‘Retaliate’ if Republicans Copy His Behavior. It might also be fun if the press were willing to note the irony in Texas’s angry Democrats fleeing to Illinois to protest gerrymandering.

 

There are only two possible worlds here: A world in which neither party gerrymanders the states they control, and a world in which both parties do. There can be no plausible system in which Maryland is a gerrymandered state but Florida isn’t, or in which Illinois has been sliced-and-diced but Ohio remains pure. We now live in the latter world. I cannot be expected to care about it only in one direction.