Gerrymandering, Race-Pandering, & Political-Meandering
15th August 2025
Gerrymandering, the political practice of carving up awkward-looking legislative districts to benefit one party’s political power, has slithered into the public conversation once again.
…
Why has the discussion roared into the public consensus this time? It started with the Texas legislature’s efforts to redraw its state’s districts after a request from the Trump Administration to review the fairness of the districts.
Yes, there is gerrymandering in Texas, but not the way that liberal reformers want to portray the problem. Consider some of the urban, Democratic Congressional districts in Texas: the 29th, 32nd, and 33rd, for example, are obscenely drawn. These contortions are examples of race pandering, or “race-mandering,” which result from the tortured misuse of the Voting Rights Act and fears of ongoing legal challenges from left-wing legal activists demanding more majority-minority districts. This kind of lawfare recently forced Alabama and Louisiana to create gerrymandered districts.
Texas is not alone in this fight, either. Ohio has to redraw its Congressional districts. This opportunity could create three more Republican-leaning Congressional seats, while the Texas legislature advances a map creating five more GOP seats. Of course, Governor Abbott and the Republican leadership have floated increasing the GOP advantage to six to eight seats if absent Democrats refuse to come back to work in their vain efforts to break legislative quorums. Democrats have not helped their cause by fleeing to Illinois, whose districts are so gerrymandered that even Stephen Colbert poked fun at them.
For the record, I’m not against gerrymandering–in fact, I favor it over the alternative, which is having up to half of a District’s population not represented by someone whose views they share. The news media, of course, prefer ‘competitive districts’, because the ‘horse race’ makes for more exciting coverage, i.e. coverage that earns them eyeballs, clicks, and money.