The Redistricting Race to the Bottom
The solution to gerrymandering isn't more gerrymandering
What started last year with Texas redrawing congressional maps quickly spread to California, Louisiana, Virginia, Missouri, North Carolina, Florida, and most recently, my home state of Tennessee.
Less than one week after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision that rolled back minority voter protections under the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee Republicans responded to pressure from Washington, DC, and called our General Assembly into a special session for the sole purpose of splitting Memphis into multiple districts.
The intent was to make it impossible for a Democrat to win any Tennessee seat in the US House of Representatives in this year’s midterm election. To accomplish that, state leaders threw out a Tennessee statute that had stood for over half a century: since 1972, state law had mandated that “districts may not be changed between apportionments,” barring the state legislature from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade in between census cycles. On May 7, the state legislature approved a bill repealing that provision, and it was signed into law the same day by Governor Lee.
During political seasons like this, it is important to remember that our Founding Fathers warned against the dangers of a two-party system in the United States. George Washington himself advocated against having only two parties, because these men knew that an us vs. them government would fracture a vulnerable nation.
Tennessee’s Capitol is called the “Athens of the South,” named after the birthplace of democracy in Greece. But what transpired in the sacred halls of our state government this week was anything but democratic.
The rules of the special session blocked citizens from giving public comment on the maps. Democrats attempted to add more than 30 different amendments to the legislation that officially redrew the congressional districts. They attempted to rewrite the bill to keep Memphis and Nashville in singular districts, to delay the effective date of the map, to require public disclosure of map-making discussions, to require adequate support for elections administrators, and even to establish a Tennessee Voting Rights Act. All efforts by the minority party failed in party-line votes.
But rather than rehashing each of the actions in Tennessee, it feels pertinent to highlight the broader view of redistricting across the country. This moment calls us to examine the shortcomings of our nation that only offers two party machines for its incredibly diverse set of citizens.
The maps are moving, but the numbers aren’t
This redistricting scramble has touched millions of voters across the country, and if you look only at raw seat counts, the partisan payoff appears modest. The more consequential shift is structural.
Before 2025, only two states had conducted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970. Today, just months into the 2025-26 cycle, at least six states have already enacted new maps, and more are expected to follow in the coming weeks. Through this campaign, Republicans are building a firewall that insulates them from the public’s verdict at the ballot box. According to analysis from The New York Times, the maps enacted so far would allow Republicans to lose the national popular vote by 2.5 percentage points and still win control of the House. If Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina follow Tennessee’s lead and redistrict in response to the Supreme Court’s rollback of Voting Rights Act protections, that cushion could grow to nearly four points.
In plain terms, Democrats may need to win the national congressional vote by four points just to retake the House. This is a system designed to produce Republican governance regardless of what the American public actually wants.
The Virginia Supreme Court accelerated this dynamic just last week, striking down on procedural grounds a Democrat-drawn map that voters had approved, eliminating what had been Democrats’ primary structural counterweight. Meanwhile, Florida Republicans redrew their map, potentially adding up to four new Republican-leaning districts. In two weeks, what had been a redistricting stalemate became a rout.
Millions of voters have had their representation reshuffled, their local election administrators thrown into chaos, and their communities carved apart. The goal was never simply to flip a handful of seats, but to construct a durable advantage that allows one party to govern while being rejected by a majority of the country. That is a structural threat to representative democracy itself.
The financial cost of partisan redistricting
That threat to democracy comes at a real and immediate price, and we can use Tennessee as an example. The special session sparked sharp debate over the estimated $3.1 million cost of redistricting in the middle of an election year, with House Speaker Cameron Sexton saying the state plans to reimburse counties for expenses tied to the changes. Lawmakers also clashed over whether local election administrators could realistically implement the new maps before the 2026 primaries.
Instead of spending three million dollars on a political play that is soon to be tied up in court, Tennessee could have hired 50 new qualified teachers, staffed a behavioral health hospital for Knox County, or funded early childhood education for 600 families. Instead, it was spent drawing lines to protect incumbents, in a session that, by one Republican lawmaker’s own admission on the House floor, was about taking “advantage of a political opportunity” to send “an all-Republican delegation to Washington to represent conservative values.”
That admission proves Tennessee’s redistricting was used as a tool to override the will of voters, spending public dollars to engineer electoral outcomes that the public itself might not choose. Tennessee is just one tile in a much larger mosaic being assembled across the country, state by state, map by map, to ensure that the party in power stays in power regardless of how people vote.
The sleeping giant in the room
What neither party seems willing to reckon with is the voters they are both losing. A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, surpassing the 43% measured in 2014, 2023, and 2024. Meanwhile, equal shares of Americans identified as either Democrats or Republicans — 27% each. Among younger generations, 56% of Gen Z and 54% of Millennials now identify as Independents.
These are not protest voters. Registration data points in the same direction: Unaffiliated voters now make up about 32% of registered voters nationally, up from 23% in 2000, and this growth is driven heavily by younger voters in increasingly diverse communities. The two parties are spending millions of dollars drawing maps to lock in their bases, while the largest and fastest-growing bloc in the electorate is looking for a different kind of leadership altogether.
The moment for something different
The conditions are in place for leaders outside the traditional party structure to build something real, but what this moment demands is structural reform alongside different leadership.
Voters watching Republicans redraw maps in Tennessee, Florida, and across the South while their own representation is carved apart are not wrong to feel that the system is being rigged against them. That frustration is rational, and is a natural response to what is actually occurring.
But the answer cannot simply be for Democrats to gerrymander back wherever they can. California’s legislature already overrode its own independent commission to redraw maps in response to Republican moves elsewhere. Virginia attempted the same. When both parties treat redistricting as a weapon rather than a public trust, the losers are always the voters, and particularly the growing majority of Americans who don’t belong to either party.
The root of this problem is a system that hands politicians the power to choose their own voters before a single ballot is cast. As long as legislatures draw their own maps, the incentive will always be to protect incumbents and entrench power rather than to represent communities. Independent commissions at the state level, however well-intentioned, cannot solve the national problem on their own as long as deeply red or deeply blue states are still free to manipulate congressional seats. A state-by-state approach hands structural advantages to those willing to gerrymander voters, giving us the headlines of the last two years.
The structural solution requires a federal floor, like the Redistricting Reform Act of 2025. This legislation was introduced in both the US House and Senate, and would mandate that every state conduct redistricting through an independent nonpartisan commission while banning mid-decade map redrawing entirely. Critically, its provisions would take effect starting after the 2030 census, meaning this is not a bill designed to rescue any party in the next election cycle.
This is a long-term fix to a structural problem, and while it naturally has broad Democratic support since they are currently the minority party, its passage means Independents as well as any minority party in the future are somewhat protected in a more perfect union.
A national standard for how congressional maps are drawn is the kind of narrow, structural intervention that federal authority exists to provide. It is not an expansion of federal power into how states govern themselves. Local governance and limited federal overreach are genuine values for many, and measures like this need to be used with a targeted purpose.
But even the best federal legislation cannot be passed by a Congress controlled by the party that benefits from the current system, and that is precisely why building independent political power from the ground up should be a primary strategy for political outsiders.
Americans are rejecting the extremes of both parties, and 2026 candidates should recognize that independent voters are watching a system being actively rigged against their voice. They are not looking for a better party. They are looking for leaders who will dismantle systems that diminish the power of their votes, and who will replace them with consistent and fair election laws.
 | A guest post by
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Crazy idea - what if politicians actually offered good policies that people want to vote for? They wouldn't have to redistrict if they actually followed the will of the people.
Lauren, thanks for laying this out in a way that’s easy to understand. I’m livid, but I learned!
Lately I’ve been thinking about a theory I find oddly hopeful. What happened to Memphis is devastating for the people there and for the basic idea that voters pick representatives instead of the other way around. But gerrymanderers are also playing with fire, and I’m not sure they realize it.
When you gerrymander, opposition votes get diluted. They don’t disappear. And when you press the advantage as far as it will go, every district you create sits closer to the edge of an upset than the safer map you had before. Picture a state that votes 60 percent Republican and 40 percent Democrat in a normal year, with a delegation of six Republicans and four Democrats. The legislature redraws so that all ten seats lean Republican. The key word in that sentence is “lean.” It assumes voters keep behaving the way they did last cycle.
But as you point out, allegiance is shifting. Independents are the largest bloc in the country now. And we are heading into a midterm where all three branches of the federal government answer to a historically unpopular president who protects pedophiles and stokes inflation to fuel endless wars of choice. The ingredients are there for traditional Republicans to be demoralized, Democrats of all stripes to be energized, and independents doing their pendulum thing. The anger does the rest.
Now run that energy through the hypothetical. Those six districts that used to be safely Republican, maybe 75/25 or 80/20, are gone. In their place sit ten districts at roughly 60/40, which means each one is only about ten points away from a flip. A blue wave that would have rolled harmlessly past a red-and-blue fortress map can swallow everything. The party that drew the map traded six seats they couldn’t lose for ten seats they might.
So my small piece of hope in a hopeless news cycle is this. What if the November story is gerrymandering’s backfire? What if the dilution went so far that an angry electorate flipped seats nobody thought were in play? That would be a stronger argument against this whole evil project than our current “who gerrymandered more” moral outrage stalemate. The case then becomes that gerrymandering is morally wrong AND electorally fragile, because once the margins are that thin, a bad enough night for the party in power produces the opposite of what its architects intended.
Which is why we should focus on supporting folks in races that might have seemed hopeless before gerrymandering brought new voters into their district. Groups like Run for Something have spent years recruiting candidates for state legislatures and local offices, which matters here because those are the bodies drawing or blocking gerrymandered maps in the first place. Flipping a state house is how you change who holds the power to gerrymander. Meanwhile, Swing Left works on the federal side, with grassroots organizing and fundraising aimed at the swing House districts where margins are tightest. What does it look like to fund and field candidates good enough to break these more fragile maps? We might find out soon… if we are motivated enough to make gerrymandering history.