Let’s Play Pretend: A Gerrymandering Fairy Tale for a Democracy on Life Support

Christine Merser, July 31, 2025

So why haven’t the Dems done a better job of fighting gerrymandering with gerrymandering, you might ask?

Truth, as I see it, not to be confused with fact, and it pains me to say it….

Because Democrats have spent the last two decades clinging to the idea that politics should still be a polite chess game, while Republicans brought brass knuckles and a sledgehammer.

The Democratic Party has long believed in the idea of fair play, independent redistricting commissions, bipartisan norms, and institutional integrity. That sounds noble until you realize the GOP was burning those norms down behind their backs and using the ashes to redraw the district lines. Karl Rove saw redistricting as war, and he fought like it. Democrats brought a copy of the Constitution to a knife fight and then seemed surprised when they got stabbed with a map of Ohio.

Part of it is structural. In blue states like California and New York, Democrats handed redistricting over to so-called independent commissions to prove their moral superiority. That left them with clean hands and fewer seats. Meanwhile, Republicans kept control in key red states, drew maps to guarantee power, and wrapped the whole thing in legal defenses so airtight they could survive a Supreme Court run by six Federalist Society lifers.

But let’s not sugarcoat it. Part of it is weakness. A deep, misguided hope that if they just stayed decent long enough, the system would reward them for it. It hasn’t. It won’t. Ever.

The Democrats weren’t outsmarted. They were outwilled. And now they’re outnumbered.

If they’re waking up to that reality now, it might be too late, but it’s still better than never. -cm

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Let’s just say it out loud. The 2026 election may already be rigged. Between Project 2025 rewiring the federal government into a Trump-owned subsidiary and GOP governors scheduling voter roll purges between rounds of pickleball, we may not have a real election. But for those of us still clinging to the idea that democracy is something more than a marketing gimmick, let’s play pretend.

Texas, and don’t they always seem to be first in line when democracy needs to be dragged into an alley and beaten senseless, has decided to redraw its congressional map five years ahead of schedule. Why? Because Donald Trump said so. Like a particularly aggressive HOA president, he called Governor Greg Abbott and asked for five more Republican-leaning districts. Abbott, ever the obedient handmaiden, obliged. A special legislative session was called. A map was released. And suddenly, the GOP stands to control 30 of Texas’s 38 congressional seats.

Let’s be clear. Gerrymandering is not new. The term was coined in 1812 after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry approved a district shaped like a salamander to favor his party. But it was Karl Rove who turned it into a science project in the early 2000s. With the help of the Republican State Leadership Committee, Rove engineered a strategy called REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project, that targeted state legislatures in swing states ahead of the 2010 census. It worked. Republicans flipped key statehouses, took control of the redistricting process, and locked in structural advantages in Congress for more than a decade. The results were seismic. Even when Democrats won more votes nationally, Republicans held the House. It wasn't democracy. It was a spreadsheet with state boundaries.

Since then, it has only gotten worse. In states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republicans have used increasingly sophisticated mapping software to draw districts with surgical precision, splitting neighborhoods and even city blocks to isolate and dilute Democratic voters. In Ohio, courts have ruled the maps unconstitutional, only to watch the legislature ignore them. The Supreme Court, once a guardrail, threw up its hands in 2019 and declared that federal courts had no role in fixing partisan gerrymandering at all. So now it is a free-for-all. Whoever controls the statehouse controls the map. And if that map gets you five more seats in Congress, apparently it also gets you a congratulatory phone call from Donald Trump.

Let me pause for a moment. Thirty out of thirty-eight. That’s nearly 80 percent of the seats in a state where Republicans win maybe 55 percent of the vote on a good day. This isn’t representation. It’s political money laundering.

Now, here’s the thing. Democrats could fight this. They could take it to court. They could organize protests. Or, and stay with me here, they could finally grow a spine and do what Republicans have done for decades. Redraw their own maps.

Yes, I know. It feels icky. It feels wrong. Gerrymandering is the electoral equivalent of cheating at Scrabble by hiding the Q under your seat. But when your opponent’s been hoarding all the vowels since 2010 and keeps rearranging the board mid-game, you either flip the table or play their game better.

Let’s run the numbers.

If Texas rigs its map to win 30 seats, that’s a net gain of five. But if California, New York, Illinois, and Maryland retaliate, and I mean really go for it, here’s what happens.

California, currently with 40 House Democrats and 12 Republicans, could conceivably erase at least 3 red seats in inland or suburban districts if they took back control from the state’s independent redistricting commission.
New York, which made the rookie mistake of trying to gerrymander badly last cycle, could clean up its map and pick up 3 to 4 more blue seats.
Illinois, already pretty aggressive, still has room to squeeze out one more.
Maryland could definitely flip one Republican district in the western part of the state.

That’s a net gain of 8 to 9 for the Democrats, even after Texas carves itself into a right-wing jigsaw puzzle.

So to answer the first question. Can Democrats do this? Yes, with enough state-level muscle, legislative action, and a little willingness to pull off their gloves and get in the mud. That’s where we are now. The moral high ground has been repossessed.

As for whether they should? Please. That question is a luxury item we can’t afford. The GOP isn’t asking should we. They’re asking how fast. The question isn’t whether Democrats should stoop to that level. The question is whether they’ll be left standing if they don’t.

Sure, in a perfect world, maps would be drawn by impartial experts with no stake in the outcome, birds would sing, and Ted Cruz would go back to doing whatever he did before becoming the nation’s leading authority on performative outrage. But we don’t live in that world. We live in this one. And this one is getting sliced into weaponized voting districts like it’s a meat counter at a MAGA deli.

So maybe it is a race to the bottom. But the Democrats don’t have the luxury of staying on the sidelines writing think pieces about civility while the GOP rewires the entire electoral grid.

This isn’t about matching bad faith with more bad faith. It’s about survival.

So to Gavin, J.B., Kathy Hochul, and Wes Moore. You’ve got your pens. Start drawing. The future of democracy might just depend on your ability to color inside some very crooked lines.

Because if we’re going to play pretend, let’s at least pretend we’re trying to win.