“Gerrymander” was one of seven runners-up for Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year, which was “slop,” although “gerrymandering” is often used. Both words are closely related and frequently used interchangeably, with the main difference being their function as nouns versus verbs or processes. Throughout 2025, as Republicans and Democrats used redistricting to boost their electoral advantages, “gerrymander” and “gerrymandering” surged in popularity as search terms, highlighting their ongoing relevance in current politics and public awareness. However, as an old Capitol Hill dog, I realized that 2025 made me less inclined to explain the definitions of these words to anyone who asked for more detail.
“Did the Democrats or Republicans Start the Gerrymandering Fight?” is the obvious question many people are asking: Who started it?
Most media suggest that Republican President Donald Trump started the mid-decade redistricting fight. However, I see it differently, as many overlook the earlier political moves and court decisions that set the stage for this ongoing battle.
I believe the fight actually began earlier, in 2016, fueled by Common Cause North Carolina and supported by the North Carolina Democratic Party.
President Trump publicly called on Republican-led state legislatures to pursue mid-decade redistricting, especially following the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which clarified that federal courts cannot hear claims of partisan gerrymandering, leaving such disputes to state courts and legislatures.
This Rucho case established that claims of partisan gerrymandering cannot be filed in federal court, effectively leaving the issue to the states.
The Rucho case arises from North Carolina’s 2016 congressional map, drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. This map became a key example in a legal battle involving Common Cause and the North Carolina Democratic Party, highlighting the ongoing struggle over partisan gerrymandering. Its significance lies in how it shows the legal and political conflicts that continue to influence redistricting disputes today, making these groups feel central to the story.
While Rucho definitively ended federal judicial oversight of partisan gerrymandering, League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (2006) mainly addressed mid-decade redistricting and racial gerrymandering. The Supreme Court ruled in that case in 2006 that there is no constitutional barrier to changing maps mid-decade.
By the end of 2025, six states’ dominoes are falling into place after adopting new congressional maps outside the regular post-census cycle: Texas (favoring Republicans), California (Democrats), Missouri (Republicans), North Carolina (Republicans), Ohio (Republicans), and Utah (Democrats).
On December 11, twenty-one of the 40 Republican senators joined all 10 Democratic senators in voting against a plan to implement a mid-decade congressional gerrymander. So, its domino still stands.
In his December congressional statement praising Indiana’s stance against Mid-Decade Gerrymandering, U.S. Representative Kevin Kiley (R-CA) wrote, “Gerrymandering is wrong wherever it occurs. Now is the time for Congress to end the practice once and for all.”
Most of the public is unaware that, four months earlier, on August 5, Rep. Kiley introduced his legislative bill, H.R. 4889, which aims to prevent states from conducting more than one congressional redistricting after a decennial census unless a court orders it to uphold the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act. If enacted, the bill would “apply with respect to any Congressional redistricting which occurs after the November 2024 election.”
Currently, this bill is still in the House Judiciary Committee and has no official cosponsors, not even from Texas Democrats or California Republicans.
The benefits of H.R. 4889 include (1) ensuring district lines are set for a full ten years between censuses, providing stability and maintaining a consistent relationship between representatives and voters, (2) preventing mid-decade efforts by the ruling party to redraw maps for partisan advantage, (3) safeguarding the voters' will against politicians, often referred to as a “redistricting war.”
However, the disadvantages of H.R. 4889 include (1) the potential for political hypocrisy, (2) the fact that it prohibits when redistricting can occur but does not address partisan gerrymandering itself (which the Supreme Court has largely left to the states to manage), and (3) oversteps federal authority by limiting states’ ability to manage their own election processes in response to changing demographics or other factors, even though the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause grants Congress authority in this area.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) asserts that the recent increase in mid-decade redistricting poses a “dangerous threat” to democracy. Neither the NDRC nor the National Republican Redistricting Committee (NRRC) has publicly endorsed H.R. 4889.
H.R. 4889 has been sitting in the House Judiciary Committee for five months, but, championed by Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren (California), the bill aimed at preventing gerrymandering by allowing each state to establish an independent redistricting commission, has not moved out of the House Judiciary Committee since 2005 (20 years ago!).
Rep. Lofgren’s latest bill was introduced on September 18, 2025, when she unveiled the Redistricting Reform Act of 2025 (H.R. 5449) with 55 Democratic cosponsors and no Republican cosponsors. Some aspects of her legislation have also been included in broader voting rights packages, such as the For the People Act (H.R. 1), which passed the House in 2019 and 2021 but failed in the Senate.
Arguments against Lofgren’s redistricting reform efforts mainly focus on violations of state authority, the potential for nonpartisan commissions to be manipulated, and the timing of these federal mandates.
Fact: Since the 93rd Congress (1973–75), no redistricting bills have experienced any action besides being referred to the appropriate committee or subcommittee.
“We have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around,” said Democratic President Barack Obama in his final State of the Union address in January 2016. It echoes calls made by Republican President Ronald Reagan twenty-nine years earlier in 1987, “That’s all we’re asking for: an end to the anti-democratic and un-American practice of gerrymandering congressional districts... The fact is, gerrymandering has become a national scandal.”
Gerrymandering is named after Elbridge Gerry, the Governor of Massachusetts in 1812. In reality, Gerry didn’t invent it himself and reportedly found the map drawn by his Democratic-Republican party uncomfortable. Still, he signed a bill that benefited his party by manipulating district lines for unfair political advantage.
If the Common Cause North Carolina and the North Carolina Democratic Party decide not to file a complaint, there will be no mid-decade redistricting effort in the 2020s.
Howard Gorrell is an advocate for the deaf, a former Republican Party election statistician, and a longtime congressional aide. He has been advocating against partisan gerrymandering for four decades.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.