We are high schoolers. We are college students. We are redrawing the lines.
For people our age, gerrymandering is a short lesson in AP Government class, a flashcard temporarily memorized for an upcoming test. For our parents, it is a word splashed across a headline, brushed off as yet another way politicians compete for news-cycle attention, soon to be forgotten, just like that vocab word. But as much as districting may seem like a technical or irrelevant procedure, its effects ripple through elections and representation, shaping the balance of power in ways most people never understand.
Gerrymandering is the practice of deliberately drawing district lines to favor one political party over another. Right now, in the midst of a mid-decade redraw, we risk facing another round of creative cartography that would make Picasso jealous. Redistricting has become ammunition in a political arms race. But instead of abstract art, we're getting abstract democracy. In North Carolina, Republicans drew a new congressional map in 2023. While a court-ordered 2020 map had produced a 7–7 split, the new map resulted in Republicans winning 10 of 14 seats in 2024. Now GOP leaders are pushing to redraw again, targeting one swing district to secure an 11–3 Republican advantage. In 2025, Illinois Republicans filed a lawsuit asking the state supreme court to overturn the legislative map drawn in 2021, arguing it unfairly favors Democrats. At the same time, a bipartisan initiative, "Fair Maps Illinois," is advocating for a constitutional amendment to place redistricting under an independent commission. Similar debates are unfolding across the country, highlighting the urgent need for fair redistricting reform.
At the same time, opposition to gerrymandering crosses party lines. In October 2025, Common Cause reported that 84% of the voters considered fair district lines critical to the health of democracy. This bipartisan concern is rare in today's polarized climate, and it is precisely what makes reform possible.
This urgency is why we, a group of three high school seniors and two college freshmen, decided to take action. We have a plan that is gaining traction because it relies on something that will not change every ten years: math.
It all began when a few of us became involved in gerrymandering research through a summer program at the Institute of Mathematics and Democracy (IMD) at Wellesley College. IMD’s mission is to find objective, mathematically-driven solutions to difficult political issues. In all our nerdy glory, and yes, we’re proudly owning it, we spent a couple of summers working at IMD and ended up developing geometric proofs that create guidelines to determine what is political gerrymandering and what is a fair drawing of district lines. We hope to take this research far and wide by using the power of our dual identity as both students and researchers.
The perfect opportunity presented itself when the Institute of Citizens and Scholars launched an initiative last year focused entirely on youth leadership. Youth Leaders for Civic Preparedness is the beginning of a growing youth voice; we made the cut as one of 100 teams nationwide awarded a grant to address a community problem. We proposed to tackle gerrymandering.
We desire to capitalize on the thousands of hours of mathematical analysis and the months of civic workshop planning we have already invested. We are planning to start from the ground up, design activities in our communities, create an educational website, launch social media initiatives amongst our peers, and build them out nationally. We will bring in experts in the field, our peers, and anyone else interested, in the hope of sparking debate and interest in gerrymandering.
We hope to inspire local communities to challenge district lines that deny representation, states to establish independent redistricting commissions, and Congress to pass reforms that protect fair elections. We are working from the ground up to make change that lasts beyond news cycles and AP Government flashcards.
What makes us unique, what gives us power, is that we did not meet in an AP Government class. We have never even been in the same room. Spanning from New York to Maryland to California, our geographic diversity offers an opportunity to make an impact not just in our local community but also in our national community. While the steady pace of academia does not always align with tumultuous politics, we can serve as a bridge between them, especially for our generation.
We cannot even vote yet, but when the time comes to cast our ballots, we want assurance that we are being represented. Changing abusive redistricting is a nuanced dance, one that requires navigating legislative hoops, the academic community, and cultivating a sense of urgency among those who wish to repair our democracy. Meaningful representation is core to our democracy, and those of us who represent this country’s future have an imperative to ensure its survival. We are not waiting for permission to fight for the democracy we will inherit.
Serena Pallan is a senior at Hereford High School in Baltimore, Maryland.
Ananya Shah is a senior at Edgemont Jr. Sr. High School in Scarsdale, NY
Thea Vedula is a Freshman at The University of Wisconsin-Madison
Angelina Wang is a freshman at Brown University
Zubin Rajesh is a senior at Campolindo High School in Moraga, California
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. To learn about the many NextGen initiatives we are leading, click HERE.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.