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.
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.