One of the most prominent talking points in the entire democracy reform movement is that curbing money's sway over elections is a prerequisite to fixing every one of the nation's biggest problems. Now critics of partisan gerrymandering are trying to piggyback on that concept.
A new study concludes that aggressive legislative mapmaking by Republican majorities is responsible for the lack of any new gun control laws in five states during a decade marked by the accelerating pace of mass shootings.
In issuing the report Tuesday, the Center for American Progress, one of Washington's most influential liberal think tanks, joined the lengthening roster of groups advocating for states to take the drawing of political boundaries away from the politicians themselves in and turn the responsibility over to independent and nonpartisan panels.
Fourteen states have already given such panels authority to draw state legislative lines starting in 2021, after the census exposes population shifts mandating new lines that confirm with the Constitution's one-person-one-vote requirement. Eight of them have also assigned the next congressional maps to commissions.
Several states with the full array of partisan power structures — reliably Democratic, solidly Republican and battleground — may soon join that list through legislation or a citizen-driven referendum, but maybe not in time for the next redistricting.
All five of the states studied by the Center for American Progress, or CAP, have been on center stage in the gerrymandering debate: North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia.
"In each of these states, it is likely, in the absence of partisan gerrymandering, that the legislature would have enacted measures to strengthen gun laws — measures that could have saved lives," the report concluded.
That's because all their legislative maps were successfully drawn at the start of the 2010s to assure that Republicans — who have remained almost unanimously opposed to additional regulation of firearms or new curbs on gun ownership — retained legislative control no matter how strong the Democratic vote in subsequent elections. And in last year's midterm, CAP notes, the GOP held control in four of the legislatures even though Democratic candidates won more total votes in state House contests in all of those states and in state Senate elections in three.
While 32 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted a combined 110 gun control measures in the nearly two years since 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., the report details, no such bills have come close to becoming law in any of those five states despite extensive campaigns in each place.
"Partisan gerrymandering is one of the reasons why a public that supports stronger gun laws can be represented by state legislators who do nothing, even in the wake of severe episodes of gun violence," CAP said. "Even when there is bipartisan support for a particular gun policy, conservative leadership in many state legislatures persistently refuse to allow such bills to have a hearing or a vote, even if the bills have bipartisan support."
The situation is particularly problematic, the authors say, because a disproportionate share of gun violence victims are young people and members of racial minorities who live in deep blue Democratic urban areas — but policies that could help them are under the control of Republican red officials with disproportionate political power.
The good news, they say, is that overt partisanship in mapmaking is in jeopardy in all five states.
North Carolina's legislative lines were redrawn this fall after a panel of judges declared the old map a violation of the state Constitution's "fair elections" clause. A very similar ruling two years ago voided a Pennsylvania congressional map and could threaten the legislative maps as well. Michigan voters a year ago voted to create a nonpolitical redistricting commission by next year. A similar proposal could be on the Virginia ballot as soon as next fall. And legislation to do the same has growing grassroots support in Wisconsin.
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.