Gerrymandering, often to the advantage one party or to protect incumbents, is as old as America.
Introduction
In some ways, the redistricting fights of today are the latest fusillade in an ongoing partisan tug-of-war for partisan power stretching back more than two centuries.
But in other ways, the redistricting fights of today are something new—higher stakes, nastier, and more precise, and taking place in an era in which our expectations for fairness are much higher.
History helps us to better grasp how districting interacts with national political conditions and the geographic bases of partisan coalitions. Since 1842, when the single-member district entered into dominant use, the geography of partisan coalitions has gone through many permutations. These permutations have interacted with districting in various ways, some more malign than others.
At no moment in American history has redistricting worked particularly well and at no moment has it escaped controversy. But, unsurprisingly, it has been least controversial during periods of low partisan polarization, and when both parties enjoyed broader geographic appeal. Knowing that our system of districting has always been a problem, but that the problem has varied in intensity, is key in understanding how to “solve” it.
1787–1840: Problematic from the Creation
Gerrymandering, or the practice of manipulating district boundaries to achieve a certain result, often to advantage one party or protect incumbents, is as old as America. In drawing the first congressional maps in 1788, Anti-Federalists in Virginia forced Federalist candidate James Madison into the same seat as Anti-Federalist James Monroe, in hopes of keeping Madison out of Congress. (Madison won the election anyway.)
The term “gerry-mander” itself was coined in 1812, a portmanteau of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry (an active participant in the 1787 Constitutional Convention and James Madison’s first vice president) and salamander. It described a snaking state Senate district designed especially to help Gerry’s party, the Democratic-Republicans, gain seats in the chamber.
This iconic drawing appeared in the Boston Gazette, under the headline “The Gerry-mander.” The accompanying essay blamed partisan pugilism—the “many fiery ebullitions of party spirit, many explosions of democratic wrath and fulminations of gubernatorial vengeance within the year past.” The practice was nothing new. But now it had a memorable name and a symbol. District maps with funny shapes that resemble animals (not just salamanders) have since symbolized the excesses of gerrymandering. However, as this report explains, focusing on the shape alone often misses the big picture: Any shape can be designed to entrench partisan advantage or protect incumbents.
If gerrymandering was a problem from the start of the republic, one might wonder why the Framers of the Constitution did not prevent it. In particular, how did James Madison not anticipate that his opponents in the Virginia state legislature would pack him into a district where he was less likely to win? One answer is that the idea of districting itself was something new.
State-level colonial politics was largely consensual into the mid-18th century, or at least dissent was effectively suppressed. Under the Articles of Confederation, all states appointed delegates, and could choose between two and seven delegates. But each state only got one vote, regardless of how many delegates it chose.
But at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Framers came up with their new representation scheme: A House of Representatives, in which states would get representatives in proportion to their population, and each representative (instead of each state) would have a single vote. The original formula was set at one representative per 30,000 residents, so Virginia had 10 representatives. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania each had eight. Two states wound up with a single representative: Delaware and Rhode Island.
The Constitution said nothing about how states should select their representatives. Article I, Section 4 (the elections clause) says: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.”
That is, state legislatures were free to do what they wanted; Congress was free to overrule them. But without any congressional guidance (that would come later), states experimented.
Some states (Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) choose to elect all their representatives statewide on a “general ticket.” That meant that in Pennsylvania, for example, voters got eight votes, to allot to the eight candidates they preferred. Two states (Georgia and Maryland) used a mixed district/at-large system, in which candidates were elected at large, but had to be residents of a specific district that they would represent.
The remaining states (including Virginia) allocated representatives to districts. However, this required a process for drawing district lines. But there was no obvious way to do this. Towns or counties made logical jurisdictions for representation, but they did not neatly naturally align into equally sized groups of 30,000 residents, which was the prescribed size for districts at the time. Instead, state governments that chose to use districts were left to combine or split up towns and counties in order to create districts of roughly equal size. And, as the Madison-Monroe contest of 1789 revealed, the political consequences of districting became immediately apparent. From the very beginning, boundaries were never neutral.
The early years of the American republic were marked by intense partisan fighting between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans (the two parties that the Framers-turned-politicians quickly organized once in government, despite their frequent fulminations against partisan politics). In an era in which the informal rules of American democracy were still under intense negotiation, partisan state governments were quick to change districting plans to benefit their party in national and state elections. Indeed, as long as state legislatures have been responsible for drawing legislative districts—that is, since the beginning of the republic—partisans have boldly bent boundaries as best they could.
The classic gerrymandering technique of “cracking and packing”—essentially, distributing your supporters more efficiently than your opponents’ supporters—was certainly one trick. But an even neater gambit was to shift back and forth between statewide at-large general ticket elections and districted elections. Here’s the basic logic: Say your party is popular statewide. If your party garners 55 percent of the vote statewide, moving all House races to general ticket at-large elections means your party can win the entire slate. With districting, by contrast, your party is still likely to lose a few seats, unless your party is equally popular in every district.
In Pennsylvania for example, the Federalist-controlled state legislature imposed statewide general ticket districting. Federalists were strongest in Philadelphia, thus the at-large system gave Eastern Pennsylvania statewide supremacy. Western Pennsylvania fought back and the state switched to districts for the 1790 elections. Federalists switched back to statewide elections in 1792, then the state settled back on districts in 1794. This kind of back-and-forth was common in the early years of the Republic, as the original two parties jockeyed for supremacy. Many states also shifted back and forth between allocating their Electoral College votes by congressional district and statewide, with similar partisan opportunism. At any time between 1789 to 1840, roughly one-quarter of all congressional seats were allocated statewide, but which quarter was in constant flux.
This whiplash of districting schemes generated high turnover among congressional delegations. But at the time, few representatives were making a career in the U.S. House. Typically, members would not serve more than a few terms. Political life in the states was robust and often more attractive.
1842–1896: The Single-Member District Becomes Dominant
This widespread practice of shifting back and forth from statewide at-large districts to single-member districts was permitted until the Apportionment Act of 1842, when Congress mandated the usage of single-member districts, using their power under Article I, Section 4.
In the decade leading up to the passage of the Apportionment Act, Democrats had moved aggressively towards statewide districts, attempting to entrench their power in states where they had a majority. However, in 1840, this backfired. Seeking a fourth Democratic term in a row, Martin Van Buren’s popularity was hobbled by a bad economy and Whigs figured out a winning formula with the popular war hero, William Henry Harrison. So, in states where Democrats had engineered congressional districting to give them a statewide sweep, Whigs benefited and swept into the House with a wide majority.
However, with the quick demise of William Henry Harrison (he caught a cold at his inauguration, and died a month later), John Tyler assumed the presidency. Tyler, a Democrat at heart who was never on board with the Whigs’ economic program, went to war with his party, and the infighting was terrible for Whigs. With a midterm shellacking all but inevitable, the Whigs realized that their best hope lay in at least preserving some safe districts in the urban areas of the states they had swept in 1840. And the best way to accomplish this was a single-member mandate, which they put into the 1842 Apportionment Act, largely along partisan lines.
The midterm results came as expected. Even with the single-member mandate, Whigs still lost the House, decisively. But they might have lost even more seats without it. Whigs were also harmed by the fact that some Democratic-controlled states refused to comply with the mandate.
But in 1846, with Democrats facing their own midterm shellacking, the remaining Democratic states that had been holdouts on at-large districts complied with the mandate hoping to preserve a few Democratic safe seats. Since then, Congress has mostly been elected through single-member districts. This mandate for single-member districts was later re-codified with the passage of the Uniform Congressional Districting Act of 1967.
No longer able to shift back and forth between statewide and single-member district House elections, partisan state legislatures turned their attention to maximizing their advantages within the confines of the single-member districts. In the 1840s and 1850s, partisan state legislatures regularly re-drew district boundaries in an era of tightly contested national elections.
But the most aggressive era of gerrymandering took place after Reconstruction, from 1878 through 1896. This was a period in which Democrats and Republicans were in close competition for national power, partisan loyalties were firm, and voter turnout was high. Under such conditions, gerrymandering became both more effective and more essential to winning elections. More effective, because with voting loyalties largely fixed, it was easier for mapmakers to draw districts to maximize their side’s representation. More essential, because, with so few undecided or swing voters, the only way for parties to win national elections was to maximize the impact of their side’s votes, by shifting boundaries to distribute them efficiently.
In many ways, this late 19th-century era resembles today’s politics—closely fought national elections, intense partisan loyalties, and aggressive constitutional hardball tactics. But there are three important differences between then and now. The first difference is that, back then, the Supreme Court had not yet established the one-person, one-vote standard that required districts to be of equal size. That gave late 19th-century partisan legislatures much more flexibility in their ability to draw districts to maximize their side’s advantage. So what they may have lacked in computer algorithms, they more than made up for with the flexibility of district sizes.
The second difference is that many more states were two-party competitive, which meant that control of state legislatures frequently shifted back and forth between the two parties. And the first thing Democrats or Republicans did when they took over was to redistrict the congressional map to benefit their side. Today, most states are solidly Democratic or Republican.
The third important difference is that the federal government was still very small. States and cities had more autonomy, and therefore more power. National partisan politics was mostly a fight over patronage and tariff schemes. There were virtually no culture war issues or federal programs dividing the parties.
1896–1964: Relative Stability and Deepening Malapportionment
With the Election of 1896, American politics entered into a new era of regional polarization and largely Republican dominance, and a sharp decline in competitive states. Southern Democrats embraced Jim Crow segregation, sealing their party’s dominance across the region. Republicans were dominant in the North, as the establishment wing of the Democratic Party had collapsed after the 1896 populist takeover by William Jennings Bryan.
With the majority of states now solidly Democratic or solidly Republican, district boundaries tended to be more stable. Democrats maximized their advantages in the states they controlled; Republicans maximized their advantages in the states they controlled. Additionally, the House stopped expanding after 1911. In previous decades, the House would expand its membership every decade following the Census (with a few exceptions), which required a certain amount of redistricting in many states. But with the size of the House set, and only small decennial reallocations in House seats (as some states grew faster than others), most states could keep the same district boundaries from election to election.
With districting largely stable, and most states locked in one-party dominance, congressional maps changed very little from decade to decade. Many states went decades without redrawing boundary lines. Solidly Republican Connecticut, for example, drew a map in 1912 that lasted until 1962. Solidly Democratic Louisiana kept its 1912 map until 1966. The realigning election of 1932 caused some states to shift from Republican to Democrat, and the maps were updated accordingly. For the most part, however, districts tended to stay the same, even as populations shifted.
However, population imbalances crept in as citizens migrated into the cities but district boundaries did not change. As a result, by the early 1960s many states districting schemes had grown terribly malapportioned, with densely populated urban districts having the same representation as sparsely populated rural districts. Rural representatives obviously wanted to preserve their disproportionate power, while urban representatives (many of whom represented new and expanding Black populations who were moving to cities) wanted to change it. However, because the districting system gave rural interests clear majorities in many states, the legislative path for reform was closed off.
It took a series of Supreme Court decisions to change that. First, in 1962, the Supreme Court established that federal courts could weigh in on redistricting; then, in 1964 it established the principle of one-person, one-vote, which Congress subsequently codified, and which forced states to redraw their district boundaries to ensure equal population.
1964–1992: The “Reapportionment Revolution” and Partisan Dealignment
Following these Supreme Court decisions, states were forced to redraw their districts. This was called the “Reapportionment Revolution.” The most significant effect was to help Democrats in non-Southern states, since Democrats were dominant in cities, and to create more districts that could be won by a Black candidate.
At the same time, the passage of major civil rights legislation shook up the existing party coalitions, and American politics went through an unusual transition of partisan dealignment, in which many voters found themselves unsure of which party they should belong to, and so were open to considering either.
As a result, an unusually high percentage of states and districts were two-party competitive, and many voters split their tickets. Most of the splitting was between a Democrat for Congress and a Republican for president. This created the popular impression that Democrats had a lock on Congress (especially the House, which they had controlled entirely since 1954, and mostly since 1932), and that Republicans had a lock on the presidency (Jimmy Carter being the only Democrat elected since 1968, and probably only as a backlash to Watergate). It appeared that Americans had rendered a permanent split decision on the two parties and it made sense the two sides should work together. In addition, there was genuine overlap in the two party coalitions, with plenty of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats still going to Congress.
These factors had two consequences for gerrymandering. First, because more voters were willing to consider both parties, the partisan predictability essential for effective partisan gerrymandering simply did not exist. If parties wanted to maximize their vote shares, it was not always clear how to do it. Elections were more candidate-centric and less party-centric.
Second, because this was an era of relative bipartisan bonhomie, incumbents of both parties were generally happy to work together to support maps that were pro-incumbent, ensuring safe seats for incumbents of both parties. Besides, with the House seemingly in permanent Democratic hands, there was less sense that majority control could depend on a particular districting plan. Therefore, gerrymandering in the 1970s and 1980s and even into the 1990s was primarily an incumbent-protection racket, with both parties complicit.
1994–Present: The Gerrymandering Wars Escalate as Partisan Polarization Spirals Out of Control
In 1994, Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The watershed election brought a new influx of conservative representatives to Congress, and made the Republican Party more solidly conservative—and combative. Academic debate brewed over whether the creation of the additional majority-minority districts contributed to Democrats’ losses, since it forced some incumbent retirements and over-concentrated Democratic votes into fewer, safer districts to ensure minority representation.
As the century waned, the two parties became more culturally and geographically sorted, congressional elections were increasingly nationalized, and the share of naturally competitive congressional districts declined steadily. Much of this was not because of gerrymandering, but rather due to Democrats abandoning rural America, and Republicans abandoning urban America.
One way to see this is to observe the steady decline of both competitive districts and split-ticket districts, as shown in the chart below. Split-ticket districts vote for one party for Congress, but a different party for president. Notably, these declines are steady, and do not appear to be exacerbated in years ending in “2” (that is, years after districts are redrawn).
But it is not just districts that have become less competitive. Counties (which are not redrawn every decade) have also become much more lopsidedly partisan. For example, “In 2004, when George W. Bush was the most recent Republican presidential candidate to win with a majority of the popular vote, less than 200 of the nation’s 3,100 or so counties were carried by one party or the other with at least 80% of the 2-party vote. By 2020, the number of such super landslides had risen to nearly 700 counties.” States have also become more lopsidedly partisan. The share of states with split delegations (one Republican senator, one Democratic senator) has fallen from almost 50 percent in 1980 to 12 percent as of 2022.
At the same time, gerrymandering has become much more aggressive in states across the country. The following section will explain the reasons why it has become more aggressive. For now, we can just point out that partisans have pushed the limits of what they can get away with.
The most blatant piece of this story is project REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project), a Republican project that was developed in response to the Democrats’ successes in the 2008 election.
REDMAP’s goal was for Republicans to gain control of the majority state legislatures in time for the next round of redistricting. Recognizing Democrats’ relative weakness in state legislatures, the GOP invested substantially in flipping state legislative chambers from blue to red in the 2010 midterms. The project was successful: the party gained nearly 700 state legislative seats and 22 state trifectas (control over both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office), compared to just 11 for Democrats.
In 2011, Republicans leveraged their new state-level dominance and recent advances in districting technology to enact a very aggressive and sophisticated redistricting plan, which allowed them to win a majority in the 2012 House midterms, despite losing the popular vote for the House and losing the presidential election. This was a qualitative escalation in the gerrymandering wars, widely documented, and widely excoriated—especially by Democrats.
This escalation prompted six states to pass redistricting reforms in the 2010s. Colorado and Michigan enacted the strongest of the bunch, becoming the third and fourth states to establish fully independent commissions. Utah and New York created advisory commissions to propose draft maps, but left ultimate responsibility to lawmakers. Subsequent aggressive partisan gerrymanders in both states have shown the clear limits to that approach. Ohio also passed an advisory commission, and Ohio’s maps have gone through heavy litigation. Virginia voters passed a reform establishing a joint commission of citizens and state legislators to draw a single map for each set of offices, proposed to the state legislature for up or down approval.
This built on efforts in previous years to set up commissions to take districting out of the hands of lawmakers, including Hawaii in 1992, Idaho in 1994, New Jersey in 1995 (congressional maps only), Alaska in 1998, Arizona in 2006, and California in 2008.
Is this a new era of reform? It certainly seems that way. For the first time, states are systematically removing power of line drawing from state legislatures. This marks a new and significant development in the history of districting.
At the same time, even as more states move toward independent commissions, the overall picture is getting bleaker. At the end of the 2021–2022 districting cycle, the proportion of competitive districts had hit a new low. Both Republicans and Democrats tried to push their advantage in states they controlled, but going into the 2022 midterms the maps still have a pro-Republican bias.
Some of this bias is because Republicans control more states where legislatures, not independent commissions, draw maps. Some of this bias is also because single-member districts tend to favor Republicans.
The Lessons of History: Conclusion
The patterns of history can demarcate the possibilities of the present. In the case of districting in America, history has a simple lesson: districting has always been a problem in American politics. Gerrymandering got its name in 1812, but it was present at the country’s creation.
Initially, states experimented with many approaches to districting, including large multimember districts, and some mixed formats. Though single-member districts were always the dominant form, they only became mandated with the Apportionment Act of 1842.
The aggressiveness and volatility of gerrymandering have varied throughout American history. Periods of close partisan competition for national power and high levels of partisan polarization (1878 to 1896; 1992 to present) have generated the most vigorous periods of gerrymandering. Other periods, notably 1896 to 1964, have been relatively stable, but largely because of widespread one-party control throughout most of the country from 1896 to 1932, in which partisans had already maximized their advantages. Additionally, declining partisan polarization from 1932 through 1978 reduced the stakes of elections, making districting less consequential. And steady Democratic dominance in the U.S. House from 1932 to 1992 also made districting less consequential. If Democrats were likely to remain in the majority, why bother? To the extent gerrymandering took place, it was mostly a bipartisan affair, with incumbents drawing lines to protect their reelection chances.
But starting in 1994, the stakes began to change, and so did the game. A new era of gerrymandering battles arose as partisan politics polarized and parties sorted geographically. But this new era also spurred new reforms. For the first time, states began transferring districting authority to commissions. This new reform era forces us to ask the fundamental question at the core of this report: How much fairer can districting be in the United States if it is done through commissions? How many of the problems that we ascribe to gerrymandering are really just problems inherent in the single-member district, especially when Democrats and Republicans live in such different places?
Originally published by New America, 09.19.2022, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.