Texas and California, states once so close that the star on California’s state flag honors the Lone Star on Texas’s flag (this is a true story), are fighting again. This time, the battle is over representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, triggered by the Republican-controlled Texas state government (reportedly at the urging of President Donald Trump) proposing to redraw its Congressional districts in an unusual (but not unprecedented) mid-decade effort. Democratic-controlled California has vowed to respond by redrawing its own Congressional districts in retaliation.
The result is a mess that teaches lessons about gerrymandering and its discontents, as well as the limits of the “independent commission,” the left’s preferred method of controlling it. (This presumes arguendo that left-wing groups like Common Cause actually want to control gerrymandering, rather than simply advantage Democrats.)
The gerrymander that wasn’t (much), and the gerrymander that was
Texas Republicans drew the state’s present Congressional map after the 2020 Census, when it appeared Texas was becoming less Republican and more competitive at the state-wide level. In his unsuccessful 2020 re-election effort, Donald Trump won the Lone Star State by a 5.5 percentage-point margin, the closest since 1996 when Bill Clinton lost Texas by just 4.9 percentage points. Joe Biden’s 46.48 percent was the highest vote share for a Democratic presidential candidate in Texas since Jimmy Carter won the state outright in 1976.
There are two forms of gerrymandering: “Offensive” gerrymandering to maximize total seats a party wins, and “defensive” gerrymandering to protect a party’s incumbent legislators. Facing what appeared to be a newly purple or purple-ish state, Texas Republican mapmakers went “defensive.” As a result, the post-2020 maps yielded only two more Republicans than a statewide proportional representation election would have yielded based on 2024 House vote totals: 25 actual GOP versus 23 simulated.
Meanwhile, California has operated with a so-called “independent redistricting commission” since a 2010 referendum backed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R). The commission was supposed to prevent gerrymandering, but it was poorly designed and easily captured by representatives of the state’s dominant liberal-progressive movement and Democratic Party. ProPublica, hardly a right-wing outlet (it is heavily funded by left-wing donors including Sequioa Capital’s Michael Moritz and Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs), reported extensively on the manipulations California progressives used in the 2010 census cycle to draw a de facto soft gerrymander.
The post-2020 commission didn’t do much better. The conservative elections blog RRHElections noted that the 20th district, formerly represented by ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), was an oddly shaped Republican “vote sink,” evidence of pro-Democratic gerrymandering.
Further evidence of pro-Democratic gerrymandering is how out of line the state’s actual delegation is from a proportional result. Based on the 2024 election results, California returned a full eleven additional Democrats than a proportional outcome, 5.5 times more than Texas’s “partisan gerrymander.” This is consistent with the results in the 2010 census cycle, which CRC analyzed in our “Myth of Nonpartisan Districts” report, which also showed the California “commission” drawing a less proportional map than Texas Republican legislators.
Texas moves
But instead of joining The Emerging Democratic Majority (R.I.P.) the left was anticipating 20 years ago, Latinos decided they weren’t going to keep voting overwhelmingly Democratic in the age of (of all people) President Donald Trump. In his return to the presidency in 2024, President Trump won Texas by more than 13 points with a 56.14 percent vote share. This nearly matched Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance in the state and beat John McCain’s 2008 performance.
Texas Republicans’ defensive map drawn amid fears of “Blexas” in 2021 might not have been necessary. So, Texas Republicans, reportedly at President Trump’s urging, have decided to switch from defense to offense, proposing a new map that would have elected up to five additional Republican Representatives.
Democrats in the state legislature have responded by busting quorum by fleeing the state. This is a delaying tactic commonly used by both parties in one-party states. It rarely succeeds in fully stopping the protested legislation since the majority parties can always apply additional compulsion to either force attendance or waive the quorum rule.
The Republicans’ gambit, a simple partisan redraw of Texas’s maps in mid-decade, is not unprecedented. Their predecessors did so after the 2002 elections gave Republicans their first majorities in the state legislature since Reconstruction. This too led to a Democratic quorum-busting attempt.
The baseline then was much different. Rather than a semi-proportional defensive map, Texas courts in 2001 had drawn a wildly aggressive gerrymander that returned a majority of Democratic representatives despite Republicans winning 53 percent of the statewide House vote.
Texas Democrats, who held the statewide trifecta after the 1990 Census, had drawn an even more aggressive gerrymander that returned nearly two-thirds Democratic Representatives in 1994, despite Republicans winning more than 55 percent of the statewide House vote. If Republicans succeed in their new round of gerrymandering, then they can tell their counterparts across the aisle “I learned it by watching you!”
California (maybe) counters
California Democrats, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), have responded by threatening to pass their own, even-more-aggressive gerrymander. It is possible, if one bacon-strips the cities aggressively enough, to draw a California Democratic gerrymander that eliminates all Republican representatives.
But this will be more difficult than Texas Republicans’ strategy shift. Existing state legal precedent may prohibit mid-decade redistricting in California, and any effort that could be enacted would need to be ratified by a plebiscite. Early polling suggests that California voters are not eager to return redistricting power to the legislature, with a Politico-sponsored poll showing roughly two-thirds of voters would keep the independent commission.
Lessons, and a path to armistice
The lessons of the California-Texas war (and related hostilities that may reach Florida, New York and beyond) are several:
First, gerrymandering is inherent to American legislative practice. The “Gerry” after whom the practice is named was involved in redistricting after the third (1810) Census. And Elbridge Gerry didn’t invent the practice; future Presidents James Madison and James Monroe found themselves running against each other for the First Congress on a map drawn by allies of (then-) anti-Federalist Patrick Henry.
The second lesson is that unbounded line-drawers, whether legislators or “citizens commissioners,” can and will engage in gerrymandering to the extent they feel it profits their political teams.
The third lesson is that voters will tolerate “ordinary” gerrymandering, but dislike ultra-extreme gerrymandering, and are looking for approaches to limit it.
The best that can be said for “independent redistricting commissions” like California’s is that they place some absolute limits on gerrymandering. The commission, because it has (nominal) Republicans on it, isn’t likely to adopt the 52-0 map that a bloodthirsty Democratic legislature could draw up. But the commission does not actually prevent gerrymandering (as evidenced by California’s nakedly non-proportional map), especially when the redistricting criteria are drawn up by progressives to enable progressive special interest groups to manipulate the ultimate outcome.
What does prevent gerrymandering, or at least extract a potentially total cost for it? Hardline rules based on pre-existing geography. Iowa (which does not at present have a proportional map, about which more momentarily) has an extensive list of such rules. The most important is probably this one: “To the extent consistent with subsection 1 [that districts be equal in population], district boundaries shall coincide with the boundaries of political subdivisions of the state. The number of counties and cities divided among more than one district shall be as small as possible.” This prohibits bacon-stripping or circling around urban core areas, two gerrymandering hallmarks.
But Iowa’s rules are balanced with legislators’ powers. While civil servants draw the actual maps, state legislators must vote to adopt them. This allows the natural consideration of political concerns over proportionality, partisan opportunity, and majority government that inhere to a single-member district system.
Following the 2020 Census, the Iowa state government under Republican control adopted a rules-compliant map that in a neutral year (like 2024) could end up unanimously Republican by four seats to zero. But—and this is what separates the Iowa system from classical gerrymandering—in a worse-for-Republicans year as many as three of those Republicans could lose their seats.
The offensive strategy’s ability to attack without fear of loss (see Texas Democrats’ strategy in the 1990s) is constrained by the Iowa Rules. And because state legislators’ districts must also follow the Iowa Rules, the ability of state legislators to protect themselves from blowback from voters is also limited.
Congress has, in the past, established standards for Congressional districts. The Congressional Research Service (Congress’s in-house, non-partisan-for-real think tank) writes, “For example, in the 1800s and early 1900s, some federal apportionment statutes included other standards for congressional districts, such as population equality or geographic compactness.” Those looking to find the basis for a national armistice on redistricting would do better to look to Iowa’s rules than California’s commission.
