Gerrymandering is, at its core, a mathematical process. It’s a numbers game designed to consolidate power in the hands of one party, regardless of what the voters may want. The image below is one of the best examples of how it works.
By redrawing the lines in just the right places, we can effectively sidestep the will of the voters and make it appear as if they support things they clearly do not. But there are risks, and I believe Trump and the weak-kneed GOP are about to run headlong into them.
To demonstrate, I’d like to engage in a hypothetical scenario that demonstrates the risks of gerrymandering and how it might backfire in November. Here goes:
Let’s say we have two districts, both of which have historically voted for Republicans. One is predicted to be an R+5, and the other is an R+15. Now let’s say that we are facing a wave election in which Democrats are experiencing a temporary bump of eight or nine points. According to that math, one of these districts would stay red, but the other would be lost. Last year, Trump told his captured party to redraw the districts to account for his unpopularity, so let’s say our hypothetical state legislature cracks these districts and mingles their voters until they get a number closer to R+10 in both districts. While my scenario is fictional, it’s methodology is the same as what the GOP used to redraw the maps. They diluted heavily Republican districts in order to shore up districts they think they might lose.
The problem the GOP is about to experience is simple. When they redrew the maps, they didn’t account for the disastrous policies and the plummeting poll numbers that kept dropping long after the gerrymander. The districts listed in my hypothetical may have stood up to the political math of the moment in which they were implemented, but what happens when the democratic advantage reaches double digits? By diluting one “safe” district in order to boost their numbers in another, the GOP may just lose them both. Simply put, last year’s republican gerrymandering could not predict today’s math, and that math is about to dismantle Republican power. And if it happens, it will be entirely Trump’s fault.
And let’s not forget – when Trump demanded the new maps and said very clearly that he wanted them in order to subvert the will of the voters, he opened the door for Democrats to do the same, which they immediately did. Democratic gains quickly matched the advantage Trump gained by cheating the system, and that was true before Trump’s numbers fell off a cliff. And now that Trump is the most unpopular president in American history, he’s about to learn the cost of his own electoral greed. Like Oedipus himself, Trump is going to meet his destiny on the very road he took trying to avoid it. And for those of us fighting the good fight, the irony of it all is just delicious.
Now, while I believe this irony will play out in November, and based on the current numbers, it certainly will, Trump is in no way done messing with our electoral processes. And the more the math lines up against him, the more desperate he is becoming, and the more likely he will be to engage in more oppressive forms of election tampering. These last weeks will be overflowing with AI slop, voter suppression on steroids, and any other forms of intervention he can think of, because losing means accountability, and Trump doesn’t do accountability.
There’s no telling just how far he’ll go, but the math tells us Trump is going to lose, and his gerrymander is going to backfire spectacularly. And if I know this, Trump knows this, which means the worst of his election interference is still to come. The math is the math, and the math is telling us to expect the worst. We need to vote, and then we need to saddle up for the real fight, which will happen after.
I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to it.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.