Gerrymandering was once only the concern of map drawers and politics nerds. Most people didn’t know who their congressional representatives were, let alone the contours of their districts. But gerrymandering is having a moment. People don’t like it, and they want it fixed. It’s easy to understand why. As we’ve mentioned before, gerrymandering takes the […]
In America, critics say, voters don’t pick their politicians: Politicians pick their voters. It’s a cynical way of describing the American process of drawing political boundaries. In most states, politicians carve up districts and can sort voters in ways that benefit themselves electorally. As awareness about gerrymandering has grown, reformers have increasingly called for that […]
The disappearance of competitive congressional elections is one of the starkest political trends of the last half century. According to an analysis by the Cook Political Report, during the last 20 years alone, the number of competitive House districts has declined by more than 50 percent. In the 2016 election, just 17 percent of districts […]
At first glance, few things scream “gerrymander” like splitting the country’s largest historically black university in two. That’s what happened at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in 2016; a school that was once in the state’s 12th Congressional District is now in the 6th and 13th. The school is in Greensboro, where 40 percent […]
Editor’s note: Earlier iterations of this post and podcast were first published on Sept. 28, before Wisconsin’s gerrymandering case was heard by the Supreme Court. Now that it has been heard by the court, we’ve updated both the post and podcast. Is partisan gerrymandering constitutional? And if not, how is it to be measured? Those […]