OPINION:
Before we consider the bonfire into which Democrats in the commonwealth of Virginia are throwing the republican values of American governance, it might be worth reminding everyone how we got here.
In August, Team Trump, for reasons known only to itself, decided that reopening the redistricting of House districts in Texas would be a good idea, ostensibly because it would provide an extra five Republican votes in the now always-close House of Representatives.
Leave aside the wisdom of weakening the support for some of the more reliable members of the House Republican caucus, as well as the questionable theory that Hispanics in Texas, especially in the Rio Grande Valley, have been voting against Democrats rather than for Republicans.
Ignore whether it is a good idea to ask members of Congress to run in new districts in the middle of a cycle.
Focus instead on two very real problems associated with this sort of midcycle redistricting. First, it was predictable that once this genie was out of the bottle, everyone who could harvest extra seats through gerrymandering would try to do so. That is exactly what has happened.
As usual, the Democrats are better at manipulating rules and will, depending on what happens in Florida, emerge from the process with more safe House seats than Republicans.
The second problem is that these exercises further normalize gerrymandering, which has been around since our founding and is now what it has always been: a mortal threat to representative government.
When elected officials get to pick their voters, they have a solid preference for those already inclined to vote for them. The value and purpose of elections is minimized, and the value of incumbency is maximized.
Gerrymandering inevitably results in a system in which adherence to partisan norms, rather than representing voters, becomes the elected official’s primary focus and goal.
At the moment, 13 House Democrats represent districts that President Trump won in 2024. Three House Republicans represent districts that were carried by challenger Kamala Harris. As recently as 2000, voters in 86 districts elected one party for president and another for their members of Congress.
Split tickets and split districts make politics more challenging, but they make governing easier and better, as the representatives in such districts need to find ways to appeal to broader constituencies.
In short, gerrymandering minimizes the possibility of good governance.
More important, gerrymandering leads to anti-democratic results. Consider California.
The California House delegation consists of 43 Democrats and nine Republicans. In the wake of Proposition 50, the number of Republicans in the congressional delegation will likely drop to just four. In the most recent House elections in California, about 60% of voters supported Democratic candidates and about 40% chose Republican candidates.
If you split the delegation along the actual vote, it would have about 38 Democrats and 21 Republicans.
In Illinois, the House delegation consists of 14 Democrats and three Republicans, even though about 47% of Illinois voters supported Republican House candidates in 2024. That delegation should be nine Democrats and eight Republicans.
It is not just the Democrats. Missouri’s House delegation is 75% Republican. In 2024, 58% of Missouri voters voted for Republicans.
After the November elections, Texas Republicans will hold about 80% of the state’s House seats, despite winning only 58% of the vote in the most recent elections.
The good news is that most of this pathology cancels itself out on a national basis. In 2024, a shade less than 50% of the voters (49.7%) nationally supported Republican House candidates, compared with about 47% of voters who chose Democratic House candidates.
A narrowly divided electorate gave us a narrowly divided House. That is how it should be, and that is how it is likely to be in the wake of the midterm elections.
Rather than allowing politicians to pick their voters, states should be required to draw geographically coherent districts that result in delegations that reflect the partisan vote total in the state.
Or we can keep having elections whose contours are decided by cartographers, judges and party hacks.
Finally, and most ominously, if one set of citizens can and does take the franchise from their fellow citizens for any reason or for no reason, then what does the republic stand for, and what does it stand upon? What sorts of people would allow themselves to be disenfranchised without eventually taking up arms?
The road we are on leads to only one outcome: violence, as voters on both sides in wide swaths of the nation are effectively disenfranchised. If votes don’t matter, then citizens become decoupled from the process and radicalized. Legitimate government becomes impossible, and violence — political speech by other means — becomes inevitable.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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