Gerrymandering: How the rules of politics shape who wins

Political outcomes depend not only on public support, but on how the game is set up. The Supreme Court just handed Republicans a way to change the map, six months before the midterms.

On April 29, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's congressional map in the Louisiana v. Callais case.

The map known as SB8 had been drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature in January 2024, but not by choice, a federal court had ruled the previous map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by failing to include a second majority-Black district, the Fifth Circuit gave the legislature until the end of that month to produce one, or a judge would draw it herself. Louisiana complied.

The resulting map included two majority-Black districts. Then a group of conservative voters sued to block it, the district court struck it down as a racial gerrymander, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court.

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Alito, the conservative majority held that using race as a criterion even in response to a court order, even to benefit minority voters, was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.

The governor of Louisiana responded by issuing an executive order suspending the state's House primaries, scheduled for May 16, before a new map could be drawn and this while early voting had already begun and absentee ballots had already been mailed.

Yet the ruling's consequences did not stop at the Louisiana state line, as Florida's Republican controlled legislature passed new maps within hours of the decision, maps that could flip up

to four Democratic seats.

Alabama's governor called a special session. Tennessee's followed. Mississippi announced one too. In a single week, the legal basis for majority-minority districts across the South was dismantled, and Republican legislatures moved to redraw them before November.

So the GOP did not broaden its coalition or change its platform. It changed the map. Faced with an electoral contest it seemed likely to lose on the merits, it moved to alter the conditions under which that contest would take place.

That is a choice and it says something about the state of the "American democracy".

The rules are never neutral

Every society runs on rules. Politics is no different and elections as the mechanism by which political power is allocated are no exception, but those rules are not universal.

An electoral system is always a product of its context: the nature of the regime, its stated objectives, the society it governs. China's system bears no resemblance to France's. France's bears no resemblance to Syria's. Syria's bears no resemblance to Venezuela's.

Take France. Its current two-round majority system traces back to the institutional failures of the Fourth Republic, whose fragmented parliamentary model proved ungovernable.

Venezuela is a different story, in 1998, Hugo Chávez won the presidency on the back of social-economical tensions and popular disillusionment, called a referendum, convened a constituent assembly, and used it to write a constitution that would favor his political family for decades.

In China, the architecture of the state was built after the Communist Party's victory in the civil war, designed from the outset to entrench its hold on power.

What all these cases share is simple: the rules that govern elections are never handed down from nowhere.

They emerge from conflict, compromise, or conquest, written by whoever had the power to write them at the time.

Some systems produce stable two-party competition. Others generate fragmented multi-party parliaments. Others produce single-party or dominant-party states, and in several Gulf countries, non-partisan assemblies where parties are absent, though shared pro-monarchy interests structure the whole.

Strongholds are not permanent

But those rules are not absolute. And those who write them tend to overestimate how much they can control.

Hungary is the most recent proof as in 2011 Fidesz passed an electoral reform designed to produce systematic absolute or even qualified majorities based on a simple principle of keeping the opposition divided while holding strongholds to win every time and for over a decade it worked.

Then Péter Magyar's Tisza party arrived. Born from a scission within Fidesz liberal branch, it did what the opposition had failed to do for years.

It united the anti-Orbán electorate without doing nor demanding ideological concessions from anyone. Worse for Orbán, it broke into his own territory, winning districts in places like Tolna County that Fidesz had held since 2014, by margins exceeding 30 points, now flipped.

In the April 12, 2026 parliamentary election, Tisza took 53.6% of the vote and 138 of the 199 parliamentary seats, Fidesz only won 55.

The electoral system Orbán had engineered to produce perpetual supermajorities produced one for the other side instead.

This assumption that strongholds are permanent is a mistake that travels. In the United States, Texas is described as a Republican fortress so often that the description has stopped being questioned.

Yet in 2020, 46% of Texans voted Democratic. And in the 2026 Senate race, multiple polls taken in April show Democratic candidate James Talarico leading both Republican opponents (though all results remain within or near the margin of error and forecasters still rate the seat as likely Republican).

This is not a prediction, Texas will probably not turn in 2026 or in 2028. The point is simply that the forces at play in any territory are rarely as fixed or a powerfull as a map makes them appear.

That gap between perceived and actual solidity is what makes overextension dangerous. The mechanism behind this danger has a name, the dummymandering. When a party overextends in redistricting packing its own voters into too many seats, winning them all by thinner margin, it exposes itself to a wave it didn't plan for.

The map can look solid and yet the position is not. Every seat won by eight points instead of twenty is a seat that flips in a bad year.

Not every reform is bad faith

None of this means that every reform is driven by bad faith. Electoral systems do occasionally need fixing. Even when the proposed solution is debatable, the underlying need can be genuine.

If gerrymandering were outlawed tomorrow in the United States, what happens to a district that loses a third of its population over a decade or gains one? Boundaries have to be redrawn at some point.

The question is not whether, but how. Tradition is not an argument on it’s own but neither is change.

What matters is having clear criteria and independent bodies to carry out those changes or failing that, processes built on genuine compromise not just with the majority but with the minority too since electoral rules affect entire societies.

A majority that rewrites the rules for its own benefit is exercising a form of power that has a name: the tyranny of the majority, which is in the end still tyranny.

Nevertheless those who rig the system do not necessarily pay for it soon. Some have locked their political systems so thoroughly that change through those same systems has become nearly impossible.

On the other hand, a system frozen in place and preserved not because it works but because it benefits those in power or because they fear change does not remain stable forever but instead accumulates dysfunction until it ultimately breaks.