For all the modern talk of violating democratic “norms” during the Trump era, however, strategic redistricting has always been a powerful weapon in American politics. Efforts by politicians to tilt the electoral playing field through redistricting and other manipulations are almost as old as American democracy itself, and indeed, by the late 19th century, both parties had turned redistricting into a blood sport.
Republicans and Democrats alike used every procedural lever available — from mid-decade map rewrites to the strategic admission of new states like the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming — to lock in House, Senate and Electoral College advantages that would outlast their popular vote share.
What’s unfolding in California is less a break from tradition than a reversion to it — and a reminder that the map wars of the Gilded Age, not the reformist ideals of the late 20th century, might be the true American inheritance.
The history of gerrymandering is nearly as old as the republic itself. The term was coined in 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry approved a state senate map so contorted that one dist
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