Month: March 2026

Abstract of Argument

Recently, congressional redistricting has shifted from a decennial responsibility to a tool of mid-cycle partisan politics. Repeated redrawing undermines institutional productivity, creates electoral uncertainty, generates wasteful litigation, and fuels a self-perpetuating cycle of escalation. These consequences must be acknowledged and addressed.

This editorial critiques discretionary mid-cycle redistricting. It does not make normative claims about proportional representation, partisan fairness, or preferred substantive outcomes.

1. The Modern Landscape of Redistricting

Traditionally, state legislatures revise electoral districts following each decennial census to reflect updated population data. However, many states have recently pursued or considered redrawing congressional maps outside the normal post-census cycle. This unusually high level of mid-decade redistricting activity has not taken place since the 19th century.

Mid-decade, or “mid-cycle,” redistricting refers to a state legislature’s discretionary adoption of a new congressional district plan between decennial redistricting cycles. Court-ordered remedial maps designed to address constitutional or statutory violations are categorically different and should be excluded from this analysis.

Since the 2020 census, six states have implemented new congressional maps, and several others are considering mid-decade changes.¹ Recent developments in Texas, California, and Indiana illustrate how mid-cycle redistricting has emerged as a partisan strategy. In Texas, Republican lawmakers enacted a mid-decade congressional map aimed at strengthening the party’s position in the U.S. House. California’s political leadership responded with a similar effort in an effort to counter those gains.² Here in Indiana, lawmakers explored a similar mid-decade redraw, although it ultimately failed.³

These actions are emblematic of broader trends rather than isolated decisions. When one party redraws districts mid-cycle to secure a political advantage, the opposing party feels pressured to retaliate.The result is a cycle of strategic redistricting that departs from the traditional census-based process and increasingly resembles an interstate partisan arms race.⁴

2. Why Mid-Cycle Redistricting Occurs

The United States Constitution assigns primary responsibility for regulating congressional elections to individual states. In practice, state legislatures control congressional district lines, subjecting mapmaking authority to state-level partisan political strategy.⁵

First, in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the scope of federal courts because no judicially manageable standards exist to resolve them.⁶ While the Court maintained jurisdiction over claims grounded in federal law, including the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act, Rucho substantially narrowed federal judicial review of redistricting undertaken for purely partisan advantage.⁷ The result is a legal environment in which mid-decade redistricting is largely insulated from federal challenges. 

This protection is further supported by the Court’s decision in LULAC v. Perry (2006). While the Court invalidated one district under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it did not hold Texas’ 2003 mid-decade redistricting inherently unconstitutional.⁸ Importantly, while some may argue that mid-decade redistricting is not a contemporary problem because it occurred in 2006, the current concern is normalization rather than novelty.⁹

Some assert that Moore v. Harper (2023) meaningfully constrains strategic mid-decade redistricting because state courts may enforce state constitutional limits. However, because state standards vary and Moore does not provide a federal rule against partisan gerrymandering, state-court review does not eliminate the underlying incentive to redraw districts under partisan control.¹⁰

Finally, strategic redistricting is more common due to its predictable effects. Modern analytical tools can project likely outcomes with significant precision. As efforts like the Princeton Gerrymandering Project illustrate, parties can often assess whether a mid-decade redraw will yield a net electoral advantage.¹¹ Consequently, mid-cycle redistricting has become an increasingly calculated and incentivized competitive strategy.

3. Why Mid-Cycle Redistricting is Harmful

Mid-cycle redistricting demands considerable time for committee hearings, map drafting, intra-party negotiations, and compliance analysis. It also predictably leads to litigation, which siphons additional state funding. This process transforms an already resource-intensive decennial task into a recurring strain on institutional capacity. The opportunity cost is substantial: effort spent redrawing maps is time not devoted to meaningful governance.¹² Mid-cycle remapping also disrupts electoral accountability and administration by reshuffling constituencies between cycles and forcing rapid institutional changes amid legal uncertainty.¹³

Additionally, mid-cycle redistricting presents a classic strategic dilemma. If one party redraws districts to gain seats, the opposing party either faces a structural disadvantage or responds in kind. Due to the asymmetric cost of unilateral restraint, mutual restraint becomes unstable, resulting in a prisoner’s dilemma where both parties’ dominant strategy becomes redistricting. Even if both sides would prefer a stable equilibrium, they are incentivized to redraw mid-cycle, perpetuating frequent strategic interventions in the electoral map.¹⁴

4. Addressing Counterarguments

A common defense of mid-cycle redistricting is based on the principle of majority rule. Since legislatures are elected, they possess a democratic mandate accountable to voters.¹⁵ From this perspective, redistricting is merely an exercise of power by a duly elected majority. However, aggressive partisan redistricting can undermine the very mechanism that legitimizes that majority.¹⁶ If a mid-cycle redraw reduces electoral competition, it weakens the corrective function of elections and diminishes the accountability that the republican system aims to uphold.

The stronger counterargument is that some mid-cycle redistricting is legally compelled rather than driven by partisan motivations. Compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provides clear examples.¹⁷ Under Thornburg v. Gingles(1986), courts may require map changes when a districting plan unlawfully dilutes minority voters’ opportunities to elect their preferred candidates, and Allen v. Milligan (2023) reaffirmed that Section 2 vote-dilution framework in the context of redistricting.^18,19 Importantly, however, Section 2 merely authorizes remedies to address identified legal violations; it is not an open invitation to redraw lines whenever it is politically convenient.²⁰

This distinction leads to a crucial procedural point. Court-ordered remedial redistricting is often necessary, while discretionary mid-cycle redistricting is not. The key nuance is that compliance and strategic advantage can be pursued concurrently.²¹ A legislature can invoke the need to avoid legal exposure as justification for discretionary redistricting that maximizes partisan gain. Without constraints, “compliance” can become a permissive label for strategically timed consolidations of power.²²

5. Reform

The primary reform concerning mid-cycle redistricting is clear: prohibit it unless required to remedy a constitutional or statutory violation.²³ To prevent evasion, these court-ordered remedies should typically be final, enforceable decisions rather than preliminary injunctions.²⁴ This rule would reduce incentives for strategic redrawing while allowing ordinary decennial redistricting to proceed. However, since electoral procedures are under the control of individual state legislatures, implementing such reforms would be procedurally difficult but ultimately administrable.²⁵ This approach does not guarantee nonpartisan maps, nor does it eliminate politics from redistricting. It simply reduces the incentive for frequent, discretionary, and strategic redistricting in order to preserve institutional stability and enable governments to actually govern.²⁶

1. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎
2. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
3. PBS NewsHour, “Indiana Republicans Block New Congressional Map in Rare Break with Trump,” PBS NewsHour, December 11, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/indiana-republicans-block-new-congressional-map-in-rare-break-with-trump. ↩︎
4. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
5. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
6. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
7. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019). ↩︎
8. League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399 (2006). ↩︎
9. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎
10. Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). ↩︎
11. Princeton Gerrymandering Project, “Redistricting Report Card Methodology,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card-methodology. ↩︎
12. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎
13. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
14. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
15. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
16. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019). ↩︎
17. Voting Rights Act of 1965, § 2, 52 U.S.C. § 10301. ↩︎
18. Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986). ↩︎
19. Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. ___ (2023). ↩︎
20. Voting Rights Act of 1965, § 2, 52 U.S.C. § 10301. ↩︎
21. League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399 (2006). ↩︎
22. Reuters, “How the War over U.S. Congressional Redistricting Is Playing Out State by State,” Reuters, February 20, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-war-over-us-congressional-redistricting-is-playing-out-state-by-state-2026-02-20/. ↩︎
23. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
24. Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). ↩︎
25. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. ↩︎
26. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Changing the Maps: Tracking Mid-Decade Redistricting,” accessed February 22, 2026, https://www.ncsl.org/redistricting-and-census/changing-the-maps-tracking-mid-decade-redistricting. ↩︎

“Before the war, it was said ‘the United States are’—grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always ‘the United States is,’ as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is.’”

The above quote, delivered by Shelby Foote as part of Ken Burns’ The Civil War miniseries, leapt from the stereo systems of homes across 1990’s America and perched itself on the bookshelf full of this nation’s canon. What Foote was getting at, outside of listing copulatives, was that the Civil War was a definitive point in time where Americans began conceiving of themselves as countrymen. No longer were men Ohioans who happened to be citizens of the United States. They were citizens of The United States who happened to live in Ohio. 

This change in the state-nation relationship was not limited to the American psyche. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, state defiance to the dictates of the federal government was overt and occasionally even violent.¹ The Civil War ushered in an era where Washington’s supremacy was settled, and, despite the failure of reconstruction and the post-1877 political and legal resistance to federal orders, politically armed organized opposition became illegitimate. 

The post-war diminution of state authority and autonomy was perpetuated and strengthened throughout the 20th century. From the 17th Amendment and the first world war, through the New Deal and World War II, and on to the Cold War nationalization of security and the Civil Rights era, the US federal government firmly established its preponderance over state politics, solidifying Americans’ conceptions of their participation in a national community, not just a state one.  

Over the past twelve months, this understanding of a continent-wide society has begun to unravel. President Trump’s return to the White House was interpreted by top Republican figures such as Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, and JD Vance as a sweeping mandate to aggressively install a new conservative agenda, one that would be fully detached from the neoconservative holdovers who hampered Trump’s governance during his first term.^2,3 The breadth and intensity of this new agenda has even surprised veteran party loyalists.⁴ The initiation of trade wars against friends and foes alike, the use of military force against Iran and Venezuela, the bellicose deployment of ICE to major US cities, and the attempts to coerce Jerome Powell into submission have signaled to Americans that the Trump Administration seeks to fundamentally alter the relationship between the State, its citizens, and the international community.⁵

The Democratic establishment appeared to be wholly unprepared to counter this Republican policy rollout. Having placed their political capital behind a candidate with deteriorating mental faculties,⁶ switched him out for his Vice President 107 days before the election, and then lost the House, Senate, and the White House, the DNC had neither the momentum, cohesion, or support necessary to deploy an effective opposition to Trump II’s early governance decisions. 

In the wake of this political turmoil, the Democratic political apparatus has shifted its messaging strategy. Leaders and operatives within the DNC have realized that focusing on the policy failures, shortcomings, and missteps of President Trump and the MAGA generation of conservatives simply does not move the needle on American public opinion.⁷ Impeachments, felony convictions, attempts to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, and worrisome conflicts of interest were not enough to sideline President Trump’s third attempt at the White House. In fact, between 2016 and 2024, President Trump gained 14 million more voters. Democrats have come to understand that pointing to the faults in President Trump’s behavior, record, and ideology is not enough to win elections. They have come to terms with the fact that expending resources and bandwidth debating principles and norms does not resonate with voters overwhelmed with feelings of frustration and ostracization. 

As a result, the Democratic political elite and media apparatus have turned away from promoting their ideology via criticizing Republican ideology. Instead, they have shifted their attention towards highlighting the physical, real-world disparities in outcomes between areas governed by Democrats and areas governed by Republicans. This was an impressive move by an establishment long marred by stubborn, antiquated leadership hesitant to change their approach to President Trump.⁸  With few opportunities to display good governance in a Republican-controlled Congress and Presidency, Democrats have simply pivoted to areas they do control: Cities, states, and regions.

This new strategy has long been floating at the periphery of Democratic messaging. Gavin Newsom, for example, has always appreciated the benefit of framing California as a semi-autonomous outcrop on the leading edge of American progressivism.⁹ However, over the past year, instances of Democrats using examples of high-performing political subdivisions as a way to demonstrate the superiority of Democratic governance over Republicanism has surged. One of the first areas where this campaign was rolled out was in discussions regarding which states contribute most to federal revenues.¹⁰

Unsurprisingly, Governor Newsom had some of the most high-profile commentary regarding this topic. The investment in this narrative from the left has been extensive. Saturating the media space with content highlighting the vast disparity between tax revenues from Democratic and Republican states achieves a variety of goals, the first of which being a discreditation of President Trump’s electoral base. 

To the median, uninterested voter, learning that the core electorate propelling Trump to a second presidency resides in states consuming more federal resources than they contribute taints the supposed mandate received by the Republican party. The endgame of such efforts is to encourage dining room conversations such as this: “So you’re telling me the people who contribute less than everybody else get to dictate the future of this country, but those actually paying into the system have no say?” Various buzzwords have been thrown into the discussion as well, most notably the conceptions of “donor states” and “welfare states”, terms meant to further drive home that idea that it is Democrat-led states that are the most productive and prosperous within the Union.

Related to this last point, a second goal of this media strategy is to get voters to associate Democratic governance with economic success. For decades, Republicans have prided themselves on being the party of prosperity. Supporting tax cuts, limited social safety nets, and deregulation, Republicans have marketed themselves to American voters as the party that puts cash back into your pockets.¹¹ By tying the political leadership of states to their “donor state” or “welfare state” status, DNC organizers are banking on voters seeing the Democratic platform as the key to unlocking economic growth and expansion.

Another area pounced on by this state-focused messaging strategy has been education. Much like with federal tax contributions, Democratic organizers have formed a unified approach to create a narrative that forges a causal link between educational outcomes and political governance.

The message here is simple: when Democrats govern, your children receive better educations. This phase of the new DNC media strategy is more confrontational than the federal tax contributions angle. Where the former campaign claims that blue state economic success is a result of Democratic policies creating more favorable economic conditions that Republican ones, the latter campaign directly accuses Republican-led states of legislative malpractice. 

Again, much like the messaging on “donor states” and “welfare states”, there is a clear attempt here to further discredit President Trump’s legitimacy as an executive. The above tweet, along with many similar ones, latch state electoral results to state educational attainment. The anticipated effect of media content like this is to encourage voters to interpret Trump’s presidency as a triumph of the uninformed red states over the educated blue states.

One of the most clever ways Democrat-affiliated media has utilized state-level politics to market the efficacy of Democratic policy has been in the comparison of crime statistics between blue and red states. Starting during the 1960s, and certainly solidifying after the Willie Horton Case,¹² the Democratic Party has dealt with the perception of being soft on crime. Republicans have taken full advantage of this in recent years. Countless campaign ads, tweets, Facebook posts, and TV segments have hammered home the idea that while Democrats let their states and cities devolve into warzones, Republican-led states fight tooth and nail to preserve law and order.

The DNC mediasphere has made significant strides in countering this narrative recently. Using the same strategies Republicans have implemented for years, Democrat-affiliated media have begun disseminating statistics and messaging showing Americans that Republicans are the real hypocrites. That, while grandstanding about law, order, and rule of law, they have sat idly by while their constituents suffer from crime at rates higher than their counterparts governed by Democratic state legislatures. 

As with the strategy behind the messaging on education and federal tax contributions, the goal here is to manufacture causation. With President Trump in the White House criticizing blue states like Minnesota and California about their failure to enforce the law day after day, DNC organizers have tried to flip the narrative regarding leftist governance and crime enforcement. They have sought to reframe the discussion regarding the Democrat Party and crime to drill into voters that in the absence of Democratic pragmatism, Republican incompetence leads crime flourishing.

These discussions around conservatism and crime are a significant divergence from liberal strategies around education and “donor vs welfare state” debates. While even card-carrying Republicans would admit that economic productivity in California outpaces that of Mississippi and that a rural Alabama elementary school may have lower testing scores than a peer in Massachusetts, it is a much tougher proposition to convince voters that Democratic rule leads to lower crime. The aggressive attempts to flip this debate on its head is a sign that the Democrat Party is no longer satisfied with winning the middle ground – they want to beat Republicans on their home court.

The Democratic media apparatus has emerged guns a-blazing during the first year of this second Trump administration. Having started the year reeling from a disastrous presidential election and facing polls showing a disturbing trend among young voters,¹³ the DNC has turned to state-level politics to demonstrate to voters the virtues of their ideology. As midterms approach, legislatures and governor’s mansions have emerged as a battleground in the competition for Congress. States are now framed as if they in a vacuum, with their various goods and evils serving to encapsulate the projected result of either party’s federal governance. 

Make no mistake though, Democrats are not the only ones who have dumped immense amounts of attention into state governments. Republicans have fully mobilized their mediasphere to counter these messaging campaigns from the Left. Just as liberal media sources have manipulated statistics and data to serve their interests, conservative voices have done their own gymnastics to raise their ideology on a pedestal.

Whether it be crime, taxation, education, or whatever else, GOP-affiliated media has gained a foothold in these debates raging around state politics. If a Democrat says blue states do better in education than red states, there are plentiful, equally convincing retorts from Republicans to discredit such claims.

In the end, this competition to link an individual state’s performance in a random category to whatever party has control leads to a media environment filled with low quality information. For every virtue, there is a vice. For every pro, there is a con. For every fact, there is a fact-check. 

The Return

The point of this extensive delve into the world of Twitter messaging and influencing campaigns is that they are significantly altering how we view ourselves, our neighbors, and our nation. When Democrats and Republicans spew infographics about how blue states or red states edge out each other in certain categories, they aren’t just gaining political brownie points, they are promoting a perception of a fragmented Union. This media environment, paired with the efforts of states like California,¹⁴ Minnesota,¹⁵ Texas,¹⁶ and Florida¹⁷ to assert their autonomy, erode the conception of a cohesive American identity and suggest that there exists two separate, fundamentally opposed political systems under the mask of the federal umbrella. 

These messaging campaigns are in no way executed in good faith either. Liberal and conservative agitants don’t concern themselves with the fact that state governments are dynamic, not static. A significant portion of the laws that govern affairs in red states like Ohio and West Virginia were codified by Democratic general assemblies of the past. California, a state that has had a Republican governor as recently as 2011,¹⁸ had six million of its residents vote for Donald Trump in 2024. Do those individuals not contribute to the behemoth that is California’s economy? Can the left-leaning tech gurus of Austin not share credit with Governor Abbott for Texas’ economic prosperity?

No matter how hard you try, you cannot rip causation from the mouth of correlation. You cannot attribute gun violence in a particular state to the fact that Republicans happen to have a majority in the legislature. You cannot establish a causal link between Democratic mayors and rampant violent crime rates within cities. The architects of these media campaigns know this, they just don’t care. They know their sensationalism won’t alter the opinions of the informed voter. They are targeting the disinterested, low-information, median voter to try to morph their perceptions of politics. 

Despite aiming at only a specific portion of the voter population, these media strategies affect the entire American political arena. States have turned into conflict zones in demonstrating which political ideology is superior. They are increasingly viewed not as political subdivisions within a greater system, but as sovereign areas whose environments are a direct result of which party is heading the state.

Fracture, fissure, and divide can only spell bad things for unions. A uniform, consistent identity is essential for maintaining the unity of a political unit encompassing 350 million people settled across an entire continent. The newly-found hyperfixation on state politics encourages behavior and thinking that can unwind the very same fabric Shelby Foote commented on 40 years ago. We are more than a collection of 50 states. We are an interconnected people, all sharing an identity linking us with our past, present, and future. 

1. Goldstein, Leslie. (1997). State Resistance to Authority in Federal Unions: The Early United States (1790–1860) and the European Community (1958–94). Studies in American Political Development. 11. 149 – 189. 10.1017/S0898588X00001620. ↩︎
2. https://observer.co.uk/news/international/article/in-a-single-eccentric-autocratic-year-trump-has-already-remade-the-world. ↩︎
3. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-criticizes-mccain-health-care-bill. ↩︎
4. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/oct/19/marjorie-taylor-greene-breaks-republican-ranks. ↩︎
5. https://time.com/collections/davos-2026/7345543/trump-foreign-policy-second-term/. ↩︎
6. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/nx-s1-5309451/biden-health-decline-original-sin. ↩︎
7. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5059796-trump-political-comeback-greatest/. ↩︎
8. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/us/politics/government-shutdown-spending-bill-schumer-democrats.html. ↩︎
9. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/10/30/what-governor-newsoms-trip-to-china-accomplished/. ↩︎
10. https://x.com/GavinNewsom/status/1944827167990538371. ↩︎
11. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-federal-budget-and-deficit-reduction. ↩︎
12. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna53339293. ↩︎
13. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/politics/young-voters-shifted-right-2024-election-ash-center. ↩︎
14. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/01/23/governor-newsom-meets-with-world-health-organization-director-general-announces-california-becomes-first-state-to-join-who-coordinated-international-network/. ↩︎
15. https://www.house.mn.gov/hrd/pubs/pap_overview.pdf. ↩︎
16. https://www.ercot.com/. ↩︎
17. https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/did-florida-get-it-right-against-covid-19. ↩︎
18. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000216/. ↩︎