Some Lawmakers Want a Gerrymandering Truce
· The Atlantic
Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi occupy a lonely space in Congress. Their respective parties—Fitzpatrick is a Republican from Pennsylvania, Suozzi a Democrat from New York—are waging a nationwide gerrymandering fight that neither wants any part in. With the seat-for-seat battle expanding to new states seemingly by the day, Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are calling for a truce—if only anyone would listen.
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“There’s got to be people that come to the table and agree that it’s in the best interest of our nation to not do this, that it’s a race to the bottom,” Fitzpatrick told me.
National leaders in both parties, however, are in no mood for peace. President Trump has directed Republicans to seize every opportunity to draw House seats in their favor, in hope that the GOP can create a buffer big enough to overcome the president’s sagging poll numbers in the midterm elections this fall. The Supreme Court’s decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act last month freed Republicans to redistrict even more aggressively across the Deep South, building on the party’s gains in Texas and a handful of other states last fall.
Democrats, who hit back in California but lost a court fight in Virginia, have vowed their own escalation in blue states next year. “We’re going to win in November,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed to reporters last week, before adopting a bit of fantasy-flick hyperbole: “And then we’re going to crush their souls as it relates to the extremism that they are trying to unleash on the American people.”
The gerrymandering frenzy will likely extend for at least two more years, which in turn will only exacerbate the polarization and partisanship that has gripped Congress and steadily diminished its standing. “We’ve just made this so bad for our country,” Suozzi told me. “We have got to address this problem, or we’re going to fall further into this spiral, this death spiral.”
Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are co-chairs of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, a group that in an ideal world might comprise the entirety of Congress—after all, what else is a legislative body for?—but in these dysfunctional times make up a few dozen lawmakers along the center political axis of both parties. With the House so closely divided over the past decade, the caucus has occasionally exerted influence over policy—when it’s been able to avoid its own issues. I spoke with Fitzpatrick and Suozzi in a joint phone interview earlier this week, during which they told me that the caucus had resolved to make a concerted push against gerrymandering.
Both Fitzpatrick and Suozzi have some incentive to make this stand, as do many of their problem-solving colleagues. Fitzpatrick represents one of just three GOP-held districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, whereas Trump narrowly carried Suozzi’s Long Island constituency. Their purple seats are the kind that both parties target in redistricting, and the two hope that demonstrating their distaste for partisan warfare can help them win crossover voters in November.
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The Problem Solvers Caucus met inside the Capitol last week to discuss what to do about the redistricting “death spiral,” at a gathering that took place a short walk away from where House Democrats were beginning to plot their next round of revenge on gerrymandering Republicans. The challenge for the Problem Solvers is that they are constrained both by an internal struggle for consensus and by their relatively narrow view of Congress’ power to regulate a practice that’s nearly as old as the republic.
Fitzpatrick joined every other Republican in opposing a Democratic bill in 2022 that would have, among many other things, banned partisan gerrymandering nationwide and forced states to use independent redistricting commissions to draw House maps. Although he supports independent commissions, he told me that Congress couldn’t require their use. Instead, he said, Congress would have to use its funding power to encourage political reforms such as nonpartisan redistricting and open primaries—another popular idea to combat polarization. But the caucus has yet to endorse even that proposal. “We haven’t come to a decision as to what we’re going to advocate for yet,” Suozzi told me when I asked what the caucus planned to do about gerrymandering. “We’ve come to a decision that it’s a problem.”
Outside Congress, election reformers are even glummer about the gerrymandering race, but they have far grander ideas about how to fix the nation’s politics. A few of them think—or at least hope—that Americans will grow so infuriated by the whole mess that a new opportunity for change will emerge.
In early 2020, the political scientist Lee Drutman published a book in which he decried the “doom loop” created by the nation’s two major parties. Seven years later, he says that the system is now even “doomier and loopier.” He told me that he is not sure how much worse Congress can get. “Things are pretty ugly and pretty nasty and pretty bitter,” Drutman said, “but I guess you should never underestimate how low the floor can go.”
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Drutman advocates for a system known as proportional representation, in which each House district elects not just one but multiple members determined by the percentage of the vote each party receives. Congress would include representatives from several parties, as opposed to its current configuration of Republicans, Democrats, and a small number of independents who align with one caucus or the other. The idea might seem like a pipe dream, but it has been drawing more discussion in the past few years (including in this magazine). Last week Harris, who is considering another White House bid, mentioned multimember districts during an interview in which she called for the party to hold a “no-bad-ideas brainstorm” to “strengthen democracy” and respond to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by five other conservatives, set off a fresh rush by Republican-dominated states to gerrymander in advance of the midterm elections, and threatened to decimate the ranks of Black representatives from the South in Congress. Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-minority district barely a week later, and GOP leaders in both Louisiana and Alabama announced new elections so that they could redraw districts currently held by Black Democrats. (Louisiana suspended a primary election that was already under way to do so.) South Carolina Republicans are now debating whether to carve up the district long held by Representative James Clyburn; in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the legislature so that the GOP majority—which Democrats hope to displace in November—could redistrict for the 2028 election while the party still holds power in the state.
Drutman said that the Callais ruling could end up being the “hinge point” in the debate over systemic political reform. It was a moment in which “the rules changed,” he said. Aside from proportional representation, Drutman mentioned other ideas that have gained currency in recent years, particularly on the left. They include increasing the size of the House from its current 435 members and expanding the nine-member Supreme Court, along with campaign-finance and ethics reforms.
Democrats considered some of those changes when they last held power in Congress, and Harris mentioned Supreme Court expansion as part of her proposed brainstorm. (She also cited the possibility of statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.) As the party seeks to reclaim both the White House and durable congressional majorities over the next few years, it must debate whether to prioritize reforms that will enhance its power or those intended to decrease partisanship in the system as a whole.
The voters who stand to lose the most in the power struggle between Republicans and Democrats are those who don’t register with either party—and who represent the fastest-growing share of the national electorate. In a Gallup poll released earlier this year, 45 percent of respondents identified themselves as independents, the highest percentage Gallup has ever recorded. As the two parties shrink in stature, they are trying to consolidate their power, in part by drawing districts stacked in their favor and also by closing primary elections to independent voters and opposing efforts to open them up. In a gerrymandered district where only voters registered with a party can participate in the primaries, candidates aim to appeal to a small slice of the electorate that tends to be much more partisan than the population as a whole, deepening the divide across the country.
To many reformers, changing primary rules to expand access for independent voters is a more effective way of combatting polarization than farther-reaching proposals such as proportional representation and increasing the size of the House. The parties’ “push to maximize partisan advantage in ways that silence voters will lead to a populist backlash, and I think in that backlash is our opportunity,” Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America, a group that opposes closed-party primaries, told me.
Unite America invested heavily in statewide ballot initiatives to replicate Alaska’s unique voting system, in which four candidates advance from a nonpartisan primary to a general election run on ranked-choice voting. The campaigns lost nearly everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024, but Troiano thinks that had they been before voters this year, in the midst of this redistricting brawl, they might have fared better. “I don’t think that strategy was a failure. I think the timing was off,” he said.
The trouble for any election reform in this hyperpartisan moment is that as soon as one party—or even a prominent party leader, such as Harris—takes a liking to a proposal, the other party becomes more skeptical of the idea. (Ranked-choice voting, which for a while enjoyed bipartisan appeal, fell victim to this dynamic after its adoption in Maine coincided with Democratic victories.)
Open primaries face resistance among leaders of both parties because the model explicitly challenges their dominance. In California, top Democrats have never loved the state’s voter-approved nonpartisan primary, and the risk that the party might get shut out of the runoff election in the governor’s race this November has prompted a new effort to scrap it. Democratic leaders in Colorado and Nevada opposed primary-reform ballot campaigns. Louisiana Republicans ditched the state’s so-called jungle primary in 2024.
But at least a few Republicans are entertaining the idea of open primaries as a partial remedy to polarization and the legislative paralysis it can cause. Fitzpatrick has said that if Pennsylvania had an open primary, he’d run for Congress as an independent rather than as a Republican. A closed primary, he told me, effectively disenfranchises more than one-third of voters. “As a matter of justice, it’s wrong,” Fitzpatrick said. “And it has a corrosive effect on the House floor. You can tell the people who live in closed-primary states. They conduct themselves very differently.” (Fitzpatrick ran unopposed in his primary on Tuesday, but his occasional breaks with Trump have attracted the president’s attention. “He likes voting against Trump,” the president told Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich, who is engaged to Fitzpatrick. “You know what happens with that? It doesn’t work out well.”)
[Listen: America has always had a gerrymandering problem. This is new.]
Garret Graves, a Republican from Louisiana who served in the House for a decade until last year before an earlier round of redistricting split up his district, shared a similar perspective on closed primaries. “There were hundreds of times where I had members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who said to me, in summary, I know this vote is the right thing to do, but I can’t do it, because I’ll get primaried,” Graves told me. Closed primaries, he said, “distort democracy. They distort free markets.”
Yet Graves was looking not to his former colleagues in the House but to the public and even the courts for a solution. He suggested that a lawsuit challenging closed primaries as unfairly disenfranchising voters could succeed. “I would really welcome something like that,” Graves said. As for Congress, he seemed to think that the chances it would act on closed primaries were as small as the likelihood that the parties would lay down their arms on gerrymandering anytime soon. “I have zero hope,” Graves said.