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The Gerrymander Endgame: What Happens When Every State Plays To Win

Here’s the truth. Congressional maps aren’t about fairness. They never have been. They’re about power.

Every ten years, the U.S. Census hands over a new set of numbers. That’s when the real fight starts. Lawmakers head into back rooms with piles of voter data and a very simple mission: keep their side in control for as long as possible.

Right now, Texas Republicans are working on a plan to squeeze five more friendly districts out of their map. Democrats in California say they’ll do the same. A few other states are watching closely, ready to jump in. This is how it always begins. Tit for tat. One party moves, the other follows.

But if you carry that out to the end, if every state strips away the polite rules and just draws for maximum advantage, the result is not a tie. It’s not even close. The Republicans win.

Geography decides more than you think

This isn’t about better messaging or better candidates. It’s about where people live.

Democrats are packed into the big cities, winning districts with 80 or 90 percent of the vote (Pew Research Center). Republicans are spread more evenly across suburbs, small towns, and rural counties. That distribution makes it a lot easier to carve out more winnable districts.

Back in 2012, Democrats actually got more total votes for the House nationwide — 59,645,531 to the GOP’s 58,228,253 — yet they still lost the chamber 234 to 201. The way the voters were arranged on the map made all the difference.

Who actually controls the map

You can’t gerrymander without having the power to draw the lines. And Republicans control more of the states where it matters most.

Texas. Florida. Ohio. Georgia. North Carolina. Tennessee. All in Republican hands when it comes to redistricting (National Conference of State Legislatures).

On the Democratic side, the big three are California, Illinois, and New York. California has an independent commission that limits how far they can go. New York’s courts already stepped in to block aggressive maps in 2022. Illinois has pushed the lines about as far as they’ll go.

The numbers if everyone plays to win

Nonpartisan groups like FiveThirtyEight and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project have run the simulations. They looked at what happens if every state draws to the max for its own party.

Republicans end up with somewhere between 240 and 250 seats. Democrats drop to about 185 to 195.

That’s a locked majority for the GOP even in years when Democrats win the national popular vote for the House by four or five points.

Why “we’ll just do the same” doesn’t work

When Republicans push a new map, you hear Democrats say they can match them in blue states. It sounds fair. It’s not realistic.

Plenty of blue states are already maxed out. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Hawaii. Every seat is already Democratic (Cook Political Report, Partisan Voter Index 2024). No room to draw more.

Small Republican states like Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas each get one seat, and they’re locked red without even trying. The math is uneven before the first line is drawn.

What happens next

If both sides go all in, competitive districts disappear. In 1992 there were about a hundred House seats decided by ten points or less (Cook Political Report). Today there are closer to thirty-five. In the endgame you might be looking at fewer than twenty.

That means the primary becomes the real election for most voters. November turns into a formality. The results are decided years earlier, in a quiet room, by people you didn’t elect to anything.

The bottom line

We aren’t drifting toward this. We’re heading straight for it. And in that world, Republicans have the structural advantage. Not because the country has shifted right, but because they control more of the machinery that decides where the lines go.

So when someone says “let the voters decide,” remember. In the Gerrymander Endgame, the people drawing the maps are the ones who already did.

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