Inside both chambers, the Republican supermajority approved a new congressional map splitting Memphis—the state’s only majority-Black city—into three pieces, eliminating Democratic Representative Steve Cohen’s seat and making Tennessee’s delegation nine Republicans and zero Democrats.
He continued, “This gives us a unique opportunity, for the first time in history, to have an all-Republican delegation sent from Tennessee to Washington, D.C.”
This is precisely why I have created the Gerrymandering Partisan Index (GPI) to measure partisan distortion.
The GPI counts seats won by the majority party beyond what closest-to-proportional rounding would award, summed across all states and expressed as a share of the maximum possible for each cycle on a 0-to-100 scale.
How the GPI has changed over time
Since 1976, the GPI has ranged from 5 in 1986 to 34 in 2024. In order to get a general baseline for how much distortion is “normal,” thresholds were set at one and four standard deviations above the average levels from 1976 to 2008, the period preceding the post-2010 rise in partisan gerrymandering. Then, I divided the scale into three tiers of escalating partisan distortion: proportional representation, partisan skew, and single-party dominance.
Data: MIT Election Data and Science Lab (1976–2024). The GPI is computed across the 37 states with three or more congressional districts, since one- and two-seat states have too few districts for meaningful partisan engineering. The 2026 and 2032 projections apply 2024 state-level voting patterns to each cycle's projected maps. The 2032 range reflects two scenarios: continuation of current redistricting trajectories (50), and an escalation in which structural barriers fall, enabling maximum engineering (59).Then, things shifted in 2010. After Republicans won state legislative majorities in roughly a dozen states and used new precinct-level mapping technology, the 2012 GPI jumped to 28 and never returned to pre-2010 levels. Democrats followed with aggressive maps in Illinois, Maryland, and (until courts struck them down) New York. The partisan shares returned to near-parity, but the total stayed elevated. The system escalated symmetrically rather than rebalancing.
Decades of data point to President Donald Trump as the trigger for the current increase in gerrymandering levels. The Trump Administration broke the once-per-decade norm, pressuring Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, and Tennessee into mid-decade redraws. Democrats ended their unilateral restraint: California’s Proposition 50, championed by Governor Gavin Newsom, suspended the state’s independent redistricting commission for one cycle to allow a counter-gerrymander. The Supreme Court, in Louisiana v. Callais, narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a way that expanded state-legislative discretion in jurisdictions with substantial Black voting populations. Tennessee’s 9-0 map followed eight days later, with similar redraws underway across the South.
Regardless of the facts, each side views itself as the aggrieved party and the other as the aggressor, sees the stakes as too high to step back unilaterally, and treats restraint as surrender.
The future of gerrymandering
If 2026 is a single-cycle adjustment, I believe the post-2030 census redistricting cycle will be a structural one. By the time the 2030 census triggers the next redraw, virtually every state will redraw again, with partisan advantage as the primary goal. Depending on how aggressively partisan engineering escalates in the interim, the 2032 GPI is projected to range from 50 to 59, roughly four times the pre-2010 baseline and unprecedented in recent history. A projection at this level is no longer about which party gains a few additional seats. It describes a structural condition: a House of Representatives whose composition is largely settled before voters even enter the polls.
I fear that our opportunity to address the erosion of our democracy is closing. The worst-case scenario would be the path the United States is on, driven by powerful forces and unchecked by any realistic counterforce. The most direct counterforce is federal legislation, since Congress has the constitutional authority to set the rules under which House elections are run in all 50 states. But such action is also unlikely for one simple reason: House members elected from gerrymandered districts have little incentive to vote against the maps that elected them.
Left unchecked, the result is a country sharply divided into hard-red and hard-blue states, each governed by single-party supermajorities, each passing laws shaped by only one set of values, and each with a political minority living in a society it rejects. For many Americans, this means losing voice at every level of government: little or no House representation, no Senate voice, no influence in the state legislature, and no Madisonian protection from majorities empowered to legislate unchecked. If this occurs, American citizenship will mean something fundamentally different depending on the state one lives in. The United States will remain one country in name only.
The choice to step back still exists. But the window is closing.
Tennessee did not decide the future of our democracy on May 7, 2026. The future was already decided. Tennessee just announced it.
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