Gerrymandering.

By Gerald Seib.

Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. Happily for us, he is also a contributor to News Items and Political News Items. — John Ellis

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By Jerry Seib:

An emerging drive to ramp up gerrymandering, creating more artificially designed congressional districts in which politicians choose their own voters rather than the other way around, continues an unsettling trend in our democracy: Voters just don’t matter as much as they used to.

This disenfranchisement is distorting our politics and adding to the nation’s stark polarization. Worse, it’s making millions of voters bystanders in their own country’s politics. It’s the sort of thing that might prompt more voters to seek an alternative to today’s system.

The current cycle began when President Trump this month essentially ordered the Republicans who lead the Texas state legislature to draw a new map of the state’s congressional districts so friendly to the GOP that the party would pick up five additional seats in the closely divided House next year. That would significantly increase the chances Republicans can retain control of the House for the remainder of the Trump term. In theory, at least, this would happen not because the party has gained more votes, but because the districts in which Texans vote were changed to produce a preordained outcome.

The White House is pushing for similar action in Missouri, with hopes of squeezing out a Democratic seat in the Kansas City area. Ohio Republicans are looking at how they can add to their House contingent as they lead a redistricting effort there, and Florida Republicans are pondering similar action.

Predictably, Democrats have responded in kind, beginning a push for the leaders of the blue states of California, New York and Maryland to launch their own gerrymandering drives to create more safe districts for Democrats.

This gerrymandering arms race is unusual because the redrawing of districts normally happens only once a decade, after the decennial national census. But the White House is pushing to upend that process, in an open effort to change boundaries now to keep control of the House after next year’s election.

This is a big deal. What’s happening today threatens to reverse one of the most positive trends in America’s troubled political system in recent years. A growing number of states—including, notably, California--had begun taking the drawing of district maps out of partisan state legislatures and putting it instead into the hands of independent commissions in hopes of producing districts that are more representative of the broad cross-section of voters. Now, instead, politicians are making changes that threaten to extend the worst political trends of the last generation: the rise of extreme partisanship and the decline of the political center.

The result figures to be even more districts so safe for one party or the other that the outcome of more elections is clear before a single vote is cast. Increasingly, the only election that matters is the party primary, not the general election. If you’re unlucky enough to be a Democrat or an independent in a district gerrymandered by Republicans to be safe for their party, your vote effectively will be meaningless—and vice versa in a safe Democratic district.

The result can be seen in the lack of truly competitive races for House seats. Three decades ago, the non-partisan Cook Political Report rated the races in 170 of the country’s 435 House districts as competitive. Today, Cook lists just 70 of next year’s House races as competitive.

Increasingly, the same process has taken over the drawing of state legislative districts as well. As a result, many of the nation’s political leaders don’t have to worry about what a majority of voters think or feel, only about what the party loyalists within their districts think. There is no need for lawmakers in such artificially created districts to listen to the other side, or even to independents.

The effects of this process are easily seen. A new Wall Street Journal poll showed that President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill as a whole and many of its significant pieces are unpopular with a majority of Americans. Yet the bill passed the House with nearly unanimous GOP support. Why? A vast majority of Republican voters support President Trump and his initiatives, and most House Republicans—like their Democratic counterparts—come from safe districts where the priority is to abide by their own party’s wishes so they aren’t challenged by a more partisan candidate in next year’s primary elections.

On the other side of the ledger, polling shows that a large majority of Americans—two-thirds in a recent Gallup survey—oppose transgender athletes playing on teams that don’t match their birth gender. Yet Democratic leaders often take the opposite position. Why? Because they are responding not to the majority’s wishes, but to the desires of the partisans who determine their electoral fate, in primary and general elections in their districts.

Gerrymandering comes atop increasing self-sorting by American voters in which voters of like mind gather in states that lean decidedly red or blue. Political analyst John Ellis recently compiled a trove of polling data showing that President Trump’s approval ratings are relatively low by historical standards, and that many of his actions are unpopular nationally, yet noted this has almost no effect on his control of Republican lawmakers. “Most Republican elected officials are elected from red states, so Trump’s national unpopularity and the national unpopularity of (most of) his agenda is not a problem for them, the way it is for Republican elected officials in ‘swing states,’” he wrote in his Political News Items newsletter.

Plenty of Americans already think the Electoral College system negates their votes in presidential elections because they live in states that are so red or blue that the outcome of the popular presidential vote—and therefore their state’s vote in the Electoral College—is preordained. Gerrymandering extends that helpless feeling down ballot.

Gerrymandering has another, more insidious effect: Moderate centrists who are willing to defy the party orthodoxy of left or right have less chance of winning elections in districts drawn to enhance the power of partisan activists, so they are less likely to even try. The result is a kind of self-selection process, in which potential candidates from the political center see no point in even trying to win office. They opt out, leaving the field wide open for partisans of the left or right.

Do Americans who dislike this state of affairs have any recourse? Well, they could demand changes in the system that is producing this downward spiral. One fix would be wider use of so-called jungle primaries, in which all candidates, regardless of party, run in a primary election, which would be followed by a general election in which the top two contenders, again regardless of party, face each other in the general election.

There’s also a more radical fix: the emergence of a real, viable centrist third party. Elon Musk has said he will start one. Success for such a party is a long-shot proposition, but the maybe the two parties are unwittingly laying the groundwork.