Weekend Edition: Redistricting or realignment?

A couple of years ago when the NY Democrats so badly overplayed their own desperate grasp for more political power that they laid the foundation for losing the House majority all together, I wrote an essay about gerrymandering fundamentally being about not trusting people. What I meant was that we don't trust our own leadership or the quality of our ideas enough to be committed to the represenation of the people we represent that we have to realign who we represent until the funhouse mirror of our own beliefs are mapped onto reality.

A lot people are asking some version of the question with regard to the redistrcting battle initiated in Texas "should Democrats fight fire with fire and redistrict in blue states to counterbalance gains made by Republicans in red states? Should California respond in kind?" My answer has been a qualified: it depends on the time horizon of the "should"...

If we are only concerned with ensuring that Democrats can regain the House to provide a more meaningful counterweight to the second half of the second term of the Trump Administration, then absolutely yes – if we assume we need those seats to win a majority. If we are concerned about the underlying health of our small "d" democratic culture and our shared belief in self-determination and self-government, then absolutely no.

Regardless of which horizon we focus on – and both can and probably are true, we need to be honest that this is about the balance of power in aggregate, not about representation, leadership, or service in the communities we have been elected to serve. We are embracing the final nationalization of federal politics and the de-coupling of federal republican representative government from anything approaching local leadership.

But either way – yet again, we are failing to lead. Democrats should be wildly outpacing the Republican party in affiliation, persuasion, and turnout in a moment when their party is enthrall to a small-minded, weak, psuedo-religious movement, disinterested in delivering for its own people much less for the country as a whole. And yet, Democrats' consistent lack of ambition, lack of moral clarity, and lack of belief in our own leadership has us reaching for the mean, small power-centric politics of our opponents – imitating them in sad, clownish and perversely satisfying ways and tarring ourselves with its petty smallness, drawing us into a race to the bottom that confirms what most Americans already feel – that neither party gives a shit about them or their needs, much less their hopes.

If we readily reach for the blatantly power-centric political power grab that is mid-census redistricting, we should be honest about our intentions and clear about what we are undermining. And we need to recognize that we are flattening the moral high-ground in a way that likely cannot be repaired. We are choosing a path into a valley of power-centric partisanship and further partisan geographic sorting that we are unlikely to be able to get off once the sky gets dark, and we want to turn back toward the sun of our higher ideals. A fundamental realignment of the concept of state, community, and electorate. It may feel like a short-term act of desperation, a momentary and temporary grasp for a tool of our opponents that we intend to set back down "once things stabilize" – but we are digging at our foundations in ways that undermines any chance of future stability. We are giving up the possibility of durable, values-based institutions permanently, so we better be as comfortable grasping them as our opponents or we will never wield them again.

Last updated: 06 Sep 2025