How to End the Gerrymandering Doom Loop Forever

What It Covers

Ezra Klein and political scientist Lee Drutman examine how the 2024 Callais Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act, triggering an all-out gerrymandering war costing Democrats 7-10 House seats, and why proportional representation with multi-member districts offers the only structural solution to permanently end partisan map manipulation.

Key Questions Answered

• •Gerrymandering mechanics: A party controlling a state legislature can use algorithms to convert a 60-40 voter split into near-total seat dominance. The 2024 post-Callais landscape shows Southern states targeting up to 19 majority-minority districts, with Florida moving from 24-4 to 28-4 Republican, Mississippi going 4-0, and South Carolina going 7-0, eliminating Black congressional representation across the region.
• •Competitive election collapse: Meaningful toss-up House races have dropped from roughly 50 per cycle two decades ago to just 15 in the current election. Senate vote correlation with presidential results has risen from 0.20 in 2000 to over 0.90 in 2024, while House correlation now sits at 0.98, meaning individual candidate quality is nearly irrelevant to electoral outcomes.
• •Proportional representation design: Multi-member districts of 5-8 seats eliminate gerrymandering incentives because minority parties still earn seats proportional to their vote share. Under an open-list system, voters choose a candidate within a party list; all votes aggregate to determine seat allocation. A party winning 40% in an 8-seat district earns 3-4 seats rather than zero representation.
• •Multiparty threshold math: Single-member districts force third parties into spoiler roles because winning requires 51% of one district. Multi-member districts lower the viability threshold to roughly 20% per seat, enabling new parties to form and grow. This structural shift explains why the U.S. has two parties by design, not by voter preference — polls consistently show Americans want more choices.
• •Expanding the House as political lubricant: Congress froze House membership at 435 in 1911 despite the population tripling since then. Adding 150 seats — roughly a one-third increase — would allow incumbents to retain their districts while new proportional seats are created, reducing the political cost of reform and improving constituent-to-representative ratios from the current 765,000-per-member average.
• •Reform pathway conditions: Historical transitions to proportional representation require three converging factors: intense public dissatisfaction with the status quo, consensus on a specific alternative, and a political window where the party in power calculates that locking in fair rules beats the certainty of losing the next redistricting cycle. For Democrats, 2029-2030 represents that window before the next census gerrymander.