Op-Ed: Doug Blair: The Left’s gerrymandering game is finally backfiring

It turns out that fair maps favor Republicans, Doug Blair explains.

The word of the year is “redistricting.” Everyone’s doing it!

Redistricting normally happens every ten years, following the census. But thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings and shifting political control in key legislatures, states can now revisit their maps mid-decade.

Texas kicked off the 2025 trend with a mid-decade redistricting push that could hand Republicans up to five additional congressional seats.

Several red states followed Texas’s lead — among them Missouri, North Carolina, and Utah. But Democratic stronghold California cried foul, placing Proposition 50 on the ballot to let voters decide whether “independent commission” maps should be replaced by safer, Democratic ones.

Even purple states like Virginia could join in on the redistricting action if Democrat Abigail Spanberger wins the governor’s mansion this November.

Critics of Texas’s decision have accused Republicans of being gerrymanderers par excellence, and of attempting to subvert democracy through mid-decade redistricting. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The scale of Democratic gerrymandering, sometimes spanning entire states, is truly staggering.

By far the worst gerrymanders in the nation lie in Illinois, a state that has just three Republican members of Congress despite nearly 45 percent of its citizens voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

A glance at Illinois’s map reveals long, snaking districts that stretch from Chicago’s suburbs deep into rural farmland; thin, twisting lines that corral Republican voters into irrelevance. And yet, Democrats are planning to further gerrymander the Land of Lincoln.

States like Massachusetts are just as egregious. Despite more than a third of the state voting for Donald Trump in 2024, not a single member of the Congressional delegation is a Republican.

The same is true for New Mexico, where almost 50 percent of the state went for Trump, yet not a single Republican represents them in Congress.

In truth, it is Republicans who have been far more constrained in redistricting, though the media and “election experts” insist otherwise. The numbers prove it as even the New York Times admits that Democrats have fewer opportunities to redraw maps to their advantage.

In August, the Times noted “it is Republicans who have a clear advantage over Democrats in the total number of states that could redraw their maps,” citing the number of states with single-party control and legislatures that handle redistricting directly.

The Times noted 15 Republican states have the necessary components to effectively redistrict. Democrats have just three.

If Republicans are the gerrymandering villains here, why can’t Democrats gain ground in this redistricting arms race? Democrats have already squeezed every drop from their maps. There’s no way to rig them further.

Even California’s vaunted “independent” districting authority was not-so-secretly a front for Democrats to get more seats. Trump won nearly 40 percent of the California vote last year, yet Democrats still hold 43 of 52 seats, giving the GOP a mere 17 percent of the Congressional delegation, and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.) is doing his best to blow up the state’s Constitution and draw even more Republicans out of office as quickly as possible.

If an “independent” body produces maps that overwhelmingly favor one side, it isn’t independent at all.

Democrats are furious because Republicans are finally fighting back. They fear losing their long-standing advantage and are threatening retaliation for Republicans’ attempts at righting the wrong.

But those threats ring hollow. Gavin Newsom can grandstand all he wants; Republicans are focused on restoring fairness to the electoral map.

And if the Supreme Court sides against racially gerrymandered districts in Louisiana v. Calais, yet another Democratic edge will disappear. No longer will states be forced to draft maps that evidently favor Democrats under threat of law.

It turns out that fair maps favor Republicans!

The outcome of this redistricting wave will shape Congress for a generation. It determines whether voters get to pick their politicians or whether politicians get to pick their voters. Democrats prefer the latter, and they’re furious to see Republicans flipping the script.

And they have the nerve to call Republicans anti-democratic.

Doug Blair is a conservative commentator and is the author of the Blair Broadcast.