Bringing Guns to Gun Fights: Making Sense of the National Gerrymandering Battle

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman here reports on the status of Trump’s national gerrymandering campaign at the White House. The result is that it doesn’t go very well. Republicans have suffered a series of setbacks of late, each with its own story ranging from legal difficulties to lack of legislative votes to resistance from established officials in very conservative states. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ counteroffensive is going surprisingly well. All things considered, this could all end up as a wash.

There is a second-order part of this story that I want to highlight. If you’ve been observing politics for any length of time, you know a fundamental characteristic or pattern of American politics. Republicans are generally willing to act more boldly, even criminally, than Democrats are willing or able to do. The examples are legion. Because of this difference in how parties operate, Republicans are almost always rewarded for norm-breaking behavior. This is how their muscular push for gerrymandering seemed likely to play out. But now it seems that won’t be the case. Most analysts think it will end up being more of a failure. This is due in part to these contingent setbacks, the most recent being a seemingly watershed judicial reversal in Utah. But the game changer is the aggressive way in which Democratic governors have decided to gerrymander their own states.