Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing district lines to unfairly favor particular politicians or political parties in elections.1 It is a political dirty trick—and an extremely harmful one—that turns democracy upside down, letting politicians choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. Gerrymandering allows politicians to get reelected even if they fail to address the problems that the majority of the public wants them to solve. That failure has consequences for every issue that Americans care about, including efforts to expand health care and to protect Americans from gun violence—two issues that the Center for American Progress has written about at length.2 It also has very real and harmful consequences for some of the most vulnerable Americans: children.
Redistricting is the process of redrawing district lines, which occurs every 10 years after a new census, to account for changes in district populations. In most states, redistricting is controlled by state legislators,3who use this opportunity to solidify their power by drawing opposition voters out of their districts and maximizing the number of districts that can be won by their political allies. These gerrymanders can wipe out electoral competition and result in dramatically different political outcomes than if districts were fairly drawn.
The effect is most clear in heavily gerrymandered states where one party’s candidates win a majority of the vote, but the opposing party nonetheless wins the majority of the seats—and control of the state legislature. This anti-democratic outcome is the status quo in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—three of the four states discussed in detail below. In Michigan, for example, Democratic candidates won the majority of the votes for both the House and the Senate, but Republican candidates won the majority of the seats in both chambers. This had a major negative impact on programs that benefit children. For example, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI)—a supporter of full-day, universal preschool—proposed an $84 million increase to Michigan’s preschool programs, but the legislature whittled that increase down to $5 million—an outcome made possible by partisan gerrymandering.4