Gerrymandering backfires on the GOP
A special election in Tennessee is a big wake-up call for the party
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On Tuesday, a special election took place in TN-07, a House of Representatives district in Tennessee. Normally, this race would have been totally unremarkable - Tennessee is a deep red state, and House seats there don’t change hands very often. But Donald Trump is in the White House, so these aren’t normal times.
The race in TN-07 became one of the most closely watched in years because it looked like Republicans could actually lose it despite winning the last comparable contest there by over 20%. National Republican groups ended up spending millions of dollars to defend what should have been a safe seat, and Donald Trump even made a few virtual appearances to try to drive up turnout.
In the end, Republican candidate Matt Van Epps won - but only by about 8%, only a third of the tally that would have counted as a “good” performance. Overall, the result tells us some pretty interesting things about U.S. politics right now.
The first is that the national environment is terrible for Republicans. You can pretty directly compare the 2022 result when the GOP won by over 20% to this week’s result, because turnout was about the same. And if we put the results side by side, then something like a 12% swing against Republicans has occurred. That’s enough to generate an electoral wipeout of epic proportions at the midterms.
And it’s not like this is an isolated data point. The elections which took place a month ago tell a similar story, and that story has been aptly summed up by the Republican operative who told Politico that “2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle” for the GOP.
The second thing this tells us is that even if Republicans manage to go ahead with new gerrymanders in Texas and elsewhere, those moves probably still won’t save them from losing badly next year. In fact, they might even make the loss worse.
How can that be? It all hinges on how gerrymandering actually works. Generally when you draw district boundaries to benefit your own side, you do one of two things.
Some gerrymanders are based on “packing”, which means putting enough of your own voters into a district to make sure you win it. Others are based on “cracking”, which means divvying up the other side’s voters so that there aren’t enough of them in any one individual district to hand that party a victory.
This can work with shocking efficiency, but it also comes with a big catch. Imagine you have two solidly red districts (A and B) and one solidly blue district (C), and you want to turn them all red. You can do that by cracking C’s blue voters and splitting them among the three districts. If you did it right, the result will be three districts that lean pretty solidly red. But two of them - A and B - will actually be less red than they were before. And in an outlier election in which the red team does extremely badly, that could be a problem.
This is essentially what has happened to Republicans in Tennessee. In the 2020 redistricting cycle, the party used its supermajority in the state legislature to crack the solidly blue city of Nashville into three districts. They took two extremely safe red districts and one extremely safe blue district and turned them into three sort-of safe red districts, one of which was TN-07, the site of this week’s excitement.
On balance, Tennessee was still a pretty safe place to do this - it’s very Republican. But the other states in which the party is contemplating or carrying out gerrymanders - places like Texas and Indiana - are not nearly so red. If they go ahead with redrawing boundaries there and a wipe-out on the scale of this week or worse is repeated next year, then there’s no guarantee that the gerrymanders are actually going to be a net positive for the GOP.
Of course, the moral of this story is not “gerrymandering is fine”. Even if Democrats still romp across the electoral map next year, the fact is that these attempted GOP gerrymanders are still a cynical abuse of power. As with voter ID laws and other state-level voter restrictions, gerrymandering can be overcome through extra effort at campaigning and voter mobilization. But just because these barriers can be overcome doesn’t mean that they should be there in the first place.
On a deeper level, there’s something messed up about an electoral system which is always demanding that the left pull off electoral coups and wave elections in order just to tread water, while systematically benefiting the GOP under normal circumstances. And if the Democrats do manage to storm the map in 2026 and win back the presidency in 2028, one of the top items on their agenda ought to be national political reform aimed at stopping partisan manipulations of the electoral system for good.