Thought we could use a thread documenting dummymandering in the 2026 election.
From Wikipedia:
In politics, dummymandering is a gerrymandering effort, which backfires, benefiting the party it was meant to exclude.
A clear example:
The Republicans in North Carolina’s third congressional district (NC3) just conceded. The republicans attempted to flip NC1 by moving a very red area of NC3 into NC1 while blue area of NC1 into NC3. Not only did they not flip NC1, they diluted their vote in NC3 so that NC3 flipped blue for the first time since 1995. Not only that, NC3 now has their first African-American representative ever.
I don’t have any specific examples but I was hoping this would happen. After all when you gerrymander so you get your side a whole lot of +1s and leave their side with a single +10, then piss off a big bunch of the uncommitted middle, those +1s are going to turn into -1s or even -2s.
I believe that Republican turnout for the midterms was lower than usual. If that’s true, I wonder if the gerrymandered districts would have paid off for Republicans had there been proper turnout.
In other words, I don’t know that the districts have actually been dummymandered. That’s just my speculation, mind you.
Before Texas’ much publicized gerrymander last year, the Democrats held 13 of the state’s congressional seats. The gerrymander was intended to carve out five additional safe districts for the Republicans.
After last week’s elections, Texas Democrats wound up with 14 seats.
It appears that the only somewhat successful Republican gerrymander this cycle was in Tennessee, where the Democrats only managed to win a single congressional seat, in the 4th District. And even in that race, the Democrat, Victoria Broderick, is only about 280 votes ahead.
The Democrats only had one seat going into the election. The Republicans were able to break up that solidly blue district, but lost one of the new districts in the process. It would only have been a dummymander if the Democrats ended up with two of the gerrymandered seats.
In Missouri there was a dummymanering whiplash. Not only did the Republican legislature’s attempt to redistrict MO-5 out of existence fail after court challenges, but the Republicans then put the measure on the ballot, and the backlash was one of the factors that helped them lose MO-2, which had been red for 34 years.
I fear that the dummymandering talking point is going to make too many Democrats think the gerrymandering was ineffective on its own terms. Giving away a few extra seats when you’re already deep into the minority is a perfectly rational choice when you’re being very ruthless at drawing the maps. The 218th seat is way way way more valuable than the 180th or 250th. Winning the election by 14 points is a very short-term solution to a problem that will still be here in 2028 and 2030.