# Gerrymanders that backfire **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [July 22, 2025, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190 "2025-07-22T18:23:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2025, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190/1 "2025-07-22T18:23:48Z")
With the recent news about Texas redoing its gerrymandered Congressional district map to be even more gerrymandered, there’s been some discussion that it may backfire and Republicans would lose seats rather than gain them. This is called a dummymander. My question is: have there been any dummymanders in the past? None of the articles I’ve seen about this have any examples from history. Obviously there are no famous examples or they’d have been cited, but are there any at all? ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2025, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190/2 "2025-07-22T18:29:23Z")
I can see that happening. As I understand it, the idea is to give the other guy a couple of 95-5 seats and yourself a bunch of 52-48 seats. Having a lot of seats with small cushions could backfire if sentiments shift enough to put a lot of those 52-48 seats in play. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2025, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190/3 "2025-07-22T19:23:10Z")
IIRC that’s been a factor in most of the recent “wave” elections – i.e. in 2006, Democrats picked up a TON of “red-leaning” gerrymandered seats, and then in 2010 they lost those AND some “blue-leaning” gerrymandered seats. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2025, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190/4 "2025-07-22T20:23:27Z")
OK, those are good, but I’m really interested in gerrymanders that backfired immeditately. That is, in the next election after the gerrymander was put in place. Depending on how they do it, I think the Texas gerrymanders will have a distinct possibility of that happening. It may depend on how many Latino US citizens that ICE arrest/deport in the next year or so. Especially if they do any in Texas. ---
**Author:** ![Lord\_Feldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lord_feldon/32/341_2.png) [@Lord\_Feldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Feldon)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2025, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190/5 "2025-07-24T06:36:43Z")
There was the Arkansas congressional map in the 2010s. The state was still controlled by Democrats even after the 2010 election, but they were pretty delusional about where things were headed, so they drew a map that they hoped would get them back to having three of the state’s four seats in the US House. Republicans won all four in 2012 and held all of them for the entire decade. IIRC this baffled outside observers as it was happening. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2025, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190/6 "2025-07-30T23:57:36Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > That is, in the next election after the gerrymander was put in place. We used to have “the gerrymander continued in place”. Everyone knew what the effect was, nobody wanted to change it. Australia was one the first places to actually pay congress-people. The argument was, rich people can afford to be in parliament, working class people can’t run because they can’t afford to be off work. Australia didn’t have institutionalized corruption to the extent that the USA did. The effect wasn’t absolutely what was hoped for: we wound up with a class of paid professional politicians, rather than working-class people in parliament, but there was still some truth in it, particularly in Queensland.au: on the left we wound up with paid professional politicians who didn’t have anything to fall back on if they lost their job. The result was, an institutionalized system of unequal margins, supported by both sides, where the left had safe seats, but couldn’t govern, and the right had government, but held marginal seats and individuals sometime lost the job. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2025, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gerrymanders-that-backfire/1021190/7 "2025-11-13T17:10:47Z")
I didn’t get a lot of real good answers, but that’s probably because people’s memory of things past doesn’t go back far enough. The 19th century is when dummymanders happened. [Electoral-vote.com](http://Electoral-vote.com) has the info: > **[Will 2026 Be a Rerun of 1894?](https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2025/Items/Nov13-4.html)** > > Click on the map for the article > [@](#): > > The maps the Democrats had ever-so-carefully drawn after the 1890 census turned what would have been a mild setback into a bloodbath. […] Nationally, the Democrats lost 114 of the 357 House seats (32%).