Democrats Realize Good Government Is Bad Politics When It Comes to Maps

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Democrats Realize Good Government Is Bad Politics When It Comes to Maps

A decade ago, the party sought independent redistricting commissions. Now, in an era of extreme gerrymandering, such efforts could slow Democrats as they try to keep up with Republicans.

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Colorado has an independent redistricting commission that Democrats are now trying to undo.

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Rachel Woolf/Associated Press

By

Reid J. Epstein

Reid J. Epstein has covered redistricting politics since 2017.

April 30, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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Not long ago, Democrats had dreams of restoring fairness

to America’s grotesquely gerrymandered political maps

.

Their party began a major push for independent commissions to draw congressional districts after President Trump and Republicans swept into power in 2017. Democrats, panicked about Republicans’ structural gains after the 2010 census, succeeded in enacting such commissions in Colorado, Michigan and Virginia, while Republicans mostly kept politically minded state legislators in charge of drawing maps in red states.

Now Democrats are finding that their old good-government policies have become bad politics.

Their idealistic push for fairness is, it turns out, no match for the Republicans’ maximalist redistricting effort. The independent commissions that Democrats pushed for eight years ago, along with ones in Washington State and California that predated Mr. Trump’s rise, have complicated the party’s redistricting fight.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday

to further weaken the Voting Rights Act

, a decision likely to lead to a rush of new maps before the 2028 election if not this year, blue-state Democrats are finding themselves regretting that they had sought to give away redistricting power to outside commissions.

“One of the lessons of the Trump era is a failure of imagination about how many norms they would break,” said Phil Weiser, the Democratic attorney general of Colorado who backed his state’s independent redistricting referendum in 2018 and is now supporting a ballot initiative to undo it. “You could say we should have been thinking ahead. We didn’t foresee this.”

At Mr. Trump’s urging, Republican lawmakers in the last year have redrawn congressional maps to help their party in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina. Democrats responded in California and Virginia by asking voters to undo past referendums that created independent redistricting bodies. In both blue states, voters agreed.

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