Article

Reconsidering Racial and Partisan Gerrymandering

Adam B. Cox

Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

Richard T. Holden

Assistant Professor of Economics and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research

Many thanks to Rosalind Dixon, Adam Feibelman, Josh Fischman, Heather Gerken, Aziz Huq, Alison LaCroix, Anup Malani, Tom Miles, Courtney Oliva, Rick Pildes, Eric Posner, Arden Rowell, Adam Samaha, Lior Strahilevitz, David Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, and workshop participants at The University of Chicago Law School, Boston University School of Law, Northwestern University School of Law, Southern Methodist University School of Law, Tulane University Law School, and The University of Texas School of Law for helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks also to Jesse Galdston and Louisa Zhou for impeccable research assistance.

In recent years, scholars have come to a general agreement about the relationship between partisan gerrymandering and racial redistricting. Drawing districts that contain a majority of minority voters, as is often required by the Voting Rights Act, is said to help minority voters in those districts but hurt the Democratic Party more broadly. This Article argues that this familiar claim is based on a mistaken assumption about how redistricters can best manipulate districts for partisan gain—an assumption grounded in the idea that all voters can be thought of as either Democrats or Republicans. Relaxing this assumption, and acknowledging that voters come in diverse ideological types, we highlight the fact that the optimal partisan gerrymandering strategy is quite different from the pack-and-crack strategy that is pervasive in the literature. Understanding this optimal strategy leads to a second insight—that the Voting Rights Act constrains Republicans’ partisan ambitions, not Democrats’, as is typically thought. We conclude by discussing some implications for the future of the Voting Rights Act and the next round of decennial redistricting.

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