This op-ed originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Greensboro News and Record. It is reprinted here with their permission.
2026 has become an unexpectedly fierce mid-decade continuation of America’s ongoing gerrymandering war. North Carolina and Virginia are both battlegrounds in that war, but there is a way they can call a cease-fire on gerrymandering.
The Tar Heel State changed its congressional map to 11–3 Republican by removing the state’s last Democratic-leaning rural district. Meanwhile, the Old Dominion attempted an even more extreme 10–1 Democratic gerrymander, only to see it struck down by the Supreme Court of Virginia. Virginia legislators may try again before the 2028 election.
Those efforts underscore problems with how both states handle redistricting.
The main deficiency with North Carolina’s redistricting rules is that they are mostly unenforceable. The state constitution imposes few restrictions on how state legislative districts are drawn: districts must be contiguous and roughly equal in population, and counties may not be divided. That last restriction conflicted with the equal-population requirement, but the Supreme Court of North Carolina interpreted those competing requirements to minimize county splits for state legislative districts. That restriction does not apply to congressional districts.
The strict enforcement of the county splits rule has had a dramatic effect. After the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump won 51.6 percent of the two-party vote, Republicans secured 59.2 percent of seats in the state House and 60 percent in the Senate. However, Republicans won 71 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.
If North Carolina enforced other traditional redistricting rules consistently across all district maps, such as maintaining compactness and keeping municipalities whole, the state’s legislative and congressional delegations would be more in line with election results.
The redistricting commission mandated by Virginia’s constitution failed to do its one job in 2021: approving state legislative and congressional maps. The state Supreme Court appointed special masters to draw the maps currently in use.
Even if the commission had approved maps, there is no guarantee those maps would have passed muster. As we have seen with the political manipulation of California’s commission in 2011 and a 2022 court ruling that Michigan’s commission violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution by racially gerrymandering some districts, commissions are not a panacea without strong rules in place.
A final problem, as seen in Virginia and other states this year, is that commissions and other redistricting rules are vulnerable to being disregarded when a party in power seeks to redistrict for political advantage.
So, should we seek to have Congress pass a nationwide ban on gerrymandering?
There are a couple of problems with depending on federal redistricting reform. First, the Elections Clause of the Constitution grants Congress authority only to establish rules governing congressional districting; reform should also include state legislative districts. Second, as we have seen in Virginia and elsewhere, statutory reforms often last only until the party in power sees an advantage in reversing them.
That said, how can we get off this tit-for-tat gerrymandering cycle?
North Carolina and Virginia could start by engaging in what the University of Chicago Law Review calls “Mutually Assured Democracy” by entering a redistricting interstate compact. Combining a red and a blue state would mitigate fears of unilateral disarmament.
The Compact Clause of the United States Constitution allows for such compacts, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of that clause permits states to enter into them without congressional approval so long as they do not diminish the power of the federal government. Although there may be a lawsuit, a redistricting compact would likely pass that test.
The compact should begin with strict adherence to traditional redistricting criteria, such as keeping counties, municipalities, and precincts whole to the fullest extent possible. The use of partisan data, such as election results, voter registration records, and incumbent home addresses, should be banned. Initial maps could be drawn by nonpartisan legislative staff or a bipartisan commission. The compact would need a sufficiently long withdrawal window (perhaps two years) to prevent a state from withdrawing shortly before an election.
Once in place, the compact could be expanded into other states, perhaps starting with Maryland and South Carolina.
It would be satisfyingly ironic if two of the states at the center of America’s gerrymandering wars started us down the road to a cease-fire.
