The “Radical Left” Needs to Start Playing Dirty

An 1812 political cartoon depicting an unfair district, titled “The Gerry-Mander,” leading to the coining of the term. Originally published in 1812 by Elkana Tisdale.

If you still read the news, you probably know the term “gerrymandering.” It’s a tactic lawmakers use to hijack the redistricting process, which occurs every 10 years, to get more members of their party elected. It’s nefarious, but it’s technically legal unless a redrawn map is struck down by a state or federal court, as has recently happened in New York or Alabama. Unfortunately, checks on inequitable districts rarely occur since the Constitution supplies no way of classifying a map as unfair, making gerrymandering difficult to catch. So, naturally, the Republican Party used the practice to engineer the Congressional majority that’s backing President Trump. And that’s just one of many sketchy tactics they employ. 

The thing is, Democrats haven’t returned the favor for years.

The (non-)secret to Republican gerrymandering is its blatant intentions. In 2010, an organization called REDMAP was founded with the explicit goal of gerrymandering to inflate Republican representation in Congress. It devalued 1.7 million blue votes in 2012 alone.

But the closest thing Democrats have to a “BLUEMAP” is the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), founded in 2017 after Trump’s first victory. But the NDRC doesn’t fight to make maps blue, it only fights to make them fair. It typically only targets overtly racialized maps, like Alabama’s District 2. Rather than fighting fire with fire, it seeks to abolish fire altogether. Even if Democrats did try to gerrymander, Republicans have more financial backing and infrastructure to make it a losing battle.

Democrats brought a spoon to a knife fight.

Lacking momentum is an unfortunate side effect of their more cautious operating procedure. Democrats produce complex policies like the Affordable Care Act that leverage existing systems of government and employ far more nuanced messaging. Meanwhile, the flashier and snappier Republicans garner enormous support for initiatives like DOGE that aim to viciously tear those same systems down. By claiming the rules are unfair or the system is broken, Republicans justify their offenses.

To make matters worse, Republicans reap enormous electoral benefits by bending the rules in other ways. When they lose elections, they change the rules. They limit voting rights even as Democrats introduce bills to expand them. With the recent SAVE Act, Republicans made it tougher to register to vote and mandated voter roll purges, disproportionately impacting women and voters of color who tend to vote blue. 

Republicans laid out all of these plans in Project 2025. They assembled a coalition of top conservative think tanks and corporate donors that made the Avengers look like the Teletubbies. They gerrymandered their way to a majority, stocked federal and state courts with lackeys, and nurtured election fraud theories and outrage in their shiny new “manosphere.” Now they can even shrug off scandals like Signalgate and the tariff-induced stock shocks that would end a Democrat’s career instantaneously. The deck is stacked in their favor.

The solution? Foul play.

Republicans win by exploiting loopholes. If Democrats want to get back to an equal playing field—let alone restore a majority in Congress—they have to do the same. Solutions like reforming the Supreme Court, granting statehood to Puerto Rico, and breaking California into multiple states have been floated in the past, but none were ever finalized. While these were good ideas, even they aren’t enough. Democrats need to get off the moral high horse. 

First, they need to start gerrymandering more seriously. They’ve done it with limited success in states like Illinois, but they haven’t matched the scale of Republican efforts. While some argue that gerrymandering isn’t impactful anymore, it has shifted outcomes repeatedly, even in recent election cycles. It’s far from an outdated tactic, and some states, like New York, offer significant room for gains. To make this easier, Democrats could propose a more comprehensive expansion of the Voting Rights Act geared towards reducing registration barriers for young voters, women, and voters of color, all of whom tend to lean left. Essentially, this would be the antithesis of the SAVE Act. Even after losing Congressional majorities, Democrats can introduce more protections for those voters at the state level.

Second, Democrats must employ procedural warfare, even as the minority party. When Obama nominated a Supreme Court justice, Mitch McConnell blocked it, but when Trump pulled the same move with Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, Democrats let her through. Just recently, they allowed a deeply partisan budget resolution to pass even after being sidelined during negotiations. Democrats must seize these opportunities to maximize institutional barriers to Republican nominations and legislation. Under Obama, Republicans showed the power of a united front, even in a minority party. Senator Booker’s 25-hour filibuster was a start. Now, more Democrats need to follow his lead.

Lastly, Democrats need an articulated—maybe even radical—vision of Project 2029, and it can’t be focused on appealing to the consultant class that dominates the party. Democrats need to acknowledge what’s broken in government, work to fix it, and take the credit for good calls before Republican media can troll them into the abyss. All of this will be bolstered by maximizing gerrymandering, political appointments, and court stacking to push that agenda through.

Republicans have repeatedly shown they’re willing to break norms and redraw lines. If Democrats want power back, they have to do the same.

Nathan Shurts (CC ’28) is a staff writer for Policy360 at the Columbia Political Review. He is a freshman studying political science and statistics.

Disclaimer: The author was previously an intern for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.