Texas gave 42.46% of it’s votes to Kamala Harris. California gave Trump 38.3% of their votes. North Carolina gave Harris 47.1% of their votes. Maryland gave Trump 34.08% of the vote. Indiana gave Harris 39.7% of it’s votes. Illinois gave Trump 43.47% of the vote in 2024. I could go on.

I picked these states specifically for a reason, but I could have picked almost any state. These are all states being mentioned as either currently gerrymandering their Congressional map or potentially. To be clear, their current Congressional maps we contested 2024 under do not match the electoral results of their state by any stretch of the imagination, and all are proposing to make it much worse. Think about it this way, at least a third of the people you would see walking down the street today in those states voted for the person who lost the election in their state. Their lucky if a fifth of their state’s Congressional delegation is in their party, and probably none of their Senators are. Congress has been totally dysfunctional since at least 2010, but the seeds of that started much earlier. Now there’s a decent argument that the entire institution is undemocratic, that it represses the voting rights of our people. The Presidency was designed to not be directly elected by the public. We stopped doing that with Congress long ago. We hold direct elections for Congress, they’re just patently unfair and misrepresentative of the public. The legitimacy is gone now. We knew the Senate was a farce. Now the House is too.

The only way to fix this, and I mean the only way, is to scrap our current district based system. Apportion the Senate based on population, there is no way California should live in a tyranny of Wyoming, and there’s no way Texas should have to with Vermont either. This is beyond stupid, and the concern of small states not being able to stop larger states is basically null and void if we’re going to be a hyper polarized country. Same in the House though. Why are we arguing over lines when the elections aren’t producing representative bodies anyway? Just apportion each state a number of seats based on population, and let them popularly elect them. Make some rules, so the whole Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania isn’t Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but put everyone on a ballot and let people vote. You’d start seeing concerns besides partisanship show back up. If Pennsylvania votes 52%-46% for Democrats in 2026, then the result should be 9-8 Democrats. There shouldn’t be a way for a state legislature to partisanly make it 12-5 if the voters are giving two out of every five, or more votes to each party. This is madness.

As long as you have line drawing, you will have this partisan gamesmanship to steal a few more seats. You can’t end it. So just end it. Vote like a parliamentary system and get a Congress that represents the voters. Then we can talk about ending all the procedural garbage the nerds on Capitol Hill created to make sure nothing gets done.