Tit-for-tat gerrymandering wars won’t end soon – what happens in Texas and California doesn’t stay there

Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, during debate over a redrawn U.S. congressional map, Aug. 20, 2025, in Austin. AP Photo/Eric Gay

Gibbs Knotts, Coastal Carolina University and Christopher A. Cooper, Western Carolina University

Congressional redistricting – the process of drawing electoral districts to account for population changes – was conceived by the Founding Fathers as a once-per-decade redrawing of district lines following the decennial U.S. census. Today it has devolved into a near-constant feature of American politics – often in response to litigation, and frequently with the intent of maintaining or gaining partisan advantage.

A Napoleonic moment in American Politics?

By Michael Bitzer

Of course, it can’t be a Monday morning without another crashing headline to start the week in politics. And this one gave me a pause to a past survey question that explored a concerning principle.

While in the Oval Office this morning, President Donald Trump was speaking about sending the military into American cities, and said the following:

Set aside if we can take his word that “he is not a dictator,” as soon as I saw this clip, I thought about a February tweet the president issued and a subsequent question that I had on the March 2025 Catawba-YouGov Survey of 1,000 North Carolinians.

Within a month of taking office, Trump sent out the following tweet:

This sentence is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who created the Napoleonic Code of civil law before declaring himself emperor of France.