Gerrymandering is typically treated as a partisan grievance. Republicans draw unfair maps, Democrats complain. Democrats draw unfair maps, Republicans complain. Each side accuses the other of destroying democracy. Neither side mentions what is actually happening.
Both sides do it. Both sides do it deliberately, in coordination with each other's tacit understanding, to protect their shared interest in power against the interests of the voters they theoretically represent. This is not two teams playing dirty. It is a single cartel managing market share.
The 2025 redistricting cycle made this undeniable.
What we watched was not a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It was the maturation of the Uniparty: a collusive duopoly employing state power to insulate incumbents from the competitive pressure that elections are supposed to apply. They treat you as a managed resource rather than a sovereign body.
The Incumbent Protection Racket
In a free market, competition drives efficiency. In politics, the major parties operate as a cartel. Their goal is not to win ideas but to erect barriers to entry.
The 2025 redistricting cycle was an exercise in market allocation. The two major competitors effectively agreed to carve up the territory to create "safe seats." They packed opposition voters into a few overwhelming districts and cracked the rest to dilute their influence. This is not just about winning. It is about reducing the cost of governance.
If an incumbent lives in a safe district, they do not need to build coalitions. They do not need to demonstrate fiscal responsibility. They only need to satisfy the narrow ideological base that controls the primary.
The Aggressors
The cycle began with Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio shattering the norm that redistricting only happens once a decade.
Texas was the laboratory. Governor Abbott called a special session explicitly to dismantle the few remaining competitive districts. They cracked the Texas Triangle (the suburbs of Dallas and Houston) to dilute the power of urban voters. They knew the federal courts, following the Rucho decision, would not intervene in a partisan power grab.
North Carolina followed. They executed a county trade to shift from a competitive 7-7 split to an 11-3 Republican lock.
They destroyed the concept of the competitive election.
The Validators: The California Betrayal
If Republicans were the aggressors, Democrats were the validators.
For years, California Democrats preached the sanctity of "fair maps" and independent commissions. We were told the Citizens Redistricting Commission was the gold standard. But the moment that commission became an obstacle to power, they burned it down.
Proposition 50 was sold to you as the "Election Rigging Response Act." The narrative was simple: "Why should California play fair while Texas cheats?" They called it unilateral disarmament.
This is intellectually bankrupt. It equates the state with the party. It assumes a "Democratic seat" belongs to the Democratic Party rather than to the voters.
They used this framing to manipulate you. They told you that destroying your own independent institutions was the only way to stop the other team. The result was the suspension of the CRC until 2030. The new map targets Republican strongholds in Orange County and the Central Valley not to help you, but to flip five seats for the national party.
They disenfranchised millions of California voters and destroyed the credibility of reform just to settle a score.
The Death of Competition
The ultimate victim here is the competitive election.
In 2024, about 10% of House seats were competitive. After this cycle, that number will plummet. Safe seats mean unresponsive representatives.
This is also a targeted strike against third parties. The Uniparty hates the Libertarian and Green parties. Constant mid-decade redistricting makes it impossible to organize petition drives or build name recognition. By eliminating swing districts, they strengthen the "spoiler" narrative. They tell you that you must vote for the lesser of two evils because the margins are too tight, or that your vote doesn't matter because the district is too safe.
This is a manufactured psychological trap.
The Only Way Out
The Uniparty thesis is not a theory. It is an observable mechanism. Republicans override anti-gerrymandering reforms when they have the power to do so. Democrats do the same. Both parties use the machinery of the state against the sovereign body of voters when it serves their institutional interests. The events of 2025 are the clearest recent example, but the pattern predates them and will continue past them.
The solution is not to elect better people into the same system. Better people placed into the same incentive structure produce the same behavior. The solution is structural: remove the incumbents' ability to draw their own districts entirely, at the federal level, and dismantle the ballot access barriers that make third-party challenge economically impossible.
They cannot maintain the cartel if the maps are drawn by algorithm and the ballot is open to everyone. The cartel knows this, which is why both solutions remain politically difficult. That difficulty is itself evidence that you are looking at the right lever.