Noah Feldman, Columnist

Redistricting Is Making a Mockery of American Democracy

May 17, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Signs of the times.
Photographer: Olivier Douliery/Getty Images North America

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Partisan gerrymandering is dominating the news, and as a scholar of constitutional law and a biographer of James Madison, who founded one of America’s first political parties, I think I know the reason: The whole thing has gone completely nuts.

We are now at the point where gerrymandering is making a mockery of democracy itself. It’s not inconceivable that, in the near future, every seat in Congress will be either a Democratic seat or a Republican seat, fixed by a process that manipulates electoral districts so that whichever party controls the state legislature can guarantee the election of its candidates.