Gerrymandering and its Effect

Three days ago, Republican Jill Dutton defeated fellow party member Brent Money in a landslide. She will now fill the seat of expelled representative Bryan Slaton. While this race seems like any other insignificant race between two Republicans, its implications are far from insignificant.

Gerrymandering

First, the race between Dutton and Money implies a more significant problem of Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is a process by which politicians draw the district lines to ensure one party’s win. And, Dutton and Money’s district is clearly gerrymandered as both candidates are Republicans looking to fill fellow republican Bryan Slaton’s slot. But Dutton and Money district is not the only district that is gerrymandered. Senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakic found that Texas had the worst Gerrymandering in the United States, with Gerrymandering giving Republicans six extra seats.

Extremism

The danger of gerrymandering is that it encourages candidate extremism. The reason for this is that when a race is just between people of the same party, they will want to have more extreme values and ideas to set themselves apart from other candidates in their party and win. Dutton is a perfect example of this. She did not win because she cared the most about other people or she had the most servant-like attitude but because of her extreme ideas like fully closing the border, preventing child gender modification, and making it illegal for women to get abortions from “conception to natural death.”

To prevent Republicans from taking over despite gerrymandering, Democrats need to fight harder than ever before for their candidates. They need to show people that they are not afraid of gerrymandering or politics and that, unlike the Republicans, they will fight for the rights of their people.

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