Politics & Power Quote by Thomas E. Mann

The sentence is a scalpel disguised as a status update. Mann leads with the language of campaign chatter - "prospects have been buoyed" - then quietly reveals the mechanism doing the buoying: not persuasion, not policy, but mapmaking. Redistricting is framed as an iterative project ("several successful rounds"), a phrase that carries the chill of process competence. It suggests a long game: repeated, disciplined interventions that accumulate advantage while looking procedurally normal.

The real punch is in what gets subtracted from democracy. "Sharply reduced the number of competitive seats" is a polite way of saying voters are being sorted so outcomes become pre-decided. Competition, the thing elections are supposed to produce, is treated like inefficiency to be engineered away. By the time Mann lands on "a national advantage of at least a dozen seats", the reader is meant to feel how structural this is: not a local quirk, not a one-off scandal, but an enduring tilt built into the system. "At least" is doing work, too, hinting that the advantage is measurable and likely understated.

Context matters: Mann, a political scientist-sociologist who has spent decades studying Congress and institutions, isn’t moralizing in hot-blooded terms because he doesn’t need to. The tone is institutional, almost bureaucratic, which makes the subtext sharper: the modern House can be functionally insulated from shifts in public mood. The line doesn’t accuse Republicans of cheating; it implies they’ve mastered a legal craft that changes what representation means while staying safely inside the rules.