"Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders)"
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Mann’s line doesn’t flirt with neutrality; it punctures it. By calling redistricting “deeply political,” he’s not offering a civics-class reminder so much as stripping away the polite fiction that mapmaking is an administrative chore. The real subject is self-preservation dressed up as procedure.
The sentence is engineered to force a choice between two unflattering motives, and that’s the tell. “Incumbents actively seeking” frames lawmakers less as representatives than as risk managers, treating voter geography like an insurance market where exposure must be hedged. The parenthetical “via bipartisan gerrymanders” is especially sharp: it names the kind of cartel behavior polite Washington tends to excuse. When both parties collude to protect sitting members, competition is quietly euthanized. Democracy remains, but with the difficulty turned down.
Then Mann pivots to “partisan gerrymanders,” the more familiar villain, where the goal is not stability but advantage - “additional seats” as a spoil. Pairing the two matters: it denies readers the comfort of thinking the problem is just the other side’s moral failure. The subtext is that the system’s incentives are the culprit, and politicians respond rationally to them.
Contextually, this sits in decades of post-reapportionment fights where sophisticated data and judicial ambiguity made mapmaking a high-stakes arms race. Mann’s intent is diagnostic: if you want fair representation, stop pretending the fox can be trusted to design the henhouse.
The sentence is engineered to force a choice between two unflattering motives, and that’s the tell. “Incumbents actively seeking” frames lawmakers less as representatives than as risk managers, treating voter geography like an insurance market where exposure must be hedged. The parenthetical “via bipartisan gerrymanders” is especially sharp: it names the kind of cartel behavior polite Washington tends to excuse. When both parties collude to protect sitting members, competition is quietly euthanized. Democracy remains, but with the difficulty turned down.
Then Mann pivots to “partisan gerrymanders,” the more familiar villain, where the goal is not stability but advantage - “additional seats” as a spoil. Pairing the two matters: it denies readers the comfort of thinking the problem is just the other side’s moral failure. The subtext is that the system’s incentives are the culprit, and politicians respond rationally to them.
Contextually, this sits in decades of post-reapportionment fights where sophisticated data and judicial ambiguity made mapmaking a high-stakes arms race. Mann’s intent is diagnostic: if you want fair representation, stop pretending the fox can be trusted to design the henhouse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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