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Three hundred sixty-six of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are not seriously in play this November. The Cook Political Report, which handicaps congressional races for a living, rates them solid for one party or the other. Just twenty-one are genuine toss-ups.
Think about what that means. Five out of every six House races are effectively over before the first ballot is printed. In most of America, the decisive political act was not Election Day. It was drawing the district lines.
If you live in one of those 366 districts, your representative is extraordinarily unlikely to lose in November. The real danger comes in the primary, where turnout is a fraction of what it is in the general election. That changes who matters. Your representative answers first to the relatively small number of voters who actually show up for the party primary. If you belong to the other party, or simply skip the primary, you barely enter the political calculation.
You still get to vote in November, of course. You get the sticker. You get the ritual. But in practical terms, you have very little ability to fire the person supposedly representing you.
And here is where the system gets even more interesting.
Two private political organizations largely control whose names appear on those primary ballots and which candidates receive the money, infrastructure, endorsements, consultants, voter data, and institutional support necessary to win. Between them, they have divided nearly the entire American political marketplace. Neither organization appears anywhere in the Constitution.
Economists have a word for competitors who fight furiously over market share while sharing an enormous interest in keeping everyone else out of the market. They call it a cartel.
That is the part of American elections nobody is fighting about, and it is the part that matters the most.
What the fight is about instead
The election integrity argument concerns the count. Voter identification, mail ballots, voter rolls, machine certification, audits after the fact. Those are real questions, and most of them belong to the states, where they have always belonged.
None of them touches the lines. Every congressional map in this year’s fight is constitutional. Districts come out equal in population to within a person or two, because the software that draws them is built to hit that number exactly. That is the entire federal standard. Count the people, make the numbers match. It says nothing about who drew the line, or why, or whether the winner was known a year in advance.
A clean count in a district drawn to produce a known result is a clean count of a question already settled.
Missouri’s eight days in court.
In September 2025, the Missouri legislature redrew the state’s congressional map in the middle of the decade, which is unusual, to eliminate the seat held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver. The new map would move Missouri from six Republicans and two Democrats to seven Republicans and one Democrat. It was not a general rule about how districts should look. The voters had not changed. The census had not changed. The politicians simply changed the electorate around the seat.
More than 305,000 Missourians signed petitions to force a public vote on the redistricting. Under the Missouri constitution, enough signatures suspend a law until voters decide. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins refused to certify the petitions and ran the August primary under the new map anyway.
On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Hoskins. The petitions had suspended the new map back in December, meaning it had never taken effect. On September 8, the deadline for printing ballots, Justice Kavanaugh rejected the state’s emergency appeal. Minutes later, however, a federal judge in St. Louis ordered Missouri to use the new map. An appeals court left that order in place. Two days later, on September 10, the Supreme Court blocked it in an unsigned order, with no explanation and no recorded dissents.
Missourians will vote in November under the lines drawn in 2022. But the August primary was conducted under the now-discarded 2025 map. That means some voters will vote in a different congressional district in November than they did in August, and some nominees will face voters who had no opportunity to participate in the primary that selected them.
Republicans did it in Missouri. Democrats did it in California.
Last year, California voters approved Proposition 50, setting aside the congressional maps drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission and replacing them with maps drawn by the Democratic-controlled legislature for elections through 2030.
Democrats defended the move as a response to Republican redistricting in Texas. Republicans defended Missouri’s redraw as part of the same national fight.
The pattern is difficult to miss. Neither party consistently opposes partisan redistricting. Each condemns it when the other party draws the lines and defends it when the advantage is its own.
Congress had the constitutional authority to intervene. It did not.
Instead, Missouri spent eight days bouncing between four courts while voters did not know which congressional districts would ultimately govern the election. The institution the Constitution expressly empowered to make or alter the rules never entered the fight.
Congress already has the power.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate congressional elections. Article I, Section 4 says the states set the times, places, and manner of those elections, but the very same sentence says Congress may “make or alter” those rules.
This is not a loophole or a modern interpretation. It is written into the Constitution itself, and the founders debated the provision publicly. Hamilton defended it in the Federalist Papers because leaving Congress entirely dependent upon rules made by the states could ultimately leave the federal government at their mercy.
Political parties, by contrast, have no constitutional role at all. The Constitution does not even mention them. The men who wrote it were deeply concerned about factions and the emergence of permanent political parties. Madison devoted Federalist 10 to the problem of faction. Washington later used his Farewell Address to warn against the “spirit of party.” The constitutional structure tied representation to states and congressional districts, not to two national party organizations dividing the country between them.
And Congress used the power the Constitution gave it. Beginning in 1842, Congress imposed federal requirements on how House members were elected. In 1872, it required congressional districts to contain roughly equal populations. In 1901, it required them to be compact, a restraint on the sprawling and contorted districts we now associate with gerrymandering. The 1911 law carried the single-member, contiguity, population, and compactness requirements forward.
Then Congress let those rules disappear. The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 made the allocation of House seats after each census automatic, ending the need for Congress to pass a new apportionment law every decade. But it included none of the previous federal standards governing how congressional districts were drawn. The 1941 law restored none of them. Congress finally restored the single-member-district requirement in 1967, amid concern about states using at-large elections.
The federal compactness requirement disappeared nearly a century ago. Congress has never restored it.
So yes, states normally administer elections. But congressional elections are constitutionally different. The Constitution gives states the first move and Congress the final authority to “make or alter” their rules. Congress once used that authority to set national standards for congressional districts.
It could do so again.
The Court tried to fix the problem and then quit halfway.
The federal courts eventually imposed the rule Congress had abandoned: equal population. By the early 1960s, some legislative districts contained vastly more people than others, while the legislators who benefited from those disparities had little incentive to change them.
In 1962, the Supreme Court opened the federal courthouse door to reapportionment challenges. Two years later, it required congressional districts within a state to contain roughly equal populations. The principle became known as “one person, one vote.”
But equal population governs the numbers, not the shape of the district. Every map in this year’s fight can satisfy the population rule while still being drawn for partisan advantage.
For decades, litigants tried to persuade federal courts to police partisan gerrymandering as well. In 2019, the Supreme Court said no. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts had no neutral, manageable constitutional standard for deciding how much partisan advantage was too much. Partisan-gerrymandering claims, the Court held, were beyond the reach of federal courts.
But Roberts did not say there was no remedy. He pointed directly back to Congress. The Framers had given Congress the power to address partisan gerrymandering through the Elections Clause, he wrote, and Congress had used that power before. “That avenue for reform,” the Court concluded, “remains open.”
Seven years later, Congress has not even attempted reform.
Why Congress prefers the system it has
The people with the power to fix congressional redistricting are often the people who benefit from leaving it alone.
Call your representative’s office and ask Congress to take up redistricting. You may be told that redistricting is a matter for the courts. But in 2019, the Supreme Court said federal courts would not police partisan gerrymandering. The responsibility circles back to Congress, and the circle closes.
Economist James M. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for developing public-choice theory, which applied economic analysis to political decision-making. His central insight was simple: politicians respond to incentives just as everyone else does. The people who write the rules have interests of their own.
That is the problem here. Neutral rules are easiest to adopt before anyone knows who will benefit from them.
Eighty-four percent of House seats are rated safe. A member sitting in one of them has little political incentive to make that seat more competitive. And the system protecting that member is the very system Congress would have to regulate.
The same incentive exists at the party level. The two parties would be writing rules that could take away districts they currently draw to their own advantage.
Congress has done this before.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed on September 14, 2001, three days after the attacks. It turns twenty-five on Monday. Five administrations have stretched it to cover groups that did not exist when it was written. Repealing it would take a majority and an afternoon.
The National Emergencies Act tells a similar story. In 1976, Congress gave itself the power to terminate a presidentially declared emergency by concurrent resolution, without a presidential signature. After the Supreme Court invalidated that kind of legislative veto in 1983, Congress amended the law to require a joint resolution, which the president can veto. Ending an emergency over a president’s objection therefore requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers.
The pattern is the same. Congress has constitutional and statutory powers that it can exercise, amend, reclaim, or restructure. When it declines to act, other institutions make the consequential decisions instead.
Congress holds a power, declines to use it, and somebody else fills the power vacuum. Nobody seized these powers. They were given away by Congress.
What Congress could do tomorrow
Congress does not need a constitutional amendment, a new agency, or new authority. It could write the rules now.
It could require congressional maps to respect county and municipal boundaries. Those lines were not designed for partisan advantage. They accumulated over generations around rivers, market towns, and courthouses, and often reflect communities that already conduct their affairs together. Carl Menger called institutions like these organic: they carry knowledge nobody planned and nobody can reproduce on demand. A county line tells us something about a community. A line drawn to eliminate one congressman tells us who drew it.
Congress could also repeal the 1967 requirement that every congressional district elect only one House member. That is what a “single-member district” means: one district, one seat, one winner. Gerrymandering depends heavily on that structure because mapmakers can manipulate who wins each seat by packing opponents into some districts and spreading them thinly across others. That becomes much harder when a larger district elects several representatives instead of just one.
Most important, Congress could make any new rules take effect years from now. A law governing maps drawn after the 2030 census would bind a future Congress whose partisan composition and political geography cannot be known with certainty today. A delayed start recreates some of the uncertainty that makes neutral rules easier to accept. It also addresses the immediate objection from either party: neither side has to change the rules solely for the other's benefit.
Why Congress has not fixed it.
Congress can change these rules. The political incentives run in the opposite direction.
The people who would have to change the system include those who benefit from it. Buchanan’s objection was fundamental: ordinary legislation is a weak restraint when the people being restrained retain the power to rewrite it. Durable rules are easiest to establish when nobody knows in advance who will benefit.
That is the problem with redistricting. Of the 435 House races this November, 366 are currently rated Solid for one party or the other. In most districts, the decisive political competition occurs before the general election. A perfectly accurate count does not change the boundaries within which those votes are cast. Voter ID does not change them. An audit does not change them. The argument over election integrity largely begins after the political geography has already been decided.
Missouri and California are not opposing principles. Republican officials pursued a mid-decade redraw in Missouri; Democratic officials pursued one in California. Each case used different procedures and arose in different circumstances, but both demonstrate the same structural fact: political parties have powerful incentives to seek favorable district lines when the law allows them to do so.
That brings us back to where we started. The parties compete fiercely over who controls the lines. The harder question is who writes the rules governing the lines themselves. The Constitution gives Congress that power. For nearly a century, Congress has largely declined to use it.
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References
Apportionment Act of 1842, 5 Stat. 491.
Apportionment Act of 1872, 17 Stat. 28.
Apportionment Act of 1901, 31 Stat. 733.
Apportionment Act of 1911, 37 Stat. 13.
Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. 107-40 (2001).
Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962).
Brennan Center for Justice. 2026. “Declared National Emergencies Under the National Emergencies Act.” Last updated September 2.
Buchanan, James M. 1979. “Politics Without Romance.” Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna.
Buchanan, James M., and Roger D. Congleton. 1998. Politics by Principle, Not Interest. Cambridge University Press.
Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent. University of Michigan Press.
Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946).
Cook Political Report. 2026. “2026 House Race Ratings.” Last updated August 25.
Hamilton, Alexander. 1788. Federalist No. 59.
INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983).
Madison, James. 1787. Federalist No. 10.
Menger, Carl. 1883. Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences.
National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1601 et seq.
People Not Politicians and Richard von Glahn v. Denny Hoskins, Supreme Court of Missouri, September 3, 2026.
Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, 46 Stat. 21.
Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).
Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019).
Uniform Congressional District Act, 2 U.S.C. § 2c (1967).
Washington, George. 1796. Farewell Address.
Wood v. Broom, 287 U.S. 1 (1932).
"Democrats defended the move as a response to Republican redistricting in Texas. Republicans defended Missouri’s redraw as part of the same national fight."
This is absurdity at its worst. Since when does a state get to mess up its own electorate in retaliation for something that occurred elsewhere? I wish there were a procedure to THROW ALL THE BUMS OUT AND START OVER!
Thank you for this excellent article. Our Congress is a pale shadow of what it once was. This has been caused by professional politicians who are often more aligned with their financial backers than with their constituents. It is nevertheless the system that we have.