Gerrymandering is bad. Expanding it is even worse.

In Texas, Republicans passed new congressional maps that would give their party an advantage in around 30 of the state’s 38 seats in Congress.

In response, California Democrats are asking their state’s voters to redraw boundaries to offset those changes. Missouri legislators voted last month to eliminate a Democratic-leaning Kansas City district. There’s been talk of redistricting in a host of other states, too, including Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Illinois, and Indiana.

This might seem like the usual gamesmanship in our highly polarized politics, but it’s not. Normally, redistricting takes place once per decade, after the census provides new data on each state’s population.

Now, Americans face the prospect of extensive mid-decade gerrymandering, as both parties race to the bottom in advance of the 2026 midterms. And if mid-decade gerrymandering becomes the norm, we can expect new maps in advance of 2028 and 2030, too.

We can also expect some states that now use independent commissions to draw boundaries may retreat from doing so, setting back progress to take districting out of the hands of partisan politicians.

Polling currently indicates Democrats are on track to win the popular vote in 2026 by a couple of points. Under the current House maps, this national margin would likely enable them to easily take control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Would the mid-decade redistricting shift this prediction? Maybe, though maybe not.

Some projections indicate that changes to the maps in Texas, California, and other states could net Republicans five to eight seats in the 2026 midterms. These gains would enable Republicans to hold onto the House only if they can keep the nationwide margin fairly close.

Of course, in an era with tight national margins, it can take just a few seats to shift control of the House.

Republicans won 220 House seats to the Democrats’ 215 in 2024. So there is a very real possibility that even small biases from gerrymandering could shift control of the chamber in a tight national election, whether in 2026 or down the road in 2028 or 2030.

But Democrats may amend state constitutions to enact their own new maps for 2028 in states they control, including New York and Colorado. So it’s far from clear that the gerrymandering wars will lead to significant, durable gains for Republicans.

Even if mid-decade redrawings do not lock Republicans into power in the short term, the growth in mid-decade gerrymandering is still worrisome for democracy. It enables whoever is in power to fine-tune maps to account for demographic changes.

One of the factors that normally limits parties’ ability to draw seats to their own advantage is uncertainty about what the future may bring.

Consider Dallas County, Texas. After the 2011 redistricting, the GOP redrew the Democratic-leaning county so as to advantage themselves in key state House races there. But with the 2018 Democratic wave, they lost five of their House seats in the county, as suburban voters broke for Democrats. Given enough time, gerrymanders can become dummymanders.

That inability to project future demographic change, political swings, or candidates has acted as a curb on the extent to which parties were willing to aggressively gerrymander, one that opponents of restrictions on gerrymandering pointed to explicitly in arguing the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even if mid-decade redrawings do not lock Republicans into power in the short term, the growth in mid-decade gerrymandering is still worrisome for democracy.

It was that same uncertainty that seemed to limit Texas Republicans’ appetite for an especially aggressive gerrymander after the 2020 Census, although the map they adopted then was still the most pro-GOP map in the country, relative to neutral baselines.

If a party sees fit to redistrict in every election cycle whenever it controls the process, it won’t need to hedge against demographic changes. That’s especially true today, as American politics has become steadily more nationalized in recent decades.

With split-ticket voting declining and congressional candidates becoming more dependent on their national party brand, those drawing congressional maps can be increasingly confident in their predictions about how districts will go.

The ability of state governments to constantly fine-tune maps is likely to make congressional elections even less competitive. It also could enable Democrats or Republicans to solidify their grip on power if a wave election (such as 2010 for Republicans) gives one party widespread control of state governments.

Perpetual gerrymandering also raises the stakes for state politics. It means control of Congress is constantly on the line when partisan control of a state government shifts — and could bring a flood of outside campaign dollars to state legislative races.

» READ MORE: Texas redistricting is no routine adjustment. The GOP aims to fracture Latino neighborhoods and dilute votes. | Opinion

In an era when most state legislatures are solidly in one partisan camp, governors and state Supreme Courts become the only checks on endless gerrymanders. These offices are likely to become even more nationalized.

By focusing voters on national issues, such as congressional maps, this nationalization reduces state publics’ ability to hold their state elected officials accountable for state-level issues, including roads, schools, crime, and the local economy. This could decrease the responsiveness of state governments to their voters, making state-level democracy collateral damage in the battle for national control.

So, with the parties staring down a classic prisoner’s dilemma, what to do?

We see multimember districts — with the appropriate backstops — as one long-term solution to ensure that the six million Donald Trump voters in California and the almost five million Kamala Harris voters in Texas are more effectively represented in Congress.

Multimember districts would also limit the extent to which political outcomes are dictated by arbitrary geographic factors, such as which parties’ voters are more spatially concentrated or live within existing jurisdictions like counties.

But in the interim, Congress could act to ban mid-cycle redistricting and place limits on the permissible partisan skew when districts are redrawn at the beginning of each decade.

How to bring conservatives on board? One possibility would be to pair such reforms with a national voter ID law. In research by one of us, we’ve found that compromises, including a national voter ID, are broadly popular.

In Rucho, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” a view we share alongside a majority of Americans. But the Supreme Court held that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

The solution to today’s race to the bottom will thus need to come from the legislative branch.

Restricting redistricting while also implementing a nationwide voter ID could win broad, bipartisan support, and could be the interim political solution the chief justice invited back in 2019.

Daniel J. Hopkins is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Christopher Warshaw is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University.