LETTER: A tale of two gerrymanders
I agree with Lon S. Jaffe’s letter to the editor (“Voting lines,” Saturday Review-Journal) that condemns gerrymandering — the manipulation of district boundaries to secure partisan advantage. However, his critique veers leftward by singling out Texas Republicans for their mid-decade redistricting effort, while ignoring similarly troubling behavior elsewhere.
For context, let’s revisit the statistics he cited: In 2024, Texas Democrats received 43 percent of the vote but secured only 34 percent of the state’s congressional seats—a disparity of 9 percentage points. In Nevada, Democrats received 47 percent of the vote yet claimed 75 percent of the congressional seats — a staggering 28-point gap, driven by aggressive Democratic gerrymandering.
By any objective measure, Nevada’s map manipulation is more egregious than Texas’s. If Mr. Jaffe’s goal is to rally readers against partisan gerrymandering, his argument would be far more compelling if it condemned abuses on both sides —especially when the offense in his own backyard is even more blatant.