Moneyball for Democracy: Why Congress Needs a Legislative Commission on Gerrymandering

In the 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis wrote, “If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.”^[1]  The book transformed how baseball executives thought about building winning teams, but its lesson extends well beyond America’s national pastime.  Currently, its lesson applies just as readily to American politics, and specifically, to the national redistricting wars.  Partisan gerrymandering seems to have overtaken baseball as America’s favorite sport. 

The didactic connection between baseball and American politics is well-documented.  As George Will observed in Ken Burns’ documentary, Baseball, “Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation . . . it requires patience; that means it involves a lot of compromise . . . it’s a game you can’t like if winning is everything.  And democracy is that way, too.”^[2]

Lately, however, America’s political culture has come to resemble the exact opposite of the nation Will describes; compromise has become a dirty word and winning has become everything.  In our forthcoming book, Draw the Line in Ohio: How One State’s Fight for Fair Maps Explains Gerrymandering in America, my co-author, Josh Rultenberg, and I explore how these incentives have fueled the recent redistricting wars in the state known as America’s test market^[3].  Ohio’s experience demonstrates that while voters have tools to fight back against partisan gerrymandering, those tools work best when paired with broader institutional reforms.  Given the escalation in the mid-decade gerrymandering wars, initiated last summer by President Trump and accelerated this year by the U.S. Supreme Court, the time has come for Congress to establish a legislative commission to seriously study long-term solutions.

Although named after former Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry based on an 1812 electoral map that resembled a salamander, gerrymandering is older than the nation itself. But as those familiar with American history well know, longevity alone doesn’t mean that a particular practice is morally superior or that we should tolerate it today.  In 1788, Patrick Henry tried to gerrymander his Virginia political rival, James Madison, out of the First Congress. He wasn’t successful, and Madison went on to not only win election, but draft the Bill of Rights during his first term. Ironically, Chief Justice John Roberts later cited this example in the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, as evidence that the Founding Fathers not only “tolerated” gerrymandering, but also “viewed it as an unavoidable part of our political system.^[4]”

Since Republicans’ successful “REDMAP” (Redistricting Majority Project) strategy in 2010, those opposed to partisan gerrymandering have increasingly relied on the courts to enforce the rules.  In 2022, former Attorney General and founder of the National Democratic Redistricting Commission (NDRC), Eric Holder argued, “Legislatures aren’t the last word on legislative maps.  Courts are."^[5]  In reality, it is ultimately up to voters, not courts, to stop the practice, because our courts have likewise become increasingly partisan institutions. 

During his September 2005 confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts famously declared, “my job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”^[6] While Roberts is correct that few people go to a baseball game to see the umpires, they have an undeniable impact on the outcome, including who wins and who loses.  Likewise, few Americans cast their ballots based on the composition of the Supreme Court, but the Court undeniably has an impact on the outcome of elections. 

Allegations of cheating aren’t new in either baseball or politics.  But there is a difference between bad calls or caselaw and deliberately manipulating the playing field to achieve a certain outcome.  Take the Supreme Court’s caselaw on partisan gerrymandering during Roberts’s tenure as an example.  The Court’s decision in April 2026 in Louisiana v. Callais showed a complete about-face in its approach to the issue.  As recently summarized by attorneys Trevor Potter and Paul Smith: “Although once viewed by the Court as contrary to basic tenets of democracy, partisan gerrymandering is now deemed in Callais to be a legitimate government purpose, even if it is used as an acceptable cover for creating maps that dilute the voting power of Black Americans, Latinos and other groups of voters who face discrimination.”^[7]

By contrast, in Rucho, the court, and Roberts specifically, held that “[e]xcessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust . . . such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles.’” and discussed ways in which it could be combated, but ruled that it was nonjusticiable because it was too difficult to determine when partisanship had gone too far.  Post-Callais, the Court’s caselaw is that courts can uphold maps precisely because they were drawn for overtly partisan reasons.  According to Potter and Smith: “This arc of injustice makes the Court a legitimate target for criticism . . . The Supreme Court’s newfound acceptance of redistricting for partisan advantage is just one of several factors that make a strong case for legislation that bans partisan gerrymandering.”^[7]

Yet meaningful legislation is itself made more difficult by the current polarization that partisan gerrymandering has helped produce. 

There is at least one encouraging development. The first step toward solving a problem is recognizing that there is one, and most Americans recognize that we have a partisan gerrymandering problem. In May 2026, the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus formally acknowledged that reality by announcing the creation of a new working group to address partisan gerrymandering.  In a press release, the group explained: “The Problem Solvers Caucus believes restoring confidence in democratic institutions requires bipartisan reforms that encourage accountability and fair representation for voters of all political backgrounds — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike.”^[8]

Although the sentiment is exactly right, the caucus’s solution, a “bipartisan Gerrymandering Reform Framework” – falls short.  The collection of abstract ideas, which consists of five principles and four reform ideas, does not offer any concrete solutions and has not yet resulted in the introduction of any legislation^[9].

Congressional working groups can raise awareness and facilitate discussion, but they lack the authority, staffing, and dedicated resources necessary to seriously study and advance structural reform.  If lawmakers truly want to confront partisan gerrymandering, they should move beyond an informal working group and establish an independent legislative commission charged with studying the problem and proposing systemic solutions. 

While researching Draw the Line in Ohio, we spoke with legislators from both parties, judges, academics, and reform advocates.  They disagreed about many things, including what the ideal reform should look like.  But they shared an important understanding: partisan gerrymandering is not simply a problem of bad actors.  It is a structural problem created by the incentives built into our representative institutions, and it therefore requires a solution that extends beyond the conventional wisdom that legislators will act in good faith (they won’t), that the courts will be a check on the system (many have been captured by partisan interests), and that independent redistricting commissions are the ideal solution (they’ve since been abandoned by several states to advance their political interests).

To this end, a legislative commission offers several advantages when confronting a politically complex problem like partisan gerrymandering. It can draw on a broad range of independent expertise beyond the bandwidth of individual lawmakers and congressional staff, create a more credible process and build greater consensus due to the nonpartisan nature of the work, and help solve the collective action problem inherent in redistricting reform: legislators are often reluctant to change the very system that helped elect them.

Congress has repeatedly used legislative commissions to tackle major structural challenges throughout American history.

For example, at the close of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Commission studied the nation’s rapid industrialization and issued sweeping economic policy recommendations in a more than 1,000-page report^[10].  The work laid the foundation for the Departments of Commerce and Labor, greater enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and broader Progressive Era reforms aimed at curbing the excesses of the Gilded Age.

More recently, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, more commonly referred to as the 9/11 Commission, conducted one of the most consequential bipartisan investigations in modern history^[11]. As a result of the report, Congress enacted the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and majorly restructuring our approach to national security. 

A legislative commission enables its members to do exactly what Lewis wrote about in Moneyball: challenge conventional wisdom and find ways to do things much better than they are currently being done. In this regard, there are numerous outside-the-box proposals that are already on the table. While some have been dismissed by current lawmakers as unrealistic and impossible to implement, if the mid-decade redistricting wars have taught us anything, it’s that the status quo is unacceptable and finding a workable solution must involve an all-hands-on-deck approach. This is not to say that all the individually proposed ideas have merit or will ultimately be part of the solution, but that the idea of considering a broad range of unconventional reforms has merit.   

For example, political scientist Lee Drutman has argued for proportional representation and multi-member districts.  In a recent Substack article, he explained: “Proportional Representation makes gerrymandering pointless: you can’t pack and crack voters when every district elects multiple winners in proportion to the vote.”^[12]

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Brunner has suggested selecting ordinary citizens through a civic-duty model similar to jury duty, where everyday citizens draw maps in an effort to minimize political influence. As John Adams once said, “Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty.  Without them we have no fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hogs.”^[13]  Brunner’s idea of connecting the two concepts – representative government and jury duty – therefore deserves further consideration.

Others like Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute and Maya Kornberg of the Brennan Center – organizations that lean both right and left, respectively –have argued that expanding the size of the House of Representatives would reduce the pressure surrounding every individual district by making congressional representation less artificially scarce. Moreover, history shows us that transformative movements tend to follow wave elections, when large groups of new members are elected to Congress. Thus, electing a large number of new members by uncapping the House may prove to be one of the best ways to implement gerrymandering reform^[14]. As Jeff Mayhugh and I previously argued in this publication, “While no single reform can address all of the nation’s problems, the size of the House is one of the few institutional variables that Congress can change without amending the Constitution.”^[15]

These proposals are not mutually exclusive, nor are they competing ideologies. They are different attempts to answer the same underlying question: how should a representative democracy organize itself so that elections reflect voters rather than institutional incentives that allow politicians to prioritize their own power?

Congress has confronted institutional challenges with legislative commissions before. Those commissions succeeded not because they arrived with predetermined answers, but because they recognized that structural problems require serious study, broad expertise, and a willingness to question existing assumptions. Partisan gerrymandering deserves the same approach.

One lesson became clear while researching Draw the Line in Ohio: Americans across the political spectrum care deeply about fair representation.  We often treat partisan gerrymandering as though it were merely a fight over maps, but it is much more than that – it is a symptom of deeper questions about how representative government should function in the twenty-first century.  Those questions deserve more than another round of litigation or another cycle of partisan accusations.  They deserve the kind of careful, bipartisan institutional reflection that has helped America confront major structural challenges before.

Michael Lewis’s lesson in Moneyball was never really about baseball; it was about institutions that become trapped by conventional wisdom and become worse as a result.  The moral of the story is that success comes from asking different questions that promote institutional change and growth.  America has spent decades arguing over who should draw congressional maps, but it’s time to ask a different question: should we be drawing different types of maps altogether?  As George Will observed, if democracy is, like baseball, “a game of the half loaf” in which “nobody gets everything they want,” then our goal should never be to simply help one team defeat the other, which is precisely what partisan gerrymandering does.  It should be to ensure that everyone is playing by rules that the public can trust.