Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
In March of 1812, American engraver and political cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale created a new species of monster – the infamous gerry-mander.
“Many are of the opinion that [the gerry-mander] is the Griffin or Hippogriff of romance,” according to an editorial in the Boston Gazette, which declared that “the devil himself” must have been concerned in the “procreation” of this creature. Inspired by Massachusetts’s lizard-shaped Essex South District, the Gazette editorial named the gerry-mander after then-Governor Elbridge Gerry, who passed state Senate maps that critics said were unfairly drawn to favor his own political party.
The Essex South District stretched from Salsbury in northeast Massachusetts, west to Methuen, and south to Chelsea, a city just north of Boston. Though the artist’s rendering resembles a dragon – with wings and a speared tongue – the Boston Gazette said the monster belonged to the “salamander tribe,” hence the name “gerry-mander.”
Oddly-shaped legislative districts have long been the objects of scrutiny. Take a decade-old congressional map of North Carolina, for example. For years, North Carolina’s 12th district was criticized for “[fencing] off black communities” in an odd shape that snaked along the I-85 corridor from Greensboro to Charlotte. Former North Carolina state representative and voting rights leader Mickey Michaux once said: “If you drove down the interstate with both car doors open, you’d kill most of the people in the district.”
But what’s called the eyeball test – determining a map’s fairness by judging the shapes of the districts – doesn’t always tell the whole story. That’s because not all uniformly-drawn districts are fair, and not all oddly-shaped districts are gerrymandered. In this edition of the Rural Index, I’ll be complicating the traditional narrative about gerrymandering and mapmaking.
It Takes More Than Just an Eyeball
In January of 2024, just days after Louisiana’s new legislative map (which featured a second majority-Black district) was signed into law, a group of self-proclaimed non-African American voters challenged the map on the grounds that it unfairly discriminated against them based on race.
The Supreme Court sided with these non-African American voters in their landmark Louisiana v. Callais (2026) decision, which will make it nearly impossible for our judicial system to fight against racially-discriminatory legislative maps. (You can read more about how recent Supreme Court cases will hurt rural voters of color here.)
In part, the plaintiff’s argument relied on the odd shape of Louisiana’s 6th district, the majority-Black district at the heart of the Callais case. Louisiana’s 6th district runs North-South along the state’s Red River Valley. It is skinny and sprawling. It doesn’t pass the eyeball test for gerrymandering because it is not compact. (Although compactness can be judged by eyesight, it can also refer to the ratio of the circumference of a district and its total area.)
When a district lacks compactness, it might be a red flag that legislatures intentionally split up communities with shared needs, which are often thought to follow traditional administrative boundaries, like county or municipal lines. It is best to keep communities of interest together so that they can collectively elect their candidates of choice.
But performing the eyeball test for compactness can leave out important historic and social contexts. That’s because human communities often fall on physical or environmental contours, not abstract administrative boundaries like county lines.
Louisiana’s Red River Valley is a good example. In an amicus brief filed in support of the Callais appellants, Louisiana historians claimed that the 6th district represents a distinct community despite the district’s odd shape, saying that the “District Court erred when it disregarded this testimony and instead relied on an incomplete and unreliable historical analysis to reach its conclusion that District 6 is not reasonably configured.”
The Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s 6th congressional district an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The district follows much of the Red River Valley. (Map by Sarah Melotte)
The historians in the amicus brief said that the shape of District 6 was appropriate, especially given the history of the valley’s cotton production that relied on enslaved labor. “The population shares a common ancestry and similar cultural and socio-economic characteristics,” the historians wrote. They referred to District 6 as a “distinct and long-recognized community of interest in Louisiana,” which “closely aligns with the historical boundaries of the region.”
But the Supreme Court still ruled Louisiana’s legislative map unconstitutional, and the state is drawing a new map that will eliminate the second majority-Black district.
While Louisiana’s most recent map failed the eyeball test but provided representation to voters of color, an older map in North Carolina did just the opposite, displaying compactness among districts while diluting the electoral power of Black voters.
In 2016, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina declared the state’s 1st and 12th districts unconstitutional because of racial gerrymandering. The Supreme Court upheld this ruling in Cooper v Harris, ordering North Carolina’s GOP to draw new districts. The new map contained relatively more compact districts. They passed the eyeball test, in other words.
But even with more compact districts, the Democratic stronghold of Greensboro was split in two. North Carolina A&T State University, one of the nation’s largest historically Black colleges, was divided in half, diluting the voting power of the Black student population on campus. “These districts are a good example of how even clean-looking districts can constitute a gerrymander,” wrote Mac Brower for the Democracy Docket.
The Louisiana v. Callais decision set many red states off on a redistricting race that is still underway. Voting-rights leaders called recent Supreme Court law a “death by 1,000 cuts” to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark piece of federal legislation that was born in the rural South. And it is important to keep these histories in mind as we observe upcoming legislative changes.
While some states may use a white, rural population to dilute the voting power of urban Black voters, others might crack rural Black voters into different districts, or cram them into a single one. It is still too early to know how rural voters might be distributed (or re-distributed) in these maps, but we will be keeping a close eye on this as elections loom nearer.
The post The Geography of Salamander Maps: All Is not as it Seems appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
