Massachusetts: where the monster was born
Every map in this collection descends from one signature. In February 1812, Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed a redistricting law drawn to keep his party in the state senate.
One district curled through Essex County so grotesquely that a cartoonist gave it wings and claws, below, and the Boston Gazette christened the beast after its father: the Gerry-mander.
It worked, and it cost him. That April the opposing Federalists won the senate vote, 51,766 to 50,164, and took eleven seats to twenty-nine. Gerry himself lost the governorship the same day. The word has outlived them all.
Two centuries later, Massachusetts is the strangest ending the story could have: nine districts, below, all nine Democratic. Mathematicians, fittingly at a group founded to study gerrymandering, proved why there is no other side to play here: the Republican third of the vote is spread so evenly across the state that essentially no map, however it is drawn, elects a Republican to Congress. The state that invented the gerrymander no longer needs one.
You are playing the Democrats in the state where it all began, with a two-to-one majority and two hundred years of practice. Sweep as many of the nine districts as you can; the real map takes all nine. There is no Republican button on this one, and for once that is a theorem, not a choice.
Clinton 60%, Trump 32.8%. Massachusetts's 2016 presidential vote.
Elkanah Tisdale's 'Gerry-Mander' (Boston Gazette, 1812): the Essex County senate district, with wings and claws added. The cartoon named the practice.
Massachusetts today, shaded by the 2016 vote: nine districts, every one of them blue.