N.Y. Times reports on Senator Cruz’s condemnation of FCC Chair Carr’s pressure on ABC over Kimmel:
‘“He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.’” Mr. Cruz said on his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” quoting Mr. Carr verbatim. “And I’ve got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”’
Cruz went on to say that Carr’s comment was “‘dangerous as hell.””
As Texas, Missouri, and (likely) California plunge the country back into the latest round of redistricting wars, the overwhelming majority of coverage and commentary has focused on the collective consequences of re-gerrymandering: how will these maneuvers affect majority control of the House of Representatives come 2027, and how do they affect the relationship between the partisan makeup of the states in question and the partisan composition of their respective delegations to Congress?
In a deeply polarized country with highly nationalized politics, the focus on collective consequences is understandable. And yet lost in the discussion is the impact of these maneuvers on the “dyadic” relationship between individual voters and their representatives. A dyadic perspective considers questions such as whether legislators share the values of their own constituents, whether they are competent, and whether they work hard for their communities. Not only are these the criteria by which many citizens judge their democracy; dyadic conceptions of representation also resonate with the geographic organization of Congress and the Constitution’s emphasis on individual, rather than collective, rights and harms.
To capture the intuition, consider an imaginary state composed of nine voters—five Republicans and four Democrats—evenly divided among three districts. Three maps are proposed: A, B, and C. In Map A, Republicans have a 2–1 majority in Districts 1 and 2 and Democrats have a 1–2 majority in District 3. In Map B, Republicans have a 3–0 majority in District 1 and a 2–1 majority in District 2, while Democrats enjoy a 0–3 majority in District 3. In Map C, Republicans have a 3–0 majority in District 1, and Democrats a 1–2 majority in Districts 2 and 3.
Focus for the moment on a comparison between Maps A and B. Which is more fair? If all that matters is how closely the partisan breakdown of the elected assembly matches that of the electorate, there’s no meaningful difference between the two partitions: Both may be expected to generate a delegation consisting of one Democratic and two Republican legislators. And with nine voters and three legislators, this is as close as you can get to proportionality—one possible criterion for collective fairness.
From a dyadic perspective, however, the maps are not the same—but why they differ depends on what voters ultimately care about. In Map A, six out of nine voters have a representative from their own party, while in Map B, eight out of nine do. So, if voters only care about having a representative who shares their values, Map B is a clear winner. But suppose voters are apprehensive of lopsided majorities—perhaps because these encourage shirking by incumbent legislators. In that case, Map A might be preferable.
Now look at Map C: no matter what collective or dyadic criterion you employ, this third map is unfair.
Our paper generalizes the intuition from these examples by presenting a stylized formal model that grounds the welfare of voters in terms of (a) the correspondence between their values and those of their legislator (as captured by co-partisanship); (b) legislator competence; and (c) legislator incentives to work hard on behalf of their constituents.
The model yields measures of “representational disparity” that capture how fairly different groups of voters (e.g., Republicans and Democrats) are treated under a given map. As with collective metrics such as the efficiency gap and partisan bias, the measure can be tested across ensembles of millions of alternative maps, revealing whether an enacted plan is a true outlier or simply reflects the geographic distribution of a state’s voters.
Critically, these measures can be “tuned” to reflect features of the underlying political environment and the user’s commitment to different, potentially contradictory values. For example, if matching legislator and constituent partisanship is the overriding concern, then a map that makes districts maximally non-competitive might come closest to achieving that objective. But if motivating legislators to work hard on behalf of a broad range of constituents matters, then the measure will reward more competitive plans.
What the Evidence Shows
Relationship to existing measures. While our approach forges new conceptual ground, our measures will generally be correlated, though imperfectly so, with existing measures like partisan bias, efficiency gap, and declination. But situations may arise where our dyadic commitments lead to different substantive conclusions than collective ones would.
Examples from the paper. Using examples from a handful of states, our article shows that traditional metrics often miss the mark. For instance, in Massachusetts, Republicans rarely win congressional seats—not necessarily because of gerrymandering, but because their voters are too evenly spread out. Dyadic analysis reveals more nuanced harms: while all maps disadvantage Republicans collectively, some alternatives give them better representation at the district level. By contrast, in Florida and Pennsylvania, enacted maps emerge as extreme outliers under both collective and dyadic metrics, making the case for unfairness much clearer.
Analyzing the 2025 Texas and California Maps. Using the approach described in our article, we conducted an outlier analysis to assess the extremity of the enacted Texas and proposed California maps on dyadic representational grounds under two different “tunings” of representational disparity. Here’s a comparison of the 2021 and 2025 Texas maps with an ALARM ensemble of simulated maps. (In all graphs, the solid vertical line indicates zero disparity.)
As the figures indicate, the 2021 Texas map was already an extreme outlier irrespective of how the measure is tuned. The new map is even more extreme.
Here’s our analysis of California:
Our analysis suggests that according to the first version of the measure, which prioritizes matching constituent and legislator partisanship, the 2021 California map is not an outlier, but the 2025 proposed map would be. According to the second version, which rewards competitiveness, both maps are extreme outliers, but the 2025 plan would be worse.
Why This Matters
It is certainly not clear (to us) that single-member districts are the most effective way to select our representatives. Yet it is the system we have, and a system of representation inescapably rooted in geographic districts must be evaluated using diagnostics that treat districts and their boundaries not merely as an inconvenience but as an intrinsic feature. Gerrymandering isn’t just about partisan balance sheets—it’s also about whether citizens can trust that their voices are heard in the halls of power.
The National Law Review has just published a story about the Third Circuit’s decision last month to invalidate on Anderson-Burdick grounds Pennsylvania’s law requiring the rejection of timely submitted mailed ballots that are misdated by the voters. Will a cert petition be filed in the case? If so, will it be granted? Although in January SCOTUS declined to consider a case that challenged the same rule under the statutory materiality provision, that case sustained the validity of the rule against the statutory challenge. Given instead that in this case the rule was invalidated and specifically on Anderson-Burdick grounds–and given especially that there has been some interest among judges in revisiting the Anderson-Burdick balancing test–what’s the possibility that SCOTUS would take this case for the specific purpose of that revisiting?
The University of Wisconsin Law School, in conjunction with other organizations, is hosting what looks like will be a great event. Parties, Power, and Possibility: Revisiting Fusion Voting in Wisconsin will be held on Friday, November 14, 2025. It has a superb lineup of participants:
If the goal of fusion voting is to counteract polarization and the election of more extreme candidates, I’m personally skeptical of its potential to achieve those benefits–at least in a state like Ohio, with which I’m most familiar. For example, I don’t think fusion voting would have made a difference in Ohio’s US Senate elections in either 2022 or 2024. In other words, even if Tim Ryan in 2022 and Sherrod Brown in 2024 had appeared on the ballot as the nominee of a “moderate” party as well as being a Democrat, I doubt that the outcome of either election would have been any different. In each case, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee (Vance in 2022, Moreno in 2024) still most likely would have won in my judgment.
But Wisconsin is a different state than Ohio, purple instead of red. It seems more likely that fusion voting might have made a difference in Wisconsin’s 2022 US Senate election. Ron Johnson won that race by only one percentage point, 50.41% to 49.41%, and Mandela Barnes, the Democrat. If Barnes had been co-nominated by a “moderate” party, that might have been enough to cause him to pull ahead of Johnson.
In any event, I think it’s great that there is a Wisconsin-specific conference focusing on the possibility of fusion voting in that state. I’ll be especially interested to hear if any empirical data is presented at the conference to shed light on what potentially effect it actually would have.
CNN reports: “In a ruling dripping with derision, a federal judge has rejected President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, asserting that the rambling 85-page suit did not follow federal rules for filing civil complaints”
This is the text of US constitutional and election law scholar Professor Edward B. Foley’s Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow Lecture delivered at the University of Melbourne on 30 July 2025. In the lecture, Professor Foley advocates for ‘centripetal’ forms of voting to be used to help depolarise the intense partisan competition that is experienced in the United States. Professor Foley’s lecture draws on University of Melbourne’s Professor E.J. Nanson’s pioneering methods of preferential voting, outlined in pamphlets such as Methods of Election (1882) and The Real Value of the Vote (1900), that were proposed at the turn of the twentieth century, and which proposed greater centripetal power than the current preferential voting methods used in Australia. You can also find a recording of the lecture at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ucbAxL7W0w.
Earlier today, the top story in the N.Y. Times app on my phone had this headline:
“Trump Says Broadcasters Should Lose Licenses for Criticizing Him”
It’s the kind of headline that should be a parody, like in The Onion, but… Continue reading
I just posted this paper, written for the Ohio State Law Journal’s symposium on my book, “Aligning Election Law.” The paper explores how the principle of alignment — congruence between governmental outputs and popular preferences — could be… Continue reading
VoteBeat’s article explains the new compromise proposal aimed at getting holdouts to agree to early processing of absentee ballots. The compromise includes “regulations for ballot drop boxes and an explicit ban on clerks fixing, or curing, errors on ballots.” Will… Continue reading
