THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 2025
New York Times echoes Daily Howler: The Massachusetts "gerrymander" muddle has been unpacked again!
This muddle has been vexing the various savants employed by the Fox News Channel. For now, we'll take you back to the August 12 edition of The Will Cain Show (4 p.m., Monday through Friday).
Cain was sure that the Massachusetts congressional map just had to have been gerrymandered. His evidence, such as his evidence was, went exactly like this:
CAIN (8/12/25): It just kind of flies in the face of reality when I look at the state of Massachusetts, where Donald Trump gets 35% of the votes and there are zero Republican representatives from the state.
Words say one thing, and actions do something else in a place like Massachusetts. So, you can’t–so you can’t bring up random words and actions to me when I see the evidence in these states.
We'll link you to the full discussion below. Simply put, Cain was saying that Democrats do engage in gerrymandering, just like Texas is now doing. Just look at Massachusetts, where Candidate Trump got 35% of the vote—but all nine members of the state's delegation to the House of Representatives are Democrats!
Please don't say that isn't a gerrymander! Any such statement flies in the face of reality!
Full disclosure: Sometimes, Democrats do gerrymander their congressional districts. The state of Illinois is a current prime example.
Also this:
Will Cain is perfectly bright, in the basic IQ sense. Because of that observable fact, we sometimes find it hard to believe that he's being fully sincere in some of the mandated talking points he agrees to agree with.
This isn't necessarily one of those cases! As we've noted several times in recent weeks, the logic of redistricting and gerrymandering is routinely misconstrued. We're going to guess that Brother Cain didn't know why his presentation about the Bay State didn't make a whole lot of sense.
Today, this vexing piece of logic has been clarified for all time. In the New York Times, Nate Cohn has slain the dragon in an analysis piece which starts exactly like this:
Trump Says Massachusetts’ All-Blue Map Is Unfair. Is He Right?
It’s easy to understand why President Trump and Republicans point to the Massachusetts congressional map in their push to justify redistricting in Texas and other red states.
Last year, Mr. Trump won 36 percent of the state’s vote, but neither he nor Republican House candidates managed to win even one of nine congressional districts. The state’s map plan has been ranked as “more skewed” than 95 percent of plans nationwide by PlanScore, a nonprofit group that is advised by legal scholars, political scientists and mapping experts.
It certainly sounds unfair, but is it a gerrymander? That’s not so simple.
While it might seem reasonable to expect that Republicans would win three or four seats with more than a third of the presidential vote, it’s really not obvious that Republicans should win a single district in Massachusetts, let alone three.
As always, we'd say that Coen is being too kind when he excuses the endless MAGA muddle about this basic point. Someone should have explained the logic of this matter to President Trump long ago—not that it would have made any difference.
That said, the incomprehension is general over the discourse with respect to this general topic. As he continues, Cohen explains what we've explained several times in the past few weeks. using similar numbers:
COEN (continuing directly): The problem is geography—or more specifically, the geographic distribution of a party’s voters across the state. For better or worse, congressional districts represent the voters of the different geographic areas of a state; they don’t directly represent a state’s voters. There is no guarantee that the state’s population as a whole will be well represented by the winners of each of a state’s geographic areas. This is at the heart of why it can be hard to detect—let alone prohibit—partisan gerrymandering.
Imagine, for instance, a state that votes 60-40 for one party, with every neighborhood voting 60-40. If so, it is impossible to draw a district for the minority party: While there are plenty of minority party voters, there’s no area that can be drawn to represent that party’s voters.
That's what we've been saying! If the population of a 60-40 state is evenly distributed across the state, it may be impossible to create a district which doesn't tilt strongly in favor of the statewide majority party.
Massachusetts is one such state. As Coen explains, there is no significant region of the state which doesn't tilt Democratic.
The heavily Democratic state of Maryland is different. Here in Maryland, we have one part of the state—the so-called "Eastern Shore" on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay—which tilts fairly strongly Republican.
Massachusetts has no such outlier region. For that reason, Maryland has one (1) Republican congressman. Massachusetts has none.
Coen goes into substantial detail about this elementary piece of logic. Not being the more typical Fox News Channel tribune, it seems to us that Cain should already have figured this out on his own.
To see him trying to puzzle this out, you can simply click this link for videotape of the August 12 show, as supplied by Mediaite. On that occasion, he was debating Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat, about this general matter.
For the record, Rep. Talarico didn't we explain the logic of this matter himself! He just kept noting that a Republican governor in Massachusetts had approved the existing congressional map.
With his new report, Coen has explained this matter in detail, convincingly slaying a dragon. In closing, though, we offer this basic point:
It won't make a lick of difference! Our discourse runs on the rocket fuel of endlessly bungled logic.
The bungling is part of a widespread consensus. Nothing can, and nothing will, ever change that fact!
