Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Role: Economic historian.
Keith Rankin, 2 November 2026 – Gerrymandering – partisan ‘redistricting’ of electorates – in the United States this year threatened to undermine that country’s demographic process. While ‘partisan gerrymandering’ – as opposed to ethnic gerrymandering – is legal in that country, there has clearly been an intent to undermine an already flawed democracy by exploiting the flaws in the ‘first-past-the-post’ plurality (FPP) voting system. (Refer US Midterms: The lines that shape America | Al Jazeera Explains, October 2026.)
Gerrymandering is a feature, principally, of FPP voting. In New Zealand, distorted electorate boundary lines determined the result of the 1978 and 1981 elections. The precise boundary lines haven’t mattered in New Zealand since the adoption of MMP in 1996, because the list-MP top-up has always countered any distortions arising from electorate boundaries.
This year may be different, because the critical factor in the final result may by the FPP contest for the electorate vote. (One to watch may be the inclusion of Ashhurst, a Palmerston North commuter town, into the Wairarapa electorate. This may give Kieren McAnulty, a potential candidate to be Labour’s next leader, a slight advantage. Wairarapa is definitely going to be a place to watch on Saturday evening. Refer this RNZ story, 27 October 2026: Ashhurst locals say they have no connection to their new electorate.)
Gerrymandering is an attempt to draw electoral districts – electorates in New Zealand – so as to either: get a result that significantly overrepresents the biggest party in that state or nation, or that sufficiently underrepresents the biggest party that the election is actually won by the second biggest party.
In an unbreachable two-party system, such as the USA, the second-biggest party is of course the least popular party. In United States presidential elections, the 50 states act as electoral districts. In the 2016 presidential election, the party leader who came last (second out of two contestants) was declared the winner. In this case, the state boundary lines were not drawn with the intention of creating a political advantage. Nevertheless, those boundary lines did give the presidency to the loser (the less popular candidate; Donald Trump) and not to the popular winner (Hillary Clinton). This was a case of ‘natural’ or ‘unintentional’ gerrymandering; lines drawn on maps without electoral intent.
Partisan – ie intentional – gerrymandering gets its name from the 1812 United States election in Massachusetts, when Elbridge Gerry created an electorate in the shape of a salamander. (Refer What are the origins of gerrymandering? PBS, 30 October 2026.)
In the United States, redistricting – which has usually involved a significant degree of gerrymandering, more in some states than others – has almost always taken place in the year after a population census; a year such as 2021. But redistricting has been rife this year, mainly in ‘Republican states’ such as Texas and Tennessee, but also in ‘Democratic’ California. Now it’s 2026, midway between the 2020 and 2030 censuses, so this latest redistricting is purely political and partisan in its nature.
The classic techniques are ‘packing’ and ‘cracking’. Tennessee’s congressional districts are a good example of both techniques. In 2022 and 2024, eight of the electoral districts chose Republican Candidates and just one chose the Democratic candidate. In 2022 and 2024 the Republicans got eight-times more seats, but only two-times more votes.
The one Democrat seat was Memphis, the Ninth District, which had a massive Democrat majority; Memphis was an example of packing as many of possible Opposition votes into a single electoral district. In 2026, that’s all changed. Memphis has been ‘cracked’ into three, which each of those three bits of Memphis being joined up with wide swathes of conservative rural territory. For 2026, the Ninth District has been redrawn; one-third of it is in Memphis, the rest is a ‘salamander’ of territory extending to the outer conservative suburbs of Nashville. Nashville is 340km away from Memphis; more than three hours driving.
The intent is to make the Tennessee score 9-0 to Republican, despite a clear indication that there will be a swing to the Democrats in the popular vote. Something similar happened in Texas where the already highly-gerrymandered congressional districts have been redrawn to give the Republicans an even bigger seat advantage in the face of a swing in the actual vote away from Republicans. The Democrat administration in California has done the reverse, to keep the number of districts going to Republicans to just a handful of the 52 seats. (Democrats already have 43 of the 52 seats in California.)
This congressional election may see a ‘backfire’ of this year’s gerrymandering, which they call dummymandering. (See US midterms 2026: Can the president’s party beat history?, Al Jazeera, 28 September 2026; especially the end of this discussion which looks at possibilities for electoral reform.) One of the discussants refers to the possibility of a “blue wave”. If a wave of popular support is strong enough, the semi-safe Government electorates start to fall like ninepins once that wave reaches a critical mass. The gerrymander protects a sitting Government from a small wave to the Opposition. With the dummymander – the backfiring gerrymander – the sweep of electorates switching to the Opposition is even greater than it would be had there been no gerrymander in the first place.
A gerrymander works by the ‘winning’ party having more electorate wins with on average significantly smaller winning margins. Those smaller winning margins make that party vulnerable to a large swing in favour of the other party. In the United Kingdom in 2024, Labour – in its weakest popular vote for 100 years – won a so-called ‘landslide’ by winning very many seats by small margins. The social scientists called this ‘efficient’; it means that, given credible opposition parties in 2029, UK Labour can expect to suffer the equivalent of a dummymander in its next UK general election.
New Zealand
In the United States, state partisan gerrymandering is not prohibited by federal law. In New Zealand such gerrymandering is lot legal; and certainly was not legal in the 1970s, when it happened regardless. Robert Muldoon, then Prime Minister, clearly ‘played’ the Representation Commission charged with setting up the 1978 election, using 1976 census data. My understanding is that the Labour Party representative on the Commission was Jack Lewin, retired Government Statistician, and best friend of the famous alleged spy; the economic historian and public servant, William Ball Sutch. (Refer What to make of new evidence in the notorious Bill Sutch spy case, RNZ, 7 April 2026.)
Re Jack Lewin, Sutch said “Lewin was an able, brash, determined and aggressive left winger who was “difficult to intimidate or subdue”‘. Lewin seems like the person least likely to have been intimidated by the very clever and intimidating Prime Minister. But, given the sensitivity of the then recent Sutch court case, Muldoon may have had something on Lewin; so it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that Lewin was blackmailed into making concessions on electoral boundaries.
(On the matter of Yes Prime Minister politics, I draw attention to this: 10 things we learnt from listener.co.nz stories this week, NZ Herald, 16 November 2024, “Former Prime Minister Sir Keith Holyoake insisted on getting letters of resignation from all cabinet ministers and keeping them in a top drawer in case they were needed, writes historian Dr Michael Bassett”. I also note that, when Sir John Key ‘invited’ the Māori Party to participate in his government – even though he did not need them to ‘sit at the table’ – a key policy of the Right in 2008 was to abolish the Māori electorates. Thus, the Māori Party had a clear incentive to ‘play ball’ with the new Prime Minister.)
In 1978, National won 51 out of 92 seats with just 49.6 percent of the vote. The gerrymander applied in particular to the Wellington electorates. Island Bay was packed, and the others were cracked. Another obvious gerrymander was the cracking of Gisborne, with Kaiti placed in East Cape. I suspect that Hunua, Winston Peters’ first electorate, was also a gerrymander, mixing solid Labour voters with their country cousins.
In 1981, there was a dummymander, but not sufficient to defeat the Muldoon National government. National’s vote went up slightly, though it lost several seats. Three Wellington seats switched to Labour: Kapiti, Central, Miramar. So did Hunua, defeating Winston Peters, who subsequently moved to Tauranga.
The Natural Gerrymander
In New Zealand’s FPP history, the ‘natural gerrymander’ has been politically significant; geographical and demographic circumstance worked ‘as if’ partisan gerrymandering had taken place. (In principal, natural gerrymandering can be offset by a political process of counter-gerrymandering; equivalent to positive discrimination. But I don’t know of any actual cases of this.)
In the elections from 1954 to 1969, Labour averaged 49.4% of the two-party vote, but only got into government once, and that (1957) – while a comfortable win on the popular vote – resulted in only a paper-thin majority in the House. In those years, it required 18% more Labour votes on average to elect a Labour MP than to elect a National MP. All elections in those years were either very close or quite close on the popular vote; but National almost always came out with more seats. The average winning margin of National MPs was significantly lower than the average winning margins of Labour MPs.
One important part of this was the four Māori electorates, which drew Labour votes away from the general electorates, meaning that the provincial cities in the North Island went National most of the time, even though the support for Labour of residents of those cities was probably more often than not slightly higher than the support for National. Elections were won and lost in the North Island provincial cities. Thus the ‘natural cracking’ of provincial city electorates, while the Māori electorates were packed.
The Māori electorates were only a part of the natural gerrymander in New Zealand. There was also a natural gerrymander effect in Auckland and Wellington, whereby working-class voters were more concentrated in particular suburbs, leading to few marginal seats in these cities, and to significantly higher winning margins in the smaller number of Labour seats than in the larger number of National seats. This was a case of ‘natural packing’.
While the United States does not have special electoral districts for ‘Blacks’ or ‘Native Americans’ – they have no equivalent of New Zealand’s Māori electorates – it does have high concentrations of working-class and underclass eligible voters in particular city suburbs; some of these districts might be called ghettos. The United States, even more than New Zealand, has ‘natural packing’, a form of unintended gerrymander.
Bigger Swings in New Zealand from 1972
In the last two decades of FPP in New Zealand, there were big swings back and forth between Labour and National, and also higher levels of ‘minor party’ support. (Although Social Credit did receive high support in 1954 and 1966; indeed it would be fruitful for us in New Zealand today to revisit some of those Social Credit policy manifestos.)
In 1972 Labour got 54% of the votes and 63% of the seats. In 1984 it got a slightly bigger vote share (54.5%) and 60% of the seats. In 1972 in particular there was a dummymander effect. (In 1972, National’s Ken Comber held Wellington Central by 27 votes, giving him the moniker ‘Landslide Comber’.) But it reversed in 1975, when National got 54.6% of the vote and 63% of the seats. 1975 was an almost exact reversal of 1972.
We should note the biggest swing of all in the popular vote – in the FPP era – took place in 1993. Yet National held on, in spite of the huge popular swing against the Bolger-Richardson government. The problem here was not a gerrymander. It was an FPP split vote between Labour and the Alliance; both Left. In 1993 the Left got over 60% of the Left-Right vote. (New Zealand First was also a contestant, but very much a party of the nationalist centre.) Yet the Left only got 48.5% of the seats. This anti-Richardson wave was easily the biggest voter surge ever for the Left in New Zealand; especially large in that just three years earlier National had gained 67 out of 97 seats in the parliament. It would be incorrect to call Labour ‘Left’ in 1990; 1990 was basically a contest between the already discredited Right and the soon-to-be-discredited Right. (If conducted under the Australian ‘preferential vote’ system, the Left would have easily won the 1993 New Zealand election.)
(We note that Rogernomics precipitated two major rifts in the Labour Party. The Left bloc departed first as NewLabour, and then merging with other Left parties as the Alliance in time for 1993; Jim Anderton was the Moses associated with this split. The other split from Labour was Act, which split in 1993, with Roger Douglas as Act’s Moses.) Act did not contest the 1993 election.)
Predictions for 2026
While this will not be my final conjecture on the result of this Saturday’s election, I note that the public’s aversion to right-wing policies is similar to what it was in 1993. But, as in 1990 – but not as it was in 1972 or 1993 – there is no clear left-wing alternative electoral vision. The Left won big on the popular vote in 1972 and in 1993. (And in 1984, because most non-elite people thought that Labour was Left then; though the elite view was that national under Muldoon was unacceptably left-wing, even consorting with the gangs!)
So, this is an election – also like 1931 – where there is a simmering mood for change, but no attractive new vision for change from the ‘major’ Opposition party. So those major parties themselves are cracking. Like 1993, 1984, and 1931 – this will likely be an election which frustrates the voter mood. And may yield – like 1993 – a substantially disproportional result.
There will most likely be an asymmetrical overhang; enough to steal the election for the Right. The principal reason for such an overhang will be the popular discontent with National, not so-called ‘strategic’ voting. Most of those who party-vote Act or New Zealand First will be voters who prefer the policies of Act and New Zealand First over the policies of National. It will be a ‘natural’ overhang, I predict. Not some kind of jacked-up partisan overhang perpetrated by the likes of Harry Mowbray or Paul Henry.
One feature driving voters to the smaller parties is the unremittingly negative campaign styles of both National and Labour. (See my Negative Campaigning and Strategic Voting, Scoop, 6 October 2026.) So it’s not inconceivable that there will be Labour overhang MPs as well as National and Māori overhangers.
Unintentionally gerrymandered electorate boundaries may have a significant impact on some electorates; sufficient to facilitate a Right-overhang outweighing a Left-overhang. For example, Ashhurst, in Wairarapa electorate, may be a close National win despite Ashhurst being more Labour.
United States
Re the ‘mid-term’ election for the US Congress, I see an FPP wave coming for the Democrats, and despite (maybe because of) the leaderlessness of the Democrats. I think it will prove to be a dummymander, in that some of the redistricted electoral districts will fall to the Democrats (though maybe only for two years) when they would have stayed Republican if they hadn’t been tinkered with. I would not be at all surprised if the Democrats win 300 out of 435 seats in the House (Congress). When the count is completed, I predict that there will be significantly more than usual very close congressional results; close enough for recounts to take place.
Repugnant Personality Politics
Re the US Senate, the elections there may not see such a large ‘blue wave’, because the way that repugnant personality politics influences the Senate rather more than it influences the House; in the United States. Though in New Zealand we are seeing more of this kind of negative politics – especially directed at the two authentically Left parties.
About the writer:
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.