Two decades ago, political scientists identified a certain breed of self-defeating gerrymander that backfired on mapmakers who tried to rig congressional district lines for partisan advantage.
They called it a “dummymander.”
“A dummymander is a gerrymander by one party that, over the course of the decade, benefits the other party, and actually looks as if it was designed by that party rather than the party in power,” Bernard Grofman and Thomas Brunell wrote in “The Art of the Dummymander.”
The phenomenon came out of Democratic legislatures in the Deep South in the 1990s. Attempting to protect incumbents amid a political realignment toward Republicans,
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