A new long-form data brief on how representativeness has been gerrymandered away — and the first installment of a series on how American democracy was engineered to stop being competitive.

In 2024, Americans went to the polls to elect 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. 366 of those races were over before a single ballot was cast.

Not “predictable.” Not “incumbent advantage.” Decided — by maps drawn years earlier, with software, by politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around. According to the Cook Political Report‘s 2024 ratings, only 69 of 435 House seats — 15% — were genuinely competitive in the general election. The other 85% were already in the Republican or Democratic column before campaigning began.

That’s the headline of the new Doctor Paradox data brief, The Gerrymandered Republic, and it’s the launch piece for a new series: Structural Sabotage, on the ways American democracy has been engineered to stop being competitive.

This first installment is the receipt-collection edition. It covers:

• The vote-share vs. seat-share gap in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio — and Maryland as the Democratic counter-example, because honesty matters
• Packing and cracking — the two techniques every gerrymandered map uses, unchanged since 1812
• The efficiency gap — the metric that quantifies how badly a map cheats
• The collapse of swing seats from 164 in 1999 to 82 today — a 50% loss of competitive districts in 25 years
• What actually works — independent commissions draw 19% of America’s districts and produce 41% of its toss-up races, a four-to-one ratio in favor of taking the pen out of politicians’ hands
• The Supreme Court’s 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, which closed the only federal door left

Click the image below to open the new mini-magazine style format:

Stay tuned for part 2 of the Structural Sabotage series — on how primaries weaponize safe seats — that will be coming next. If 85% of seats are decided before the general election, then who actually decides them? The answer is a much smaller and more ideological electorate than most Americans realize.

Please share. The cover-up that worked is still working, and the least we can do is make sure people can see the map.