Kim Strassel Calls the Voting Rights Act a Gerrymander

Kimberley Strassel is selling Republican gerrymandering by calling the Voting Rights Act a racial gerrymander.

That is the artifact, in one sentence. She does not put it that way. She would deny that summary. The column body below shows the sentences she did write, and what each one is for. The artifact is the lead item in Strassel’s “All Things with Kim Strassel” newsletter for the Wall Street Journal Opinion section, dated 13 May 2026 — four paragraphs running from “the most bizarre aspect of the left’s reaction” through “voters tune you out.” Six distinct propaganda-technique deployments run across those four paragraphs. Walking through five of them at the sentence boundaries they operate on is the work this column does.

I should disclose, before any of it, that I drafted sentences in this register for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page between 1999 and 2007, including unsigned-board material that ran under names not mine, and I cashed the foundation-circuit checks the apparatus that produced them ran on. The operator’s-eye-view below is grounded in that record. The bitterness in the prose is residue. The analysis stands or falls on the documented record being cited, not on the residue.

The most bizarre aspect of the left’s reaction to their recent gerrymandering setbacks is that they claim to be shocked and surprised. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court has been moving for years to tighten the Voting Rights Act, and its recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais (reining in racial gerrymanders) had been predicted since oral arguments in October. — ¶1, “Democrats’ Redistricting Outburst”

What Strassel calls “the left’s reaction” is the documented response of the political coalition that has, since 1965, run the legal apparatus that protects Black-majority districts from being eliminated. What she calls “tighten the Voting Rights Act” is a court majority’s serial weakening of the VRA’s Section 2 enforcement architecture — Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Brnovich v. DNC (2021), and now Louisiana v. Callais on the docket. The relabel scam runs at the verb level: “tighten” carries the polite-policy register the WSJ Opinion page has taught its readers to hear as restraint, when what the verb is naming is the dismantling of remedial enforcement. The drill is: pick the verb that sounds like adult moderation and lets the policy outcome arrive without the reader noticing what was moved. The “shocked and surprised” frame does a second job: the coalition fighting to preserve VRA enforcement is recast as either feigning naïveté or being too stupid to read a docket. Either way, the substance of what is being remediated drops out of the paragraph. This is the relabel scam stacked on the dummy-up smear. It is hack work.

But that isn’t stopping the party from using the defeats to double down on claims of racism and to ramp up judicial smears, frivolous litigation and radical plans to have their way. — ¶2, “Democrats’ Redistricting Outburst”

Four loaded vocabulary deployments in twenty-five words — that is multi-audience targeting at full tempo. “Double down on claims of racism” reframes the Voting Rights Act enforcement record as overheated identity-politics rhetoric rather than the documented sixty-year remedial architecture it is. “Judicial smears” recasts the entirely standard practice of criticizing court rulings — a practice as old as the Supreme Court itself — as a kind of slander, on a par with personal defamation. “Frivolous litigation” is the legal-establishment signal that says, to the technocratic reader, these cases lack merit — except that the cases in question are VRA enforcement actions that have, for decades, been the documented mechanism by which Black political representation was salvaged from white-majority redistricting plans. “Radical plans” is the populist-base flare. The four deployments operate as one paragraph at the surface and as four distinct messages at the sentence level — one each for the wealthy reader, the legal-establishment reader, the political-class reader, and the populist-base reader. This is the brochure. The brochure folds into different pockets depending on who picks it up; every audience-segment word in this paragraph was chosen because someone counted who would receive it and what they would do with it. It is the smear job.

But they’ve been playing this game as long as Republicans, and until recently a lot more effectively. (Where did the GOP get its idea to more aggressively rewrite maps? From watching how well the left had done it in states like Illinois and Massachusetts.) — ¶3, “Democrats’ Redistricting Outburst”

This is the both-sides racket — advantageous comparison, Bandura mechanism number three, the third tool on Albert Bandura’s eight-mechanism list of how moral disengagement gets done at scale. The move is structural: take a documented act of yours (the contemporary Republican mid-decade redistricting push, undertaken in states the GOP already controls, accelerated through legal infrastructure the Federalist Society has built over four decades), and place it next to a different act by your opponents (state-level Democratic gerrymanders in Illinois and Massachusetts), and let the placement do the work the argument cannot do. The trick depends on the reader not noticing three things: the asymmetry in aggressiveness (mid-decade redistricting is a documented escalation, not a parity move); the asymmetry in Court treatment (the Roberts Court has shielded Republican maps while striking down Democratic ones in cycle after cycle); and the asymmetry in structural function (a gerrymander that locks in a coalition with a structural Senate and Electoral College advantage is not the same thing as a gerrymander in a state the same coalition would otherwise lose). The parenthetical voice — the (let me let you in on a secret) tone — is itself a tell; it is the foundation-circuit voice, the we’re-all-grown-ups-here, you-and-I-know-the-real-story register that lets the reader feel let-in-on-something while a structural distinction is being smuggled out of the room. This paragraph is the long con. The long con done well, by someone with a Bradley Prize on the shelf for doing it well.

It’s a bummer for Democrats that the Supreme Court has finally moved to return to constitutional principles and rein in abusive racial gerrymanders. It’s a bummer for Democrats (if not a surprise) that what was always a difficult bid to redraw Virginia didn’t work out — and that they blew more than $60 million on the process. — ¶3 (continued), “Democrats’ Redistricting Outburst”

The phrase “abusive racial gerrymanders” is the load-bearing inversion in the entire artifact, and it has to be held still and examined. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed because Black political representation in the American South had been eliminated by white-majority redistricting and white-majority voter suppression — Selma, Bloody Sunday, the documented record. The “racial gerrymander” the law was written to remedy was the elimination of Black-majority districts. Louisiana v. Callais concerns a Louisiana district that — under VRA Section 2 — was drawn to provide a second Black-majority district in a state where Black voters constitute roughly a third of the population. Strassel’s sentence relabels the remedy as the abuse; the apparatus that exists because Black districts were being eliminated is recast as the apparatus doing the eliminating. This is propaganda — coordinated communication that subordinates fact to a frame the communicator’s political coalition benefits from. The frame here inverts the historical record of which side did the eliminating, and Strassel knows the historical record because she went to Princeton and has been on the WSJ editorial board since 2005. The “$60 million” sentence that follows is the attribution-of-blame trailer — the coalition fighting structural disenfranchisement is recast as the engineer of its own waste — Bandura mechanism number eight, deployed for cleanup. This is the relabel scam in its starkest form. This is lying.

But politics ain’t bean bag. And pronouncing the “end of democracy” every time you lose a fight risks having voters tune you out. — ¶3 closing, “Democrats’ Redistricting Outburst”

The scare quotes around “end of democracy” are the gaslight. Gerrymandering, by the operational definition every introductory civics text uses, is the deliberate redrawing of electoral districts to allocate political power to one coalition irrespective of the underlying vote distribution. That is a change in how democratic representation translates votes into seats. The structural concern is, by definition, a democracy concern. Strassel’s move is to put it in scare quotes so the reader hears it as Democratic crying-wolf — as a phrase the loser-coalition reaches for whenever it loses anything, rather than as the analytical description of what the operation under discussion is. The closing cadence — politics ain’t bean bag (the Mr. Dooley line, the WSJ editorial page’s most over-used quotation, deployed specifically when readers need to be told that the move being defended is within the range of normal political combat, even when it isn’t) plus voters tune you out — does the audience-management close. The reader has been walked through three paragraphs of frame-engineered relabeling, advantageous comparison, and VRA frame-inversion, and the close is a lecture about the opposing coalition’s tone risking voter inattention. This is the gaslight in its plainest form. It has worked on millions of WSJ readers for forty years because it is performed at exactly the analytical-room volume Strassel performs it.

So here is what the four paragraphs actually do, taken together.

The trick at the column’s center is a magic trick. The hand the audience is asked to watch points at Illinois and Massachusetts and at Democratic gerrymanders that are real and have happened. The hand the audience is not asked to watch is the one holding forty years of Federalist Society litigation strategy, the Bradley Foundation grant rolls, the Heritage Foundation redistricting handbooks, the Powell Memo’s 1971 organizational schematic that started the whole apparatus running, and the donor-class fortunes that paid for every fellowship, every chair, every prize — including the 2014 Bradley Prize on the columnist’s shelf. The hand the audience is not asked to watch is the one that bought the byline.

This is what an institution serving the donor class sounds like when it speaks. It speaks calmly. It speaks in the register of adult moderation. It puts scare quotes around the reader’s democracy concerns. And it tells the reader that the side fighting to preserve the Voting Rights Act is the side that should learn to lose more gracefully. The reader of the newsletter is being addressed by an institution whose job is to make donor-class power consolidation sound like Supreme Court moderation. The reader who repeats this newsletter’s framing at Thanksgiving is, without intending to be, saying the words the Bradley Foundation paid this column to put in the reader’s mouth.

The byline is a delivery system. The newsletter is the brochure. The brochure folds into four pockets, and the smallest pocket is the one that says the Voting Rights Act is the gerrymander. The wealthy reader picks up the brochure for reassurance. The political class picks up the brochure for the citation. The populist base picks up the brochure for the grievance. The technocratic reader — the one who will repeat the VRA over-reach frame at the next bar-association lunch — picks it up for the legalistic gloss. Four pockets. One brochure. One operation. Funded for forty years by the apparatus the operation serves. The newsletter delivered to the reader’s inbox is the apparatus saying its own framing of structural redistricting consolidation back to itself in adult-moderation register, and the apparatus that bought the byline is kept entirely out of frame.

That is the artifact, end to end. The byline is the delivery system. The apparatus that bought the byline is the operation.

— Phukher Tarlson