Baker v. Carr Explained: From Unequal Districts To One Person, One Vote

Imagine sharing a district with nine times as many people as the voters next door and getting the same single representative. That stark imbalance was common before Baker v. Carr, and it’s the starting point for our deep dive into how the Supreme Court reshaped representation, why one person, one vote became the baseline, and where the law is drifting now.

We sit down with Professor Stephen Wermiel to unpack the two-step process that changed modern apportionment. First came Baker v. Carr in 1962, which opened the courthouse doors by declaring that extreme population disparities in legislative districts can violate the Equal Protection Clause. Then, in Reynolds v. Sims in 1964, the court set the rule: districts must be drawn with roughly equal populations. That pairing forced states to redraw maps nationwide, bringing urban and rural representation closer to parity and making legislative power track people, not old boundaries.

But equal headcounts didn’t end the fight over power. We explore how partisan gerrymandering flourished within the population rule, as mapmakers learned to pack and crack voters to entrench party control. The Court has largely walled off federal challenges to partisan gerrymanders, holding that these disputes don’t present manageable constitutional standards. At the same time, we dig into the line the Court did draw: racial gerrymandering and vote dilution. For decades, voters could challenge maps that dispersed minority communities to weaken their voice under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Now, a pending case from Louisiana could narrow or even close that pathway, signaling a significant shift in how racial vote dilution claims are treated in federal court.

Across the conversation, we connect doctrine to real-world stakes: school funding, roads, taxes, and who gets heard at the Capitol. You’ll come away with a clear map of how Baker v. Carr changed the game, why Reynolds v. Sims matters every redistricting cycle, and what today’s legal battles could mean for fair representation tomorrow. If conversations about maps, power, and democracy matter to you, press play, share this with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stakes
• 3:51 Unequal Districts And Urban Shift
• 7:16 Baker Opens The Door
• 9:14 Reynolds Sets The Rule
• 10:36 The Rise Of Partisan Gerrymandering
• 13:26 Political Vs Racial Gerrymandering
• 15:16 Vote Dilution And Constitutional Protections
• 16:41 A New Supreme Court Crossroads
• 17:16 Closing Thoughts On Democracy

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 1:34

Welcome back to Civics in the Year. I'm very excited to have Professor Stephen Romeo with us to talk about Baker versus Carr, which is one of our Supreme Court cases. And if you are an AT government student, it is one of the ones that you have to know. So, Professor Romeo, what was at stake in Baker versus Carr? And how did the Supreme Court's decision to change the court's role in addressing issues of political representation and fairness?

SPEAKER_00: 2:05

So Baker versus Carr is a really fundamental case about our system of voting and representation. And it really goes to the core of who we are as a democracy. Prior to Baker versus Carr, many states, maybe even most states, had this vastly disparate-sized legislative districts. When we're talking about the makeup of the state legislature, let's say the state legislature has a House and a Senate, just like the Congress. The state legislatures before Baker versus Carr, many of them had not changed the size or shape or number of people living in their legislative districts for years and years and years. Baker versus Carr itself came from Tennessee. And so, for example, it was decided in 1962. Tennessee had not redrawn their district maps to reflect changes in population since 1901. Oh, 1901 to 1962. And so what was happening in the country, not just in Tennessee, but all over the place, was vast migration in the early 1900s to the mid-1900s from rural areas to cities. The population of cities was increasing dramatically, and the population of rural areas shrinking. What that meant is that you had legislative districts that once had been smaller, that now had huge numbers of people in them, but the representation wasn't changing. So one of the more dramatic examples was the Supreme Court had decided an earlier case in 1946 from Illinois. And in Illinois in 1946, one legislative district might have 100,000 people living in it, and another legislative district had 900,000 people living in it. How is that equal? How is that fair? You know, how is your representation equal to the next district representation? The other problem, just to kind of lay this out a little bit, the other problem that happened, and it wasn't all in the Midwest and the South. When we first began drawing legislative districts in this country in New England, the New England states did it by saying every town gets a representative. And a town that has 10,000 people living in it gets a representative. In how these districts were drawn. Reapportionment meaning you're realigning, you're reapportioning legislative districts to reflect accurate population numbers. The Supreme Court opened the doors to those cases being federal constitutional cases. And that led to dramatic changes all over the United States. And that's true, but it's not quite accurate. What Baker versus Carr did was say you can come to federal court and say that this disparate representation violates your guarantee of equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment. But that's all we're doing in Baker versus Carr. All we're doing is opening the courthouse door to those kinds of cases. It took a couple more years, and a case called Reynolds versus Sims in 1964 for the Supreme Court to come up with the one person, one vote standard. So, in a sense, it's really two steps. Baker versus Carr invites you in, and then Reynolds versus Sims says, and here's the rule. And that's really the significance of that is that every state in the country had to then redraw their legislative maps so that people were getting fairer representation, equal representation.

SPEAKER_01: 9:16

Interesting. So besides Reynolds versus STEM, what lasting impact does Baker versus Carr have on America's constitutional democracy, especially when we're talking about modern debates over gerrymandering or representation?

SPEAKER_00: 9:35

So in a sense, it's a good news, bad news situation. But the good news is before Baker versus Carr, if you were in that 900,000-person district with only one representative, and you felt that you weren't getting adequate representation because the person in the next district had one representative for 100,000 people, you couldn't really go to court to do anything about it. You could maybe go to state court, uh, but you really couldn't go to federal court to claim that the federal constitution had anything to say about this. So once Baker versus Carr opens up the possibilities, and then Reynolds versus Sims says one person, one vote, then the door is open to what we call gerrymandering, which is a process by which the political parties in power say, okay, if we have to redraw the district lines, and it still has to be one person, one vote, but we're going to draw those district lines in a way that tries to maximize the influence and power of the controlling party. And to be fair, this is not a partisan point. Democrats do it when they're in power, Republicans do it when they're in power. So what they do is they cleverly draw weird-shaped maps and so on to maximize their influence. If it's if let's say it's the Democrats drawing the map, they'll try to push Republicans over here into this district and over here into this district so that the influence of the Republican vote is spread out and not concentrated and reduces their ability to elect a representative. As long as two things. One, it's still one person, one vote, and two, as long as it's not based on race. And as long as it's still roughly equal numbers of people living in each district, then the court has basically closed the courthouse doors to gerrymandering lawsuits. The court has said that gerrymandering lawsuits do not raise any federal constitutional issues. So they're almost like mirror images. I mean, we opened the courthouse doors to the idea that districts have to be roughly the same size so that everybody is fairly represented. But when we draw those districts to maximize one political party's advantage, the court says that's not interfering with your ability to be fairly represented.

SPEAKER_01: 13:06

So political gerrymandering is okay, but you said racial gerrymandering is not. Can you explain the difference in that?

SPEAKER_00: 13:14

So what the racial gerrymandering arose, well, there's a case all the way back in 1960, but much more recently in the 1970s and 80s, there were places in the country where legislatures tried to draw maps that would minimize the impact of minority voters, they would spread the minority voters out among different districts so that the minority voters didn't really have the ability to elect a representative of color. And that notion is called dilution. We're taking the power of minority voters and by spreading it out, we're diluting its impact. And the court basically said that that raised race discrimination problems under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and also under the Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of the right to vote free of race discrimination. Now that's a very timely subject because the Supreme Court is hearing a case from Louisiana this term, where there's a good chance that the court is going to change its position and say you can't ever use race to draw district lines, and you can't go to court to claim that vote dilution based on race violates the Constitution or violates the federal law. So basically, for for 40 years, roughly, you've been able to go to court and say, in the state that I'm in, they are drawing the district lines in a way that discriminates against minority voters. They're making it hard for minority voters to have their vote count as much. And it seems likely that the Supreme Court is now going to close the courthouse doors to that kind of claim. In other words, a state will be able to dilute the minority vote without risking a federal constitutional lawsuit. Now, again, the court hasn't ruled that yet. They've heard arguments in a case called Louisiana versus Calais. But it seems like there's a good chance that they are gonna take away some of the protection that has existed for uh against the discrimination uh against minority vote.

SPEAKER_01: 16:22

Professor Vermiel, thank you so much. I feel like you took a really big topic, not only political gerrymandering, but racial gerrymandering. And then you tied it all the way again. Now I want to look up this case and kind of follow this with the Supreme Court. So thank you so much for your expertise. We appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00: 16:39

Glad to help and great subject and very important to our democracy.