I think I get what you're saying, although the point of gerrymandering isn't to empower communities by giving them representatives who reflect their residents'

I think I get what you're saying, although the point of gerrymandering isn't to empower communities by giving them representatives who reflect their residents' political affiliations (although it works out that way for the ruling party). Rather, it's to disenfranchise voters for whichever party is out of power in a given state at that time. I would much rather see a system where a given district is defined in terms of the common needs of its residents, not the political affiliation of the residents. Whichever party wins, they can try to fix the community's problems in their own way, and if they screw up, presumably the community might flip and try the other side for a while. If all anyone cares about is which political party someone is affiliated with, there's no accountability and no alternatives. With the current system, all of this stuff is set in stone- a given representative might end up with with a 15% approval rating but still get reelected for 30 years. Gerrymandering is trying to rig the system to favor a party, not unlike how monopolies have the power to rig a market to favor themselves by subverting free market forces. In the case of monopolies, we have all sorts of antitrust/etc. laws to protect free markets. Some people say they go too far, some say they don't go far enough, but they're there at least. I wish we had many more similar legal concepts for redistricting, so the governance of the mechanics of US democracy is at least in theory geared towards empowering as much of the population as possible. Right now it's not even that way in theory, as politically-based gerrymandering is not only legal but the expected norm in most states.