Resilience‑first gerrymanders

Some partisan maps that look 'inefficient' are intentionally designed to maximize a party's resilience to modest national swings rather than to maximize seats in a particular favorable year. That tradeoff helps explain why parties sometimes draw maps that critics call 'dumb' — they are buying insurance against future cycles at the cost of short-term seat count optimization. — If true, this reframes critiques of gerrymanders from one of mere incompetence or malice to a strategic institutional choice that alters how accountability and campaigning work.