District Drift

Three decades of congressional gerrymandering — explore how redistricting shaped partisan outcomes in every US state from 1992 to 2024.

🌐 Live site: districtdrift.org

Desktop	Mobile

What it is

District Drift is a free, nonpartisan, public-interest website that documents the history of congressional redistricting in the United States across five cycles: 1992, 2002, 2012, 2022, and 2024.

It is backward-looking — a historical record for the general public, journalists, and educators showing how congressional maps have been drawn and who benefited. Both parties have gerrymandered; this site shows all of it.

Key features:

• Nation view — all 50 states ranked and colored by efficiency gap, with animated seat-change overlays across redistricting cycles
• State view — district-by-district maps with boundary morph animations between cycles
• Partisan metrics — efficiency gap, mean-median difference, seat/vote ratio, competitiveness
• Demographics — race, income, and education per district per cycle
• Precinct layer — raw precinct vote data for all 50 states (2012 and 2022 cycles)
• Historical events — key redistricting events and litigation for all 44 states with congressional districts
• Mobile-optimised — full touch support, pinch-zoom, bottom-sheet panels, and glassmorphism UI

Stack

Data sources

• NHGIS (U of Minnesota) — congressional district boundaries, 103rd–118th Congress; census demographics
• MIT Election Lab — US House election returns 1976–2024
• Redistricting Data Hub — VEST precinct shapefiles
• Princeton Gerrymandering Project — historical partisan scores

Running locally

See CONTRIBUTING.md for full setup instructions.

# Pipeline (Python)
cp .env.example .env   # add your free NHGIS API key
uv run python -m pipeline.download
uv run python -m pipeline.process
uv run python -m pipeline.tile

# Frontend
cd web && npm install && npm run dev

License

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — free to use and adapt with attribution, non-commercial only. Copyright © 2026 Kana Nadarajan