If every single person who says “my vote wouldn’t matter anyway” voted, then every single one of those votes would matter.
Gerrymandering is not insurmountable, it’s based on “likely voters”. The opposing party just keeps stoking the “it’s pointless” line alive because it keeps it true.
Actually, gerrymandering is especially vulnerable to sudden bursts of “unlikely” voters showing up to the polls. The whole point of gerrymandering is to spread your conservative voters thinly across the districts you let them exist in such that they juuuuuuuuuuust barely outcompete the liberal ones while packing all the other liberals into one or a couple of “dump” safe-Democrat districts.
So if you suddenly add more blue voters to the equation in a gerrymandered district, the odds become higher that the overall surge in voting swamps the amount of conservative votes “accounted” to win the district and it flips instead. The more voters you get overall, the more likely this is to happen.
Remember, gerrymandering is about distributing votes carefully to jigger the predicted distribution of votes such that the gerrymandering party (nearly always Republicans) wins a proportionately higher number of seats than would be expected if seats were apportioned based on overall voting choices within a larger geographic area.
By gerrymandering the districts, you inherently opt to trade many reasonably narrow wins for fewer practical, safer wins. Narrow wins are vulnerable to sudden unexpected surges of Democratic voters, but the GOP has historically been able to expect much more predictable turnout levels from their constituents of the vindictive and elderly, so their gamble has tended to pay off in gerrymandered regions.
For now.
amhrancas 